Adobe Genesis is an AIR take on the venerable enterprise dashboard, or "enterprise desktop" as it is referred to on their development blog. Development of this business platform has not taken place in secret, but it has only recently been given its first public outing at the Office 2.0 conference. Below is a 40 minute video presentation by the Product Manager Matthias Zeller on Genesis, but if you want a higher resolution view check-out this March 2008 screen-cast.

Genesis is an attempt by Adobe to position their AIR run-time as the platform for business applications. Given the eagerness of business developers to use Flex, Adobe are hoping AIR will see similar levels of adoption. However unlike Flex, which produces Flash content that any modern web browser can consume, AIR applications reside in their own, dedicated run-time. This requirement, alongside improvements in browsers, may prove too big an obstacle for Adobe to get around, but you have to give them credit for trying.

Overall Genesis is a shiny looking, but still fairly standard, enterprise dashboard. The biggest problem is that the majority of the functionality demonstrated could be achieved using modern Javascript and Flash. Besides the ability to drag and drop files to and from Genesis there appears to be very little demonstrated benefit to using the AIR run-time over a standard web browser. This is unfortunate but the signs are there that if luck went Adobe's way Genesis could become huge.

Do not base key functionality of your software on closed, third-party libraries - you never know what the future holds.

When Adobe purchased Marcomedia the writing was on the wall for Flashpaper from the outset. Flashpaper was Macromedia's alternative to Adobe PDF for paper-based documents on the Internet. Unlike PDF which requires a dedicated reader application (e.g. Adobe Reader), Flashpaper turns print documents into easily consumable Flash animations. Not only is Flash just as (or even more) ubiquitous as PDF, it integrates better with a user's web-experience. Consequently from Adobe's perspective letting Flashpaper live on as a potentially superior competitor to PDF on the web just did not make sense. Yet whilst this axe has been dangling above Flashpaper's head for quite some time, Adobe has only recently made it official; Flashpaper is dead, long live PDF.

This long coming announcement was a kick in the guts for businesses that have built their products on top of Flashpaper or use it for internal purposes. One bright point was that Scribd took the demise of Flashpaper as an opportunity to establish a competing product called iPaper. Whilst iPaper has some very interesting features (like integrated Google Adwords), it cannot operate 'within the firewall' on documents that are too sensitive for public release. Also iPaper's hosted architecture precludes it from being embedded into third party, redistributable applications.

Rising fuel prices, hectic schedules and incessant climate change warnings are making us more aware of the hidden costs of 'same room' meetings. Whilst telephone conferences alleviate the need for travel, a lack of visual feedback leaves such exchanges feeling one dimensional and disjointed. Up till now video conference choices have either been too costly or rudimentary to be viable business solutions. In an effort to change this, Melbourne-based AttendAnywhere have partnered with Vidyo to offer an affordable, on-demand, high-quality video conferencing solution.

That's me (on the right) taking part in a video conference. (click to enlarge)
Yes that is a .Net book in the background - I was young, naive and she promised to be gentle...

But what is wrong with Skype?

At this point many people start to wonder why you would want to spend money on video conferencing when Skype video is free. The AttendAnywhere/Vidyo combination provides a range of advantages over plain old Skype:

• Multi-party conferences - Skype is limited to one on one video.
• Screen sharing of applications - Is possible in Skype but requires third-party software.
• Very low-latency audio - Ever tried having a conversation on Skype only to talk over people? Vidyo has pretty much solved this problem.
  
• High quality, robust calls - Skype video works, but is not that consistent as far as video or audio quality goes. Vidyo dynamically degrades the video and audio quality to make sure the conversation can still keep going.
  
• Meeting management - Skype lets you make calls but it does not help when it comes to setting them up.
• Ad-hoc meetings - With Skype you really need to be 'friends' with someone to start a meeting. In a business environment where you could be meeting with hundreds of relative strangers this is unwieldy.
• Support - Skype is a subsidiary of eBay focused on mainstream audio services. AttendAnywhere is dedicated to business to business video conferencing.

Yesterday (after a comic strip teaser) Google finally took the plunge and released their own web browser named Chrome. For years they have had a defacto relationship with Mozilla Firefox, but now they have decided to go it alone with their own, radically different offering. How this affects the Firefox/Google relationship is anyone's guess, but presumably for Mozilla having your number one revenue stream release a competing product is not a good sign.

So why should I care?

Rather than a simple re-branding of Firefox, Google Chrome is a completely new beast built on top of the WebKit rendering engine (the same engine that drives Apple's Safari). Innovation is a term used pretty lightly in the technology industry, but in this case Google has really tried to break conventions and create something that is genuinely a generation better than the competition.

The Chrome interface with its Task Manager (click to enlarge)

Process isolation comes to tabs

The biggest conceptual leap the developers have made is thinking of each tab as its own distinct process. Traditionally your browser has run as a single process, which means when one tab or window goes haywire the whole thing goes up in a puff of smoke. By running each tab as a distinct, protected process the browser gains a level of robustness never considered possible. In fact in some respects Google Chrome is a lightweight operating system unto itself, it even has its own Task Manager for monitoring and selectively killing errand tabs.

If you have done any work with web services (especially SOAP) you will appreciate the value of a good TCP monitoring tool. Wireshark is arguably the best network monitoring tool available, but it is complicated and for monitoring plain old HTTP transactions is akin to hitting the proverbial nut with a sledgehammer. Fortunately Apache have TCPMon, a light-weight, Java-based TCP monitoring utility that lets you quickly see what TCP transactions are taking place between your computer and a server (be it local or remote).

TCPMon does not need to be installed, just download the latest version and execute the relevant startup script (.bat for Windows, .sh for OSX/Linux). There are very few options, but to monitor TCP traffic between your client and a server set the listen port to the local port you will be sending requests to and the target hostname/port to where you want the requests sent:

For example if you wanted to track TCP traffic between my browser and google.co.nz enter www.google.co.nz as the target hostname and port 80 as the target port. Then point your client (i.e. browser) to http://localhost:8888 (where 8888 is the listening port). TCPMon will take your inbound TCP request, forward it on to http://www.google.com:80 and record what gets returned. Whilst all this takes place you can sit back and inspect the TCP transactions. Okay completely useless to normal people, but for anyone that has had to debug a SOAP request quite invaluable.

I have recently been checking out Projjex, a relative newcomer to the online project/collaboration/document management market. The "cool kid on the block" when it comes to this field is 37signals' Basecamp, but it seems like the two companies are after very different audiences. Basecamp is synonymous with "Web 2.0" and has a look and feel that suits this crowd. In contrast Projjex seems to be going after the older (more mature?) audience with an offering that emphasises practicality over design.

My sweeping generalisation is that if you read TechCruch religiously then Basecamp is for you, whereas if you have never heard of TechCrunch (or prefer 'real news') then Projjex is probably more to your liking.

The genre clash dilemma

Before I go over Projjex I need to get a couple of things off my chest. The problem I have with these project/collaboration/document management tools is that they are trying to do too much with too little. It is like a summer blockbuster that cannot decide whether it is an action, comedy, drama or romance film and just ends up being nothing. Pulling something like this off is almost impossible and at some point the software developer has to put a stake in the ground and focus their efforts on one primary thing. For example when you take a look at the 'traditional' desktop each one of these functions is handled by a dedicated product:

• Project management: Microsoft Project
• Collaboration: Outlook, Notes, Groupwise, Apple Mail...
• Document Management: Sharepoint, Alfresco

Every one of the above products has a very deep feature-set and whilst it is possible to monitor projects in Sharepoint or manage documents within Outlook, these capabilities are purely secondary and often accidental.

Recently I put together a webcam for the Aorangi Ski Club's lodge on Ruapehu. The system consists of a second-hand laptop, an old Canon camera and Ubuntu Linux. Images are automatically captured every hour, timestamped and posted to Flickr. The end result is a pretty impressive looking Flickr slideshow.

To put a similar setup together follow these steps.

Step 1: Get the gear

Find a Linux compatible laptop and a Canon camera compatible with the Capture software.

or: How they Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love the Internet

It is my opinion that Autodesk is in the early stages of implementing a bold Internet-centric strategy that if successful will position it as the Software + Services giant within the Architecture, Engineering and Construction (AEC) industry. Excluding the spin-off and re-purchase of Buzzsaw during the Dot-com bubble one could say Autodesk's attitude towards the Web, like the rest of the AEC industry, has been tepid at the best. In a similar manner to Microsoft, the historical and financial foundations of Autodesk lie in the traditional, desktop software market. Here its catalogue of heavy-weight tools compete for domination of the competitive CAD, BIM, animation and rendering markets. Unlike Microsoft vs Google, Autodesk and its competitors (such as Bentley Systems) have yet to face serious competition from an Internet savvy, AEC software heavy-weight. Rather than waiting for such a competitor to emerge Mike Haley, Jeff Wright and the rest of Autodesk's Content division are building it 'in-house'.

I have recently upgraded the site from Drupal 5 to Drupal 6. This was no simple task given the level of API changes that occurred between releases.

Note to Drupal community: If you want to be taken seriously in the 'enterprise' world you need to be backwards compatible with third-party modules. Forcing everyone to completely rebuild their modules and sites every year is not a viable option.

Anyhow I use the TinyMCE module for writing posts but do not like the default way it takes up half the textarea window with wasted grey space (see below):

To get around this problem edit the modules/tinymce/tinymce.module file and change the line that reads:

$min_btns = 5; // Minimum number of buttons per row.

To something more sensible like:

$min_btns = 30; // Minimum number of buttons per row.

This will give you an editor that is far more space efficient and better looking:

I took this photo at Borders' Auckland store yesterday afternoon.

Are Borders trying to position themselves as the subtle industry analyst with their shelving labels? Should Gartner be concerned that people will stop reading their reports and start scanning Borders' shelf names?

Noticing this shelving good did lead me into purchasing 'Don't Make Me Think'. I read it on the flight back to Wellington and it was pretty good and quite funny. The content was all common sense, but sometimes it just takes very clear communication for common sense to make sense.

I guess it is just a shame that 'hey, don't make me think' is probably the response of Novell's marketing department when questioned by their CEO...