Archives for the ‘Application’ Category

Rest In Peace FaceBook Gift

July 11th, 2010 Application No Comments

Facebook is winding down its “Gift Shop” feature, the company announced today. Facebook Gifts will stop operating on August 1, although gifts you’ve received previously will remain on your wall.
It’s a surprising move from Facebook, who stands to become a significant player in online transactions thanks to Facebook Credits. Given that gifting is a great advertisement for the benefit of making transactions on Facebook, we can only imagine that giving Gifts is wildly unpopular. Facebook Credits perhaps doesn’t need a helping hand, either: The rapid rise of Facebook games has assured the success of the Credits scheme.

If you’re into gifting on Facebook, you still have a few options: Birthday Cards and Pieces of Flair to name a couple.

Facebook’s Jared Morgenstern says of the closedown:

“Closing the Gift Shop may disappoint many of the people who have given millions of gifts, but we made the decision after careful thought about where we need to focus our product development efforts.

We’ll be able to focus more on improving and enhancing products and features that people use every day, such as Photos, News Feed, Inbox, games, comments, the ‘Like’ button and the Wall.”

RIP, Facebook Gifts.

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Adobe Flash is Going 3D

July 11th, 2010 Application No Comments

Everything is going 3D these days, and Adobe Flash isn’t missing out: The company has revealed it will include 3D support in a future version of the browser plug-in.
The news of the update first leaked out via the agenda of October’s Adobe Max conference, which includes a presentation entitled “Flash Player 3D Future.”

Adobe product manager Thibault Imbert then drew attention to the presentation in a blog post, but declined to give further details, save for the fact that Adobe will release a “3D API” in a “future version”:

“If you are into 3d development for games, augmented reality or just interactive stuff like websites, you just can’t miss the session entitled Flash Player 3D future scheduled for Max 2010 scheduled on October 27 at 11:00AM in room 503. Sebastian Marketsmueller (Flash Player engineer) will deep dive into the next generation 3D API coming in a future version of the Flash Player.

Now you may wonder, what does this means, what kind of 3D are we talking about ? What kind of API ? True textured z-buffered triangles ? GPU acceleration ? Even better ? What I can say is forget what you have seen before, it is going to be big

When this will be available ? We will share plans with you at Max during this session, I tell you, some serious stuff is coming for 3D developers.”

Adobe, it seems, aims to become a platform for 3D content. The idea seems sound, but we’ll await details until we pass judgment. There’s little to go on here.

[via CNet News]

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Google Cloud Print

April 20th, 2010 Application, Web No Comments

Google Cloud Printing Solution

To print out a document, you rely on your local operating system, which must have a driver installed for the printer you intend to use. Most of the time, it’s not an issue; at home, you probably have one printer and all of your PCs have the required drivers.

Things get a bit more complicated when you want to print something from a mobile device, like an iPad, or from a laptop based on Google’s Chrome OS, which relies entirely on web apps and services. This is why Google is working on Google Cloud Print, a service that enables “any application (web, desktop, or mobile) on any device to print to any printer.”

Google Cloud Print is still in the early days of development, but Google made the code and documentation public as part of the Chromium and Chromium OS projects. The documentation reveals how Google plans to solve some of the issues it will inevitably face, such as making Cloud Print work with legacy printers.

“The ideal experience is for your printer to have native support for connecting to cloud print services. Under this model, the printer has no need for a PC connection of any kind or for a print driver. The printer is simply registered with one or more cloud print services and awaits print jobs. Cloud-aware printers don’t exist yet, but one of our main goals in publishing this information at an early stage is to begin engaging industry leaders and the community in developing cloud-aware printers and the necessary open protocols for these printers to communicate with cloud print services.

“We want users to be able to print to legacy printers via Google Cloud Print. This is accomplished through the use of a proxy, a small piece of software that sits on a PC where the printer is installed. The proxy takes care of registering the printer with Google Cloud Print and awaiting print jobs from the service. When a job arrives, it submits the print job to the printer using the PC operating system’s native print stack and sends job status back to the printer.”

There are obviously some obstacles ahead, but it’s an amazing idea. If print jobs are handled in the cloud you won’t need drivers, and most of the problems users have with printing from devices like smartphones and tablets will be solved.

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