New Posterous Webaccount

Trying out this posterous blogging account.  So many social networking sites, works kind of like friendfeed.  Have a look http://optionkey.posterous.com

Thanks,

Trevor

Posted via email from optionkey's posterous

Windows 7 Mobile To Little To Late

Microsoft has some gull. After about ten years in the mobile PDA and mobile phone space, replacing the Palm OS on most of Palms smart phones until Web OS was released; and BlackBerry being Microsoft's only competition (I realize there is Symbian from Nokia but let's be real it was basally these 2 controlled the smart phone market). Until the iPhone showed up and changed the smart phone market forever, Microsoft stagnated the development of the Windows Mobile OS. Microsoft had a rare opportunity to control the mobile market but did not seem to understand that a mobile phone is not a desktop computer. Windows Mobile is slow and bulky, and difficult to use. Lots of Palm users would buy old phones just to run Palm OS because they didn't like Windows Mobile.

Now Microsoft is to release Windows 7 Mobile, I for one was very excited for this release but not anymore. Microsoft some how thinks it has a healthy share of the smart phone market. Paul Thurrott from the Windows Supersite stated that Microsoft controls about 18% of the smart phone market on the Windows Weekly podcast with Leo Laporte. This is down from the 24% it had back in 2004 according to wikipedia with most of the manufactures and developers abandoning the Windows Mobile platform for more current standardized platforms like the iPhone, Android, Symbian and Yes Web OS. The one thing these Mobile operating systems have in common is web standards. Internet Explorer does not support web standards very well at all and from a consumer perspective why would you want a platform what has very few apps and at the time of this blog post you don't even know how many older apps will be ported or able to be ported to Windows 7 mobile.

Granted for the corporate space depending on the difficulty with IT support will either be Windows 7 mobile or BlackBerry (probably the latter), but the more work starts to encroach our personal time there will be a huge demand for these nicer easier to use products. Most IT support and network professionals know what I'm talking about. Microsoft will have to start changing it's attitude if it wants to grab a bigger share of the mobile market.

1. licensing it to mobile manufactures for free


2. creating an app store experience similar to that of the apple store


3. A web browser that supports web standards better


4. Maybe a mobile Microsoft office apps for windows 7 mobile


5. Maintaining or improving the syncing and integration with exchange

There is a huge push right now to keep everything on the cloud and an economic incentive for lots of companies to move their businesses to cloud services like Google docs, even Microsoft is going to release a version of office 2010 for the cloud. I like Windows 7 and like what I see with Windows 7 mobile but with Android, iPhone, and the other mobile OS, out there that I can develop for just using web standards, I don't know why I would want to develop for Windows Mobile when I would have to redo a lot of my code even to get things to work in Internet Explorer properly. Microsoft has a major up hill battle ahead of it's self in the mobile space, and they are taking the old Microsoft way of handling it. With the mobile OS user base increasing and Microsoft's share shrinking they might want to rethink the way they are approaching this.

Tips To Help You Protect Yourself From Scammers.

After hearing a news report on CBC about an Edmonton Realtor Robert McLeod; I though I should give some helpful tips to try help prevent users from being taken advantage of by scammers. Here are some helpful tips to help prevent you from being taken advantage of by scammers.

1. If it is to good to be true it usually is


2. Deal and meet with people locally as often as possible. Especially if using Kijiji, Craigslist or BuySell


3. Google the people or company your dealing with find as much information as possible.


4. If you have reservations or "bad feelings" about who your dealing with DON'T!


5. If there are professional accreditations check them out and confirm them. i.e. Better Business Bureau


6. Use a payment type that has excellent fraud protection or fraud insurance, like Visa, PayPal ***Policies my vary***


7. If something is a scam, report it to the authorities and the listing company.


8. Keep all evidence of the scam/fraud to protect yourself. Always file your paperwork and keep all documentation of all communications.


9. Don't cash or send any money orders, cheques etc. for any companies or individuals. At least not right away until you can establish that the individuals or company(s) are not scammers. Any fraud that will occur will happen right away, they will ask you to cash or send money to places with all kinds of excuses. REMEMBER you will be held responsible for any fraud that occurs if you cash any checks, money orders etc. Protect yourself no company or individual will get the a new person to pay the bills or handle large sums of money when they are just hired!

If you use these tips it should help prevent you from being scammed; you do need to keep a cool head, have a sober second thought. People get excited if they find something that seems to be to good to be true. Use your discretion and follow the guidelines and you should be fine.

Good Hunting

Trevor

Why Flash will die

Adobe Flash (http://www.adobe.com/products/flashplayer/) is quickly becoming the bane of the internet. Mostly used for online video or interactive websites, flash is quickly becoming a hassle that people don't want to deal with. Within the last year Flash has become the main vector for many malware attacks. Flash also has major issues with causing the CPU to max out, browsers crashing, and memory management. Flash is also not as good for SEO and can lower your ranking on search engines.

A brief history on Flash

Flash has been until now the best platform for delivering low bandwidth highly interactive web objects. What does that mean? Well, Flash has been a great platform for delivering interactive content and eventually making up most of the video on the web. This was due mostly to ActionScript; a programmable language for Flash that allows you to do things you couldn't do before on the web with ASP, PHP, ROR (Ruby on Rails), Perl CGI, JavaScript, QuickTime and windows media player. Flash showed much of it's promise in Version 6. That is where ActionScript became really useful, and more mainstream starting to replace the older program Director, which was almost the same program just raster based with a language called Lingo and had much more CPU and Ram requirements. Director was also given the same options as Flash for posting it to the internet via The Shockwave plug in, but did not catch on as much as Flash did, probably due to the size of the player files, and the lack of bandwidth most internet users had at the time. Flash has quickly come to be the leading video player of choice on the web, and there is no better example of this then youtube. This was probably due to flash being able to read the length of time in the "Flash Video" and the communication capabilities between different swf files where you can put in "markers" or "hotspots" to trigger events in flash players.

So why will Flash Die?

To put it simply, there is a shift to move things on the web to open source and open standards preventing any one company from controlling the web. That is only part of the story. Flash has also drifted away from why people used it in the first place. A low bandwidth solution for providing highly interactive content. Flash as it has matured has become more bloated due to request from flash users for more features and capabilities. Eventually I think Flash will disappear from the web all together unless Adobe does 3 things.

1. Makes Flash Open Source


2. Fixes Flash from hogging the Processor and Memory


3. Stops Flash from crashing web browsers

Most of the things done in flash now with the exception of a few items can be done now with javascript and css. With the move to web standardized content management systems which pretty much eliminates flash unless you put in a Flash Banner, Gallery, video player or some other flash element which has to be custom coded, Flash becomes very inconvenient to implement into websites. If Adobe were to open up Flash and get partners like Microsoft, Apple, Google, and Yahoo to sign on and make flash freely available to everyone to make it easy and very cheap to produce flash swf files. This might be enough for Flash to become a true web standard and have HTML 5 have a native tag just for flash instead of using Active X (which is what they did for video). The odds of this happening are slim to none, it's hard enough to get these guys to agree on anything, let alone release control of their own technologies for an open technology that standardizes everything, which would be a benefit to us all. If Adobe wants flash to live on into the the future I think they have to open it up or it will go the way Director did into oblivion.