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الثلاثاء، 14 مايو 2013
الجمعة، 3 مايو 2013
الجمعة، 5 أبريل 2013
Google and Apple part ways over WebKit, Blink to become the new engine behind Chrome
Google on Wednesday announced that it’s departing from its relationship with Apple’s WebKit engine and starting up a new open source rendering engine, based on WebKit, called Blink.
WebKit currently powers Safari and Opera, and also underpins Google’s Chrome browser, whereas Microsoft and Firefox each have their own rendering engines for their respective web browsers.
There are advantages and disadvantages to working on your own engine. Obviously using an established one like WebKit allows you leap right in to development, and you can also co-operate with other developers to create consistency in certain technologies used across different web browsers. However building your own engine allows you to more easily innovate and build things to directly suit the needs of your browser.
Chrome coming of age
This appears to be the main reason why Google has now decided that the time is right to branch out and create its own engine, in order to speed up development and spur on further innovation within the Chromium project. Google’s vice president of engineering for Chrome, Adam Barth, had this to say about the decision:
“We’re confident this will allow us to move faster and allow the rest of the WebKit community to move faster, which ultimately will allow the Web to move faster.”
As Chrome has developed over the past few years, design decisions have resulted in the project using quite different multi-process architectures compared with other WebKit-based browsers. This diversification away from common WebKit features has led to a more complex landscape for WebKit, which is slowing down “the collective pace of innovation” for Chrome as well, as Google puts it.
Co-operation is great but this also leads to problems if the contributors have different end-goals, and Chrome has simply grown apart from its WebKit cousins.
Whilst this is clearly the right decision for Google, it does pose serious questions for the future of web development. After all further, fragmentation makes it harder for everyone to choose the best platform. But Google seems committed to the viewpoint that an open-source and competitive development arena delivers the best results, as it had this to say about the fracturing of the WebKit platform.
“[...] we believe that having multiple rendering engines—similar to having multiple browsers—will spur innovation and over time improve the health of the entire open web ecosystem”
What does this mean for the future?
Well Google isn’t departing from WebKit entirely. Instead it’s going to continue to use WebKit as a base for Blink and gradually branch off as development moves forward.
So in the short term nothing is likely to change very much, the initial work is going to focus on optimisation and removing parts of the WebKit engine which Chromium doesn’t need. For example Google software engineer Adam Barth estimates that developers will be able to remove 7 build systems and delete more than 7,000 files, and 4.5 million lines of code, which will help with stability and reduce the number of bugs.
Looking to the long term, as Blink branches out further from WebKit, other developers and users are going to have to decide which platform they prefer. Whilst this could lead to a major split in web technologies, the decision to make Blink an open-source project should help to accommodate the needs of the wider web.
It’s an interesting decision for Google, but not one that hasn’t been coming. There has been tension between the Apple and Google development teams for quite a while, and it was probably inevitable that the two companies would part ways based on their individual goals. We’ll just have to wait and see how well WebKit fairs in the future without the support of one of the world’s largest web developers, and what sort of impact Blink will have on the wider web.
Old PC Graphics compared to modern SoC’s
We love our mobile devices, and we love our computers. Tablets are fun, and smartphones are just about necessary to our lives, now. The computer just does so much we can’t really get away from, even though we’re edging toward equality each day.
We understand the computer and mobile device will soon be on the same plane, and a new graphics benchmark technology may give us a better understanding of just where we stand. As we ease into the OS crossing platforms, it’s a good idea to know just where the hardware measures up… or falls short. Is a 1.6GHz processor in a phone the same as a laptop? If, say, Windows 8 runs on both devices… does that mean the same performance should be carried over?
To date, all benchmarks have pretty much been done in a controlled environment, comparing devices to their counterparts. Smartphones are compared to other smartphones, but rarely tablets… and never computers. It’s fair for us to ask where our devices measure against one another, especially if we are asking them to perform the same functions.
If you’ve ever been curious as to how your mobile device compares to a computer with similar specs, the results may be interesting. In comparing results from years of testing, AnandTech concludes that an ARM processor may be on par (or a bit slower) than an Atom processor from 2008. So, your smartphone with that ARM processor may be more comparable to a laptop, circa 2004.
We suggest you take a look at the work done by AnandTech, which is very comprehensive. Mobile devices usually don’t have the same hardware as a laptop computer, but their work gives a much better understanding of where we are, and where we’re going. Soon, we’ll have true parity with testing graphics across devices and OS’s. Game on.
الاثنين، 1 أبريل 2013
Galaxy S4 Mini release date set for May/June after next week announcement, report says
Samsung’s Galaxy S4 will hit stores in late-April but the device may be too big – it features a 5-inch display – for some potential buyers. Just like last year, the company also has a Galaxy S4 Mini in the works and a new report suggests that Samsung will unveil it next week.
Sam Mobile says that its insiders have revealed that the Galaxy S4 could hit stores from the end of May or beginning of June following next week’s announcement.
The handset is expected to pack a 4.3-inch qHD display, 8-megapixel camera, Wi-Fi, AGPS and Android 4.2.2 Jelly Bean with TouchWiz on top. The phone will come in single- and dual-SIM versions, with the former (GT-I9190) reportedly sporting a quad-core processor, while the later (GT-I9192 or Duos model) will only pack a dual-core CPU.
When it comes to color options, the Galaxy S4 Mini will also ship in Black Mist and White Frost, just like its bigger brother.
It’s not clear at this time where the Galaxy S4 will launch, and we wouldn’t be surprised to see certain carriers skip the handset like they did with its predecessor.
Interestingly, the publication notes that Samsung’s decision to unveil the Galaxy S4 Mini so soon after its Galaxy S4 media event came after Galaxy S4 Mini pictures and specs hit the web in recent leaks.
As always with unconfirmed reports, we’ll tell you to hold on to your grain of salt until the company properly introduces the device, especially since tomorrow is April Fools Day.
Facebook Home to be the OS name of Facebook’s Android phone?
Facebook will reportedly unveil a new Facebook phone later this week, with the device said to be running a new Android user interface / fork which could be called Facebook Home.
What appear to be two distinct sources suggest that Facebook Home is the name the social network is going with. A new 9to5 Google report reveals the Facebook Home name:
Facebook’s invitation to its Android-related media event next week is much less cryptic than it would seem. The invitation reads “Come See Our New Home on Android.” While, based on these words, Facebook seems to be teasing at a new Android-related Facebook experience, our sources say that the tagline reveals the actual product name: “Facebook Home…”
The same product name seems to be confirmed by a new @evleaks tweet:
“The version of Facebook for Android currently on this device needs to be upgraded to support Facebook Home.”
Facebook will make everything official on April 4, and we’ll cover the event thoroughly since it’s Android-related.
A previous report revealed that this supposedly HTC-made Facebook phone will run a forked Android version that will incorporate various Facebook apps and that the handset will look more or less like an iPhone and will offer competitive specs. Facebook and HTC are apparently already in talks with mobile operators to carry the handset, although we’ll have to wait a few more days to find out availability details for the handset.
On the other hand, a recent Wall Street Journal article said that Facebook only wants to take over Android devices by replacing the Home screen with a Facebook-based user interface of its own rather than actually creating a different Android fork like Amazon did with the Kindle Fire tablet family. While some OS modifications would be required to make everything possible, this wouldn’t actually be an Android fork. The name Facebook Home makes a lot of sense combined with this particular story.
Would you replace your current smartphone with one running a Facebook-based Android OS version (whether it’s forked or not)?
Computer pioneer Alan Kay says the iPad has “been dumbed down so far it’s distressing”
Apple’s iPad may get outsold by Android tablets this year; according to mobile computing pioneer Alan Kay, the iPad isn’t even that impressive. Kay recently spoke at a Churchill Club event in Silicon Valley and shared his thoughts on Apple’s tablet. Here are a few of his choice words:
“The iPad’s been dumbed down so far it’s distressing. And Microsoft of course followed suit with its interface.”
Kay claims the iPad is an anti-personal computer and not only is difficult, but doesn’t allow for symmetric creation. Instead of personal computers being designed “as a place where people are going to spend a lot of time and different people can exist there”, their design is based on marketing and the most number of devices being sold to the largest number of people.
Kay has a vast experience working with mobile computing devices dating back to the 1970s when he worked at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) which developed the first graphical user interface and personal computer. It was from there that Steve Jobs and Bill Gates got their ideas for what would become the two largest operating systems on the planet, Windows and Mac OS.
When it comes to true innovation in the tech industry, Kay believes it’s been lacking over the past 30 years to the point of being mundane. There is much room for debate in that area and although many manufacturers are just meeting the status quo, devices like the OUYA seem to push the boundaries.
What do you think?
