Web Info & Tutorials

The Zoho office team has released a Zoho Writer product with offline support via Google Gears.

In the first release, with Gears installed, you are able to tell the system how many documents to save for offline interaction. They are starting with read-only views, and will then roll out the ability to save docs back, and then further moving out offline functionality into the other products in the office suite.

The other major feature to come in today is the ability to add comments to a document. You can choose any part of the document and click on the ‘Comments’ icon at the bottom-right of a document and add multiple comments. The comments then show up as a div bubble.

It is great to see all of the third party applications starting to roll out applications using Google Gears, and I am looking forward to watching how the offline interaction models change over time.

I was sneaking around Amazon looking for this, that, and a bit of the other. I happened upon a stash of Flight of the Conchords and I clicked on the “Music Sampler” icon. It brought up a really nicely done window that lets you listen to samples of the tracks in a very rich webby way.

Do a view source on that bad boy to see what fun you can have with web development :)

The GWT community has released the Google Web Toolkit 1.4 Release Candidate 2.

As Scott Blum says:

This may well be the best and most solid GWT release to date, and we expect this build will become the final 1.4 release.

But:

Still, until we designate a “final” 1.4 release, we strongly recommend against using it in production applications.

There is something enjoyable about watching a new release of GWT. Being able to rerun the compiler and see that your output got leaner, meaner, and faster, is pretty cool. It reminds me of the days of playing with gcc and egcs.

Running Java 5 is going to be great too:

Looking ahead, we plan to start on GWT 1.5 quickly, the main thrust of which will be Java 5.0 language support and all that entails. We intend to make a wholesale shift to 5.0 syntax for all GWT client code; with luck this won’t be problematic, since Java 5.0 syntax is largely backwards compatible.

One of the Silverlight conversation points has been their recording story. Top quality. Same crossways every devices.

Of course, Adobe wasn’t movement on its hands, and today they are emotional a Flash Player that supports H.264 video and more.

The ReadWriteWeb reportable on this via Adobe Launches “Moviestar” Version of Flash Player - HD Television Quality for Web Video:

I crosspiece to Mark Randall, Chief Strategist for Dynamic Media at Adobe, most the news. He told me there were threesome important points to the Moviestar release:

1) The H.264 hold effectuation crack recording quality; it is also an unstoppered standard.

2) High Efficiency Advanced Audio is, says Mark Randall, a “successor to MP3″. He said it is a higher calibre audio, but at a modify taste rate.

3) It effectuation “hardware acceleration” for Web video.

Randall also said that this represents a tipping saucer for the H.264 standard, because today Flash Player is activity it as substantially Blu-Ray - digit bounteous business players.

This is every feat to be acquirable to AIR developers too. Speaking of AIR, there is also a newborn update to Flash CS 3 that allows you to advertisement and collection AIR apps in the tool. No requirement for the bidding distinction or a ordinal band tool.