It’s the same story for the iPhone, iMacs, and the other technology Apple produces. Apple fanboys are rarely price-sensitive. When a new Apple product appears, they will sell their children for medical experiments just to get their hands on the device.

However, a recently discovered Apple patent reveals the company are considering alternative revenue options. The patent refers to an “enforcement routine” which plays adverts at pre-defined intervals that the user would not be able to skip. In addition, the device may asks questions or request specific key-press combinations to ensure the user has been paying attention. An incorrect response could result in temporary device lockdown. Nasty.

Although many would find such heavy-handed advertising intrusive, it would allow you to obtain an Apple product for a significantly discounted price — perhaps even free.

There’s no certainty Apple will implement the technology. Like most major technology companies, they regularly submit patents which never result in an actual product. Apple have refused to comment further, however, unlike many previous filings, CEO Steve Jobs is named on this patent.

Ad-supported revenue is an idea that’s been gaining momentum within the IT industry for several years. It’s Google’s primary source of income and Microsoft is trying it within products such as MS Works. For Apple, it could mark an extreme shift in emphasis away from selling premium hardware to dedicated disciples. If the advertising model works, anyone could have an Apple product and the perception of exclusivity would be lost forever.

Could Apple be serious about the advertising patent? How would Apple users feel if their beloved products were available to the masses at little or no cost?

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Both Bing and WolframAlpha were launched in 2009:

• Bing appeared in June and received a largely positive response from the Internet community. The results are relevant and fast, plus it has a few interesting features such as text and image previews. It’s been slowly chipping away at Google’s market share but is yet to achieve worldwide appeal.
• WolframAlpha was launched in May and was billed as the “knowledge engine” which would topple Google. It parses natural language and presents intelligent data rather than links to other websites. Following a high-profile marketing campaign, the servers promptly crashed and the system failed to live up to its initial hype.

Linking both services could work well. For example, a search for the planet “Mars” could show a wealth of technical information from WolframAlpha plus links to associated websites such as Nasa (and the chocolate company).

This isn’t the first search Bing partnership deal Microsoft has instigated. The company announced a Yahoo partnership in July and has recently begun integrating results from Facebook and Twitter.

It appears that the future battle for web search traffic is likely to be dominated by Google vs Microsoft in allegiance with everyone else. Who will win? Let’s hope no one does — the competition encourages innovation.

Will Bing and WolframAlpha be a good fit? Would you use it in preference to Google Search?

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In Memory of Dan Schulz

We were very sad and shocked to learn that a well-loved SitePoint Forums member, Dan Schulz, passed away suddenly last week. Dan was a member of our community for a long time, and his posts helped all kinds of people. He won several community awards, including our Member of the Year award in 2007, and was an Advisor in the Design forum.

You can read more about what happened, and see some of the reactions to this news, in this special announcement. The outpouring of responses are a testament to just how much we love and miss him already.

This Month’s Community Crier

The Community Crier is SitePoint’s monthly newsletter of what’s happening around our community, and Issue #164 landed in our subscribers’ inboxes on Wednesday. It was also my first issue as Crier editor, taking over the reins from Linda Jenkinson. Linda, you’ve done a great job, and thanks for your hard work in the past!

Unfortunately, I already need to issue a correction. In the introduction, I’d mentioned our fearless Forum Administrator, Sarah, like so:

…you may have seen me running around there wearing a shiny new red Administrator’s badge, along with Sarah Taylor.

This should have read Sarah Large — Sarah Hawk Taylor is actually our equally fearless support ninja. I’m very sorry for the mistake and apologise to all readers — especially to the two Sarahs!

Subscribing to the Crier and our other newsletters is super easy and takes just a few minutes. We don’t share your email address, and you can unsubscribe at any time. Check them out!

Facebook Fans Build Neat Stuff

Our Facebook page has over 1800 fans — designers, developers, bloggers, and entrepreneurs, all working hard on their respective projects. We put a shoutout to our Facebook pals to see what they were working on. If you’re not a fan yet, come and check us out!

On the Blogs

SitePoint readers have heaps to say about all kinds of things! Here’s a roundup of some of the more interesting discussions:

• The hottest debate by far this week was Dmitry Baranovskiy’s scathing critique of Google’s Closure library. Hot air or legitimate problems?
• There’s lots to worry about where the Eolas Ajax patent is concerned — or is there? See what readers think.
• Sean collected heaps of great shopping cart solutions, with some more solutions, tips, and tricks offered by our readers.
• There’s some mixed feelings about the EU’s investigation of Oracle’s Sun takeover bid. Does Oracle’s takeover spell doom for MySQL, or will the project continue as normal? And what about forks?

Happy birthday, SitePoint Podcast!

Episode #36 of the SitePoint Podcast marks one year since the podcast began. If you’ve yet to subscribe, you’re missing out on heaps of great interviews, reviews, and tips. Come and wish them a happy birthday over in the forums, or why not leave them a note in the episode’s comments?

In the Forums

Whatever you’re working on, there’s a place for it at the SitePoint forums. Here are some of the interesting threads that have popped up over the last few days.

• We’re lucky to have oodles of options for content management. What’s your favourite CMS?
• How would you go about presenting an offline portfolio?
• Popular and busy sites shouldn’t have performance bottlenecks. What are some of the techniques we can use for busy web sites?
• What are some of the reasons you might choose PHP over ASP.NET, or vice versa?
• We all know some people browse without JavaScript on, but what are some of the reasons you might do so?
• Business administration degrees — do you have one? Is it worth it?
• How do you feel about the ethics of copyright circumvention?

That’s it for now — I hope you’ve enjoyed this taste of what’s been happening around the SitePoint community!

Pic by lusi

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The $7.4 billion Oracle-Sun deal was announced in April 2009. Although US regulators have not raised objections, the EU investigation could put the merger plan at risk. EU Competition Commissioner Neelie Kroes is known to support open-source technology and Oracle have posted a statement responding to her concerns:

[The EU objection] reveals a profound misunderstanding of both database competition and open source dynamics.

It is well understood by those knowledgeable about open source software that because MySQL is open source, it cannot be controlled by anyone. That is the whole point of open source.

Both Oracle and the US Justice Department have stated there are at least eight strong players in the database market so anti-competitive practices are unlikely to be successful. However, investors had already responded to possible EU objections and Sun is currently trading at more than 12% below Oracle’s takeover offer of $9.50 per share.

Would Oracle Harm MySQL?

MySQL is not a direct competitor to Oracle’s enterprise databases, but developers will be suspicious of the company’s motives. Oracle could embrace MySQL and exploit the market by selling consultancy, training, reference guides and database migration tools. However, they could also starve MySQL of developer resources and remove Sun’s supporting websites and services.

Unfortunately, Oracle have remained tight-lipped about their plans for MySQL. Although MySQL’s open-source development does not depend on the company, forking the database into multiple systems is unlikely to benefit anyone. Finally, are there really eight “strong” players in the database market? MySQL dominates the web and switching to another system is not a task many site owners and developers would be willing to undertake.

Are you concerned about Oracle’s takeover of MySQL?

Related reading:

• Oracle and MySQL: Ally or Die?
• EU to Investigate Oracle’s Acquisition of MySQL

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Firefox 1.0 was released on 9 November 2004. The browser quickly gained the adoration of web developers and their enthusiasm spread throughout the world. Firefox has been downloaded more than one billion times and is the world’s second most popular browser after Internet Explorer. (You could make the case that Firefox 3.x is the most-used browser since IE’s market share is split between IE6, IE7 and IE8).

Firefox’s history goes back a few years further and it rose from the smoldering ashes of Mozilla’s buggy and bloated browser suite. The project, aptly named “Phoenix”, was started in 2002 by Dave Hyatt and Blake Ross. Their objective was to produce a stable, lightweight, and fast standalone web browser using Mozilla’s Gecko rendering engine. The name was subsequently changed to “Firebird” and finally “Firefox”.

Mozilla soon released Firefox was the future and the browser attained widespread awareness with their innovative marketing campaigns. Complimentary reviews followed and people began to realize that Firefox was not only a viable alternative to IE, but it beat the aging Microsoft browser by a considerable margin.

For developers and power users, Firefox’s greatest appeal is the add-ons system. The browser was enhanced with extensions that made development easier and prompted the rise of Web 2.0 and Ajax applications. Today, it’s almost inconceivable to develop a web application without Firebug, the Web Developer Toolbar, or many of the other essential Firefox add-ons.

Perhaps Mozilla’s greatest achievement is that Firefox changed the IT industry. Five years ago, few web applications were considered viable alternatives to the desktop and Microsoft stated that the web browser was dead. Mozilla’s success prompted Apple and Google to enter the market and Microsoft rescinded on their announcement that IE6 would be their last browser.

Happy Birthday Firefox! You’re aging better than many of us!

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All that will change on 16 November 2009. The board of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) has agreed a proposal that allows governments to apply for a domain name suffix using their own language and character set. The proposal was unopposed by the 15 voting members and received a standing ovation at the summit in Seoul, South Korea.

ICANN CEO Rod Beckstorm stated:

This represents one small step for ICANN but one big step for half of mankind who use non-Latin scripts, such as those in Korea, China and the Arabic-speaking world as well as across Asia, Africa, and the rest of the world.

The Chinese government are expected to be one of the first applicants and ICANN expect the new addresses to be available in early 2010. Several rules will apply:

1. Countries may only apply for one domain name suffix.
2. The suffix must represent the name of the country or an abbreviation.
3. Non-Latin versions of .com and .org will not be permitted yet, but ICANN is considering the implications further.

How long will it be before someone applies for a Klingon suffix?

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The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is an international community of organizations, full-time staff, and public members who work together to develop web standards and technology specifications (HTML, XML, CSS, DOM, RDFa, SOAP, SVG, semantic web, etc.).Until recently, those of a polite disposition would describe the website as functional rather than usable or attractive. The W3C hope the redesign will make the site easier to navigate and more pleasant to use.

The new site is undoubtedly an improvement. The design is clearer, far more attractive, and works on all modern browsers (as well as IE6). A flexible layout is used which switches to a “mobile view” single column when the browser viewport width is reduced below 481 pixels. It’s a nice touch, although I’m not convinced many mobile users have an urgent need to access the site?

The content is as thorough as ever, although it’s evident some pages are incomplete. The first sections I visited were browsers and authoring tools — these are of significant interest to developers, yet no content is available? It’s understandable that the site and specifications will evolve, but why provide a home page link to missing content?

Behind the scenes, the site uses XHTML 1.0 strict throughout and every page I tested passed validation. Ironically, the CSS does not validate primarily because of numerous IE6 hacks. Neither does the site pass automated accessibility validation: form controls have missing labels, there are linking issues, and descriptive meta tags are not used.

The “view: desktop, mobile, print” control at the top of the page is powered by JavaScript. Unfortunately, it lacks progressive enhancement: the control never appears if JavaScript is disabled or unavailable in your browser. That strikes me as slightly bizarre: a control which benefits mobile users will probably fail on many mobile devices?

The view control is the only JavaScript functionality I could find. So why does the site require the full jQuery library and a cookie plugin? I’ve nothing against jQuery, but a better standalone widget code could have been developed which was a fraction of the download size and supported more browsers.

Perhaps I’m being a little overly-critical, but shouldn’t the W3C lead by example? I like their new site, but it would be better if the developers had followed the guidelines they were publishing.

What do you think of the new W3C site? Should they fix the validation and accessibility problems? Or are they simply using the hacks and shortcuts many web developers use on a daily basis?

Links:

• http://www.w3.org/
• W3C home page XHTML 1.0 validation report
• W3C home page CSS validation report
• Progressive enhancement techniques: HTML, CSS and JavaScript
• The W3C Want Your Feedback

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Windows users are really tired of all the headaches that they’ve been getting over the years, starting all the way back from Windows Me to NT to Vista and now Windows 7. As a result, I think people are looking for something different, and the Mac offers real ease of use, stability and security.

Windows 7 is still just Windows. It doesn’t change a lot. It’s still complex, it’s still really expensive when you look at the cost of the upgrade, and there’s still security concerns. It turns out when you get Windows 7 it doesn’t even have some of the basic applications like mail or chat, or programs to manage your photos. You actually have to go and find them and download them.

For the consumer, there’s a lot of headache and annoyance built in to Windows 7. It’s built on a lot of antiquated technology that doesn’t change from release to release. We think that most people probably aren’t going to make that jump (from XP/Vista), and as a result, are going to be looking for new computers.

Let’s examine his statement in detail:

1. Windows users are tired of the headaches

Really? We’ve all had problems with Windows but does any OS offer a trouble-free experience? I think not, Mr Croll — and Macs are hardly exempt.

2. Windows 7 is still just Windows

That’s a relief — users would be very confused if it weren’t! The OS has evolved and it’s certainly more reliable and less confusing. Perhaps its evolution could have been quicker, but people like what they know.

3. There are no basic applications

Microsoft has dropped Windows Mail, MSN Messenger, Photo Gallery, Movie Maker and several other applications from Windows 7. Internet Explorer 8 can also be uninstalled (to an extent).

But isn’t that what the industry wanted? Everyone complained about Vista’s bloat and Microsoft was fined on several occasions for providing free software that destroyed competitors. It finally looks as though the company has listened, but they still can’t win!

You should also note that the applications are still available. They can be downloaded for free from http://download.live.com/ and they also appear as an optional “Live Essentials” entry in the Windows 7 Update panel. However, Windows users can choose alternative applications if they wish.

4. It’s built on a lot of antiquated technology that doesn’t change from release to release

Microsoft work hard to retain program compatibility between releases. They test and support thousands of applications, so it’s not surprising old code is retained. Windows compatibility may not be perfect, but how many other companies strive to support 15 year-old software?

Perhaps Mr Croll is unaware that OS X has been available since 2002 and is based on a 40 year-old operating system? I’m sure some of the original Unix source code can still be found lurking beneath the surface!

It’s slightly bizarre that Apple’s marketing departments regularly resort to Microsoft bashing. Their most devoted fans would never touch a non-Apple product. Even Microsoft users recognize that Apple make some glorious hardware and software. So why is Apple always on the attack? It’s rare for Microsoft to retaliate.

Has Apple become overly arrogant? Is Windows 7 a big concern for them?

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The deal is a massive boost for Google as it attempts to compete with Microsoft, IBM and HP in the business arena. Perhaps it’s the first sign that cloud computing is being considered as a serious proposition by major corporations.

Google’s ambition is to lure companies away from their dependency on Microsoft Office. Their success to date has been modest:

• MS Office is one of the most entrenched business applications. For many companies, it is the primary reason for purchasing a PC.
• Feature-for-feature, MS Office beats Google Docs by a wide margin. Critics argue that Office users only utilize 10% those features, but that 10% differs from person to person.
• Many users develop their IT skills on MS Office. Google Docs may be simpler, but an element of re-training is likely to be necessary. For example, sharing a document with another user no longer involves emailing an attachment.
• Cloud computing is a relatively new concept compared to the files and folders model. Corporations will be concerned about service availability and security.

However, cloud computing can offer significant business advantages:

• Users can work from any web-connected machine at any time.
• Groups of authorized users can work on the same documents at the same time. There will be fewer issues with multiple versions of the same file being shared between personnel.
• Losing a PC, whether by breakdown or negligence, has less of an impact: the data is securely stored online and backed up automatically.
• Staff activity and access can be logged and monitored more effectively.
• There is less need for fast PCs or OS upgrades. Users could keep Windows XP, switch to Macs, or a use a humble machine with a lightweight Linux distribution and retain the same office applications.

The LA contract offers Google a chance to demonstrate their ability to cope with large scale data handling, storage, and security. Computer Sciences, the third-party contractor implementing the system, has agreed to pay a preset penalty payment should a breach occur. With 30,000 users, even 1 minute of downtime represents a work time loss of 2 man-months (although this assumes the unlikely situation that every user is accessing the system during the same minute!)

Business analysts will be watching the project closely.

Would you consider switching to Google Apps within your company? Is cloud computing reliable and secure enough? Are Google’s applications really a viable alternative to Microsoft Office and other fat-client alternatives?

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This is a problem that directly affects web developers. We want people to use the latest browsers so we can implement new technologies and techniques without spending time coding around problems on older applications. IE6 development is particularly problematical yet it retains 20% of the market 8 years after it’s initial release. How can we encourage people to upgrade when the vast majority don’t know what we’re talking about? Those users cannot possibly comprehend the benefits of newer browsers because they’re happy with their existing software.

There are deeper problems for Google. The company makes its money from search and online applications. As those systems become more sophisticated, they have become reliant on new technologies such as HTML5. Microsoft has made no firm commitment to HTML5 and, even if it is implemented, they are unlikely to provide support for their legacy browsers. Yet 65% of people continue to use Internet Explorer; they cannot run Google applications such as Wave.

Google is attacking the issue on a number of fronts. They are:

• dropping support for IE6 on sites such as YouTube
• creating IE plugins that add new technologies to older browsers, and
• launching a free operating system that offers a modern browser.

However, user education remains the biggest hurdle. Google has identified that users spend more time surfing the web than driving, but they are more likely to know their car’s make and model. Few users realize they have a choice and Microsoft benefits from apathy and lethargy. Therefore, Google’s latest campaign is entitled “What Browser”; they’ve released a video and a mini-site explaining what a browser is to the Internet masses:

I like it. The video’s short, simple, to the point, and offers links to browser websites. I’m sure my parents would understand it.

Will the video have a major impact? It’s unlikely. Just because someone knows about the alternatives, it doesn’t follow that they will want or use that choice. Browser differences are imperceivable to many people; IE is good enough and they see little reason to change.

However, while the effect of this mini-site may be negligible, this is one small part of Google’s larger campaign. Their success depends on companies and individuals upgrading their browsers. You’d be brave to bet against them.

Links:

• What Browser? website
• Google blog announcement

Related reading:

• What is a Web Browser? No One Knows!
• Google Fixes IE6 with Chrome Frame
• Google Chrome Frame: the Technical Details
• YouTube to Drop Support for IE6
• Google Chrome Operating System: the Facts and Fallacy

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