If, like me, you were expecting to download a fully bootable ISO, you’re going to be disappointed. The launch consists of:

1. A name change from “Chrome OS” to “Chromium OS”.
2. A new Chromium.org website containing information for UI designers and developers.
3. An early version of the source code.

Google has stated that the OS is a full 12-months away from release. The source code is not a beta or even a pre-alpha. It’s possible to create a build but few people will bother: you need Linux, various developer packages, and a lot of patience.

Screenshots and videos are available, but they’re mostly conceptual line drawings rather than actual footage of real-world use. This video is one of the more informative:

So have we discovered anything that we didn’t know before?

• It’s a pure browser-based OS. It’s essentially the Google Chrome browser with additional pop-up management. Even simple applications such as the calculator appear to be web-based rather than an OS executable.
• The left-most tab shows the Chrome menu which links to standard applications like GMail or panels.
• Small panels can be opened which overlay the main window or can be docked at the side of the screen.

The OS is mostly what I expected, but I’d really hoped to be booting a virtual machine today. It’s great that Google has released the code and is asking for developer contributions, but whipping up frenzied media excitement wasn’t the best move. I can’t help feeling a little underwhelmed.

Have you built or tried Chromium OS?

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Windows 7 Home Basic and Premium users are unable to use XP Mode. This is unfortunate since the vast majority of new PCs have those editions installed. However, there is a workaround that allows Windows 7 Home developers to use XP Mode integration.

1. Check your PC’s compatibility

XP Mode requires hardware-assisted virtualization (HAV). This is supported by most modern processors, but it may need to be enabled in your BIOS. The BIOS menu is normally accessed by pressing DEL, F2, or ESC immediately after switching on your PC. Microsoft provide a useful HAV detection tool which can help you with BIOS configuration.

2. Download Virtual PC

You must download Virtual PC for Windows 7 from the following location rather than the Microsoft Virtual PC website:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=2b6d5c18-1441-47ea-8309-2545b08e11dd

You might be prompted to install Genuine Windows Validation Component in your browser if you’ve not installed it before.

3. Create a new Virtual Machine

Start Virtual PC from Start > Programs > Windows Virtual PC > Virtual Machines then click Create virtual machine on the toolbar.

You will be prompted to enter the name, location, RAM (256MB is enough) and create a new virtual hard disk.

4. Install Windows XP in the VM

You will now need to start your VM and install Windows XP using an original CD or disk image. You will also require an XP licence — you may have one if you’ve scrapped or upgraded a PC.

Alternatively, you’ll need to buy a copy of Windows XP. The OEM versions generally cost less and you might be able to grab a copy on eBay — but ensure it’s legitimate.

You will also need to install the latest updates including SP3. However, do not install IE7 or IE8 just yet!

5. Enable integration

From the VM Tools menu, choose to install the Integration Components. Once installed, click Tools > Enable Integration.

6. Install the Windows XP SP3 RemoteApp upgrade

Within your XP VM guest (NOT the Windows 7 host), you should download and install the RemoteApp upgrade from:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=2f376f53-83cf-4e5b-9515-2cb70662a81b

7. Configure the VM resolution and color depth (optional)

By default, IE6 and IE7 will run in 16-bit color mode and your subtly-shaded web application can look a little strange. To fix it, refer to step 3 of Running XP Mode for the First Time at the bottom of the original XP Mode article.

8. Create IE6 and IE7 VMs and desktop shortcuts

You can now follow the instructions on page 2 of the original XP Mode article to create two cloned VMs and Windows 7 desktop shortcuts for IE6 and IE7.

click to enlarge

Many thanks to logic_earth on the SitePoint forums for providing a great solution for Windows 7 Home users.

Are You Considering a Windows 7 Upgrade?

The solution above is ideal if you’re already using Windows 7 Home and have a spare XP licence. However, if you’re considering a Windows 7 upgrade, purchasing the Professional edition may save you time and money.

Prices appear to have reduced a little in the US:

• US Microsoft Windows 7 Professional Upgrade — $175
• US Microsoft Windows 7 Professional (full version) — $265
• US Microsoft Windows 7 Ultimate Upgrade — $200
• US Microsoft Windows 7 Ultimate (full version) — $292

UK prices have not altered significantly, but the full version price is confusingly similar to the upgrade and less expensive than the US:

• UK Microsoft Windows 7 Professional Upgrade — £150
• UK Microsoft Windows 7 Professional (full version) — £150
• UK Microsoft Windows 7 Ultimate Upgrade — £167
• UK Microsoft Windows 7 Ultimate (full version) — £170

Has Windows 7 XP Mode reduced your IE testing time?

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Data Visualization with Flex, Part I is the first in a three part series in which Toby Tremayne will show us how to use Adobe’s Flex Builder to develop sophisticated data visualizations. In Part I, he focuses on extracting a useful subset of data from a huge dataset, and importing it into Flex in a format we can use.

Here’s the cool part: the dataset he’s using is a collection of posts from our very own SitePoint forums! By the time Part III rolls around, we’ll have the tool running live so you can take a look at how different technologies are discussed in the forums. And if you haven’t been to the forums before, this is the perfect opportunity to drop by and introduce yourself!

We’d like to thank Adobe, who are our sponsors for the multiple choice article quiz—if you find the article interesting, be sure to check how closely you paid attention!

Article: Flex Data Visualization Part I
Quiz: Flex Data Visualization Part I Quiz

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I recently looked at Google’s Go programming language. At first glance, it seems to be a good option for desktop or server-side web development, but it appears that Google has more ambitious plans.

According to source code comments and interviews with the development team, Go may be integrated within the Google Native Client (NaCl). NaCl is an open-source plugin which allows native 32-bit x86 code to run directly within a web browser. The code is sandboxed, verified, and restricted to ensure it cannot cause any damage to the browser, other applications, or the underlying OS. Although NaCl is experimental, it is already included (but disabled) in the Chrome web browser and Quake has been converted to demonstrate the technology.

Potentially, Go could be a good fit for NaCl. Developers could deploy compiled executables, or even the raw source code, which would run quickly within the browser. Complex games and processor-intensive applications would be possible.

Do We Need More Plugins?

How many plugins do you have installed? Most people will have Flash, Java, Adobe Reader, and perhaps Silverlight or Google Gears. Novice users who click “Yes” to every prompt probably have dozens.

The web’s main attractions are platform independence and instant deployment. Yet the industry’s obsession with moving every desktop application online is provoking plugin development which negates the advantages:

1. Relying on a plugin violates platform independence. Creating a Go-based client-side application will almost certainly tie you to Google Chrome since NaCl will never be available for all OS and browser combinations. Many web applications still rely on IE because ActiveX was used — even though Chrome and Firefox have ActiveX implementations.
2. NaCl and Go will offer raw speed so games, graphic, and video applications are logical choices. However, complex applications can be hundreds of megabytes in size — instant deployment is unlikely. While I accept NaCl is very clever, processor-intensive applications will certainly run better outside the browser.

Mozilla expressed similar concerns in their recent criticism of Google Chrome Frame. Although Chrome Frame is a niche solution to a known problem, Mozilla is worried that the web could become fragmented if companies eschew web standards in favor of plugin-based solutions.

I’m not saying all plugins are necessarily bad and, in some cases, they provide facilities that will eventually become a browser standard. For example, Flash allows us to view a video today rather than wait a few years for HTML5’s video tag. However, the web and the desktop are different platforms with their own strengths and weaknesses. Although the boundaries are increasingly blurred, is it sensible to use plugins to shoehorn a desktop application into the browser?

If you find yourself becoming increasingly reliant on plugins, perhaps you should consider a redesign so your application exploits web technology. Alternatively, release a desktop application that utilizes web connectivity when necessary.

Google — have fun with NaCl, but please don’t turn the web into a distribution platform for Go-based binary applications!

What do you think? Is NaCl and Go a great idea? Do we have too many plugins or do they improve the browser experience? Should web browsers be used as an application platform if they continually need bespoke improvement?

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Today, developers are spoiled for choice with PHP, Java, C#, VB, Ruby, Python and a multitude of other platforms and languages. Evidently, Google did not consider that to be enough and have created their own new programming language named ‘Go’.

Go started as one of Google’s 20% projects. Google developers are permitted to spend one day per week on a project of their choice — that idea has led to GMail, AdSense and other successful systems. The Go team’s objective was to build a fast, fun and productive development language. It had to offer the performance and security of compiled programs with the ease and speed of interpreted language development.

Syntactically, the language is reminiscent of Object Orientated C. Here’s the usual “Hello, world” example:

package main
import fmt "fmt" // package implementing formatted I/O.

func main() {
	fmt.Printf("Hello, world\n");
} 

Go offers functions, loops, conditional expressions, pointers (without arithmetic) and all the other structures you would expect. There are a few interesting features:

• End-of-line semi-colons are optional.
• JavaScript-like anonymous / lambda functions and closures.
• Python-like array slices and mapping.
• Support for parallelism (concurrent execution) using “goroutines”. This alone could be an attractive option; few developers delve into multi-threaded coding and Go appears to make it easy.

Compiling

Google provide two compilers: 6g for 64-bit and 8g for x86 systems. Both are designed to be fast and moderately-large applications will compile in under one second. Even the whole package library containing 120,000 lines of code compiles on a standard laptop in less than 10 seconds. There is also an alternative compiler based on GCC called Gccgo.

Unlike Java and .NET, Go compiles to a native binary rather than managed or intermediate code. That’s an unusual decision and many will argue it’s a backward step. In theory, managed code is safer, more portable, and potentially faster because it can be optimized for the processor it’s running on. In practice, few Java and .NET applications are known for their speed.

Does Go Have a Future?

Google are releasing the Go source code under the BSD license and hope an eager development community will evolve.

The language is experimental and is not recommended for production environments — there is no IDE integration, standard libraries are sparse, and there are few code examples. However, the project appears to be mature and the developers used it to build the web server which runs the project’s official website, golang.org.

With Google’s backing and resources, you can be assured Go has a future. Personally, I think the language has potential but it will be some time before it can lure developers away from their current platform of choice. There’s also one option Google are considering which is a little more dubious … see Why Google Should Not Give Chrome the Go-Ahead.

Will you try Go? Is it the future or another minority development language?

Link: The Go Programming Language.

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A Brief History of Ajax

Ajax is a conceptual technique. The technologies have been available for over 10 years, but Ajax adoption became widespread after Jesse James Garrett’s article in February 2005 which described the techniques and provided a great acronym: Asynchronous JavaScript and XML.

Despite its name, Ajax does not necessarily depend on asynchronous calls, JavaScript or XML. Today, Ajax is a useful term applied to any system that communicates with a back-end web server to update content without requiring a full web page refresh (although many marketing departments confusingly refer to Ajax when describing any type of animation or interactivity!)

Most Ajax systems utilize the XMLHttpRequest object which permits programmatic server communication. It was introduced by Microsoft in March 1999 when Internet Explorer 5.0 was released. The original implementation was an ActiveX object devised specifically for the Outlook Web Access system. Most browser vendors followed Microsoft’s lead and implemented XMLHttpRequest as a native browser object.

Many of the dynamic web applications we rely on today would not be possible without Ajax techniques.

Does Eolas Have a Valid Ajax Patent?

Eolas Technologies is the company that fought Microsoft over the use of embedded browser applets, such as Flash. Eolas won that case and were awarded over $500 million in 2003. For several years, IE had to show a ridiculous alert box whenever an embedded object was encountered in the HTML.

Eolas 7,599,985 is a continuation of the original patent and has the snappy title “Distributed hypermedia method and system for automatically invoking external application providing interaction and display of embedded objects within a hypermedia document”. It was filed on 9 August 2002 and describes Ajax-like systems. Here’s an excerpt:

A system allowing user of a browser program on a computer connected to an open distributed hypermedia [web page] to access and execute an embedded programming object. The program object is embedded into a hypermedia document much like data objects.

The user may select the program object from the screen. Once selected the program executes on the user’s (client’s) computer or may execute on a remote server or additional remote computers in a distributed processing arrangement.

After launching the program object, the user is able to interact with the object as the invention provides for ongoing interprocess communication between the application object (program) and the browser program.

The present invention allows a user at a client computer connected to a network to locate, retrieve, and manipulate objects in an interactive way. The invention not only allows the user to use a hypermedia format to locate and retrieve program objects, but also allows the user to interact with an application program located at a remote computer.

Interprocess communication between the hypermedia browser and the embedded application program is ongoing after the program object has been launched. The use is able to use a vast amount of computing power beyond that which is contained in the user’s client computer.

To most developers, the Eolas claim is absurd:

• Ajax is a programming technique — not a technology.
• Eolas did not define the name ‘Ajax’ or provide technical implementation details.
• Ajax technologies and techniques existed before the patent was filed. Microsoft’s first implementation of XMLHttpRequest was developed 40 months before the Eolas patent was filed, although it took several years for developers to realize its power. Prior to XMLHttpRequest, on-page server communication was still achieved using more rudimentary techniques such as IFrames or dynamic script injections.
• Ajax has been adopted by millions of websites — can Eolas file lawsuits against them all?
• The patent is vague and could be applied to a wide range of web page interactions.

However, it has been ruled as valid by the US Patent Office on three separate occasions. If Eolas win their infringement case, there is nothing to stop them taking out a lawsuit against … everyone.

Will Common Sense Prevail?

Who knows what will happen once the lawyers become involved.

I’m no legal expert, but it appears that Eolas have filed a US patent — which does not necessarily apply worldwide. Could we see a situation where US companies hand their web development and hosting to offshore providers to avoid a lawsuit? If that’s the case, perhaps Eolas should consider their impact on the US economy?

Does Eolas have a valid Ajax patent? Is this another good reason to abolish software patents? Read the Eolas Lawsuit press release and decide for yourself.

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Our latest tutorial, The Easy Way to Install PHP on Windows sees SitePoint’s own Louis Simoneau putting version 2 of Microsoft’s Web Platform Installer (Web PI) through its paces.

Louis will demonstrate how to install PHP with the Web Platform Installer, and along the way will show how conveniently this tool can pull in different open source software packages and install them for you. You’ll learn, for example, how to grab MySQL, WordPress, and Drupal, and watch the Web PI install them all automatically. And therein lies the beauty of the Web PI—you don’t have to dither around configuring stuff yourself.

Louis also gives us a heads up about some of the other cool features, such as the excellent SEO tool, which can analyze your site or application. It’ll check for broken links and provide recommendations to improve the site’s search engine friendliness and overall performance.

The Web PI also has a caching extension for IIS, which improves web server performance and makes it a serious competitor to Apache for hosting PHP applications. Take a look and see what you think.

A huge thank you to Microsoft, who are our sponsors for the multiple choice quiz for this article—if you find the article interesting, be sure to check how closely you paid attention!

Article: The Easy Way to Install PHP on Windows
Quiz: Web Platform Installer Quiz

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Image search/processing technology has also been an area that has been going through a bit of evolution over the past few years.

Cooliris brought us a nifty 3D spacial image search interface. What The Font brought smart image processing to font identification and IDEE have given us some amazing visual search tools with Tineye and Piximilar.

Last week we saw a fresh player jump into the the image search game with the launch of the GazoPa public beta.

Much like Tineye, GazoPa is a service that analyses the content of each image — the shapes, colors, tones and lines that make it up — rather than just inferring it’s content based on it’s file name and the surrounding content as most traditional images searches do.

However, GazoPa also adds a few interesting new strings to it’s bow.

Firstly, GazoPa allows you to sketch a rough image directly into the search panel which it will then try to match.

Of course, that’s OK in theory, but does it actually work?

In my first quick tests, yes, it seemed to do a reasonable job. I started out with a fairly detailed and distinctive drawing — a quick sketch of my iphone — and the results were certainly good.

I then gave it a more advanced challenge for its second test case — a simple line figure of a dancer — and the results were more mixed.

The current algorithm seems to emphasize the general composition over specific shape and line configurations. As such, most of the results mirrored my (unimportant) off-centered layout, more than the more important positioning of the figure.

That said, the fifth image presented on the results page (above) is actually a very good match.

I tend to think my second test is a more likely real-world use case, but this *is* a beta, so we’ll have to wait and see how things develop as they accumulate more data.

GazoPa have also released a free iPhone app to compliment their standard web service. The application lets you use match images created via either the camera or finger doodles.

If this works *well*, it’s quite simply a ready-made, stone cold, killer app for them. Can you imagine being able to identify and price an antique lamp with a quick pic on your phone? Or identify a dog breed? Or the architect behind a building. The mind boggles at the possibilities.

Throw in a Firefox extension and standard URL and keyword based searches and Gazopa have certainly come ready to play. It’s still raw, but looks promising.

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Brooklyn-based web agency Arc90 describes the problem:

Reading anything on the Internet has become a full-on nightmare. As media outlets attempt to eke out as much advertising revenue as possible, we’re left trying to put blinders on to mask away all the insanity that surrounds the content we’re trying to read.

It’s almost like listening to talk radio, except the commercials play during the program in the background. It’s a pretty awful experience.

Fortunately, they have also produced a solution: Readability.

Readability is a browser bookmarklet that makes reading web pages simpler and more enjoyable. Those using small screens, such as netbooks, could benefit the most because the system strips the superfluous information and shows the main content in a single column of easy-to-read text.

To use it:

1. Visit the Readability page.
2. Choose your page style, text size, and column width (a preview is shown).
3. Drag the Readability link to your toolbar.

You can now surf to any page and hit the Readability icon to extract and view the main text. It’s not perfect, but it works most on most websites — I find myself using it increasingly often.

As a side note, the bookmarklet also provides an interesting assessment of web page accessibility. Certain development techniques can cause content to disappear; if Readability doesn’t show the page text, it may be that screen readers or Google will have trouble accessing it too.

What do you think of Readability? Does it work on your favorite sites? Will you use it?

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However, this tutorial could only cover so much, so about six months ago we contacted some of the top web heavyweights—Derek Featherstone, Jina Bolton, and Tim Connell—to share their insights with us.

If you’ve been at any web conference in the past year, you’ve probably heard these individuals speak about web design at events like Web Directions, dConstruct, An Event Apart,and Webmaster Jam—this trio know what fancy is all about!

We’ve now compiled all their knowledge and best-practice advice into a practical, full-color book that will teach you how to create visually stunning and usable web forms, from start to end.

With Fancy Form Design, you’ll:

• learn the basics of grid design and typography
• discover how to use color and images effectively
• find out how to structure forms for maximum usability
• gain tips for writing useful instructions, errors, and advisory text to eliminate user frustration and form abandonment
• grasp how to style web forms using CSS to great effect
• master techniques for jazzing up forms using JavaScript—such as creating “multiple path” forms with conditional elements, password strength indicators, and autocompletes, and capturing day and month information

To grab your copy—in print form delivered to your door or as an instantly downloadable PDF—head to:

http://www.sitepoint.com/books/forms1/

Remember, order a second book and shipping is free to anywhere in the world!

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