Author: Simon Mackie

Next month will see our cloud computing conference, Structure, return for its third year, which got me thinking about the impact of cloud computing on my web working.

Coupled with the increase in Internet bandwidth, cloud computing has facilitated the development of many of the fantastic web apps that I use and love today as services like Amazon’s EC2 and S3 and Google’s App Engine has lowered the app vendors’ startup costs and provided reliable scalability for when their user bases grow.

When it comes to mobility and collaboration, cloud computing has delivered advances that I already take for granted. Because I primarily work in the cloud, I can access my work from anywhere, using a multitude of devices. This is beneficial beyond just being able to hop between a desktop machine and a laptop. When most of one’s tools live online, switching from PC to Mac (or vice versa) is much less burdensome than it could have been in the past. And if I suddenly found that my main laptop had died, my Time Machine backup was corrupted and I only had in iPad  to work on — as happened to designer Shane Pearlman recently — it wouldn’t be an absolute disaster.

Having my work available online makes collaboration far easier than it ever was before. Rather than emailing files to my colleagues and trying (and failing) to keep track of all the different versions, using a tool like Google Docs means I can have one document that everyone can access — it’s even possible to have more than one person editing that document at any one time, if I wish. Couple that kind of access with project management and corporate social networking features and collaboration with the rest of my team, which is spread all over the globe, is a snap. And developers have seemingly only scratched the surface of the collaborative possibilities.

Personally, I love having all of my main work tools available in the cloud. It means I can always get at my work, whether I’m logging on with either of my laptops, on my phone, on a desktop machine or even using someone else’s computer — I simply open a browser, load up a few tabs and I’m ready to go.  If a hard drive failure or some other catastrophe strikes my computer, I know that my work is safe and I can get back up and running with minimal downtime.

While this veritable explosion of web apps has made all of our web working lives considerably easier, it’s also made things cheaper. While running a virtual team like WebWorkerDaily’s would still be possible without the cloud, it would probably be a lot more expensive. Instead of using an array of fairly inexpensive cloud-based tools, not only would we have to either buy or develop all the software we need, we’d also have to have the infrastructure on which to run it and hire additional staff just to keep the systems running. Without the cloud, many of the virtual businesses that have sprung up over the past few years wouldn’t exist, because the costs would be too prohibitive. And I probably wouldn’t be doing what I’m doing now.

Of course, working in the cloud is not without its drawbacks and risks. It requires an Internet connection, and such connectivity is not yet ubiquitous. Data portability is also an issue, because once you start using a particular web app, it can be tricky to move your data to another service. There’s also the question of trusting web app vendors with your data — what happens if the vendor goes bust, corrupts your data somehow, or is hacked? Many of these issues can be mitigated, however — by having appropriate local backup strategies, for example — and some of them are being addressed by web app vendors themselves.

Cloud computing has clearly had a huge impact on my working life over the past few years, but I wanted to get the thoughts of the WWD readership: How has cloud computing changed the way that you work?

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Over on Ghacks, Martin Brinkmann describes how he’s been living without Flash installed on his work computer, due to an increase in the number of hacks targeting it. Brinkmann’s now four weeks into his experiment, and says he mostly hasn’t missed Flash, although there have been times when not having it has been awkward. In particular, he’s found not being able to view Flash videos difficult, although he lists a number of workarounds, including using YouTube’s experimental HTML5 video player, downloading videos to view them, and using the developer version of Chrome (this one could be described as cheating, as it has native Flash support built in).

It seems that getting by without Flash is becoming easier (there’s no Flash on the iPhone or the iPad, for example), and I’m looking forward to a future where open technologies like HTML5 will render Flash obsolete (for more about why open standards matter, see my interview with Bruce Lawson of Opera). However,  even though HTML5 video is becoming more commonplace, and I don’t come across Flash-based websites quite as often as I once did, I don’t think I could do without having Flash installed on my machine just yet. Personally, I don’t believe Flash is enough of a security risk or a resource hog to force myself into having to use workarounds to access web content on a daily basis. What do you think, though? Could you live without Flash?

Photo courtesy Flickr user e³°°°, licensed under CC

Browser vendor Opera Software is well-known for its support of open web standards. So hot on the heels of the release of Opera 10.52 for Mac, I thought I’d chat to Bruce Lawson, a web evangelist at Opera, about the Open vs. Closed debate, which we’re covering as an ongoing series on the GigaOM Network, to get his take on why open standards matter for web workers — and the web as a whole. Below is a lightly edited version of our conversation.

Simon: Can you briefly outline Opera’s stance on open standards?

Lawson: Of all the browsers currently available, Opera has been around the longest, and has always supported open standards. Note I don’t mean open source; although there are overlaps between the two movements, they’re not the same. You could make an open-source Photoshop clone, for example, but as the Photoshop data format PSD isn’t an open standard, so you couldn’t use it in your clone. We believe that if data is transferred in open, royalty-free formats then it is more future-proof and more manipulable than data that is held in proprietary formats. You’re also protected against being locked into one company’s products — if you don’t like us tomorrow, you can change. I have university essays in a proprietary Tasword format that I can’t open any more as the format was tied to one program, which is now discontinued.

And we put our money where our mouth is: Out of 600 employees, about 25 devote most of their time working on actually making the standards — both the “sexy” standards like HTML5, CSS (our CTO Håkon Wium Lie was co-creator of CSS), SVG, geolocation and widgets, and also the “industry standards” that drive the TV and mobile applications industry, such as CE-HTML, JIL and BONDI.

Simon: The web designers and developers in the WebWorkerDaily audience should all be aware of the benefits of open standards as they use them daily in their work, but why are they important for everyone else? If I’m, say, a copywriter or a lawyer, why should I care?

Lawson: Apart from the future-proofing aspect I explained before, you also have the advantage of portability. An HTML document, for example, will open just about anywhere — PC, Mac, Linux, mobile devices, netbooks etc. Documents authored to W3C standards can work with all the world’s languages, and can be run on mobile devices, TVs and even the much-vaunted web-enabled fridge. There’s also the question of accessibility. Open web standards developed by the W3C have to go through a process to ensure they are accessible — that is, the information contained in documents developed according to the standard can be made available to people with disabilities so, for example, a blind person can hear a description of an image, or a person who can’t use a mouse can navigate a web page using only the keyboard. That accessibility isn’t automatic — the developer has to be professional and take care to use the language correctly — but there is nothing inherently blocking that accessibility. It seems to me that a copywriter would want her purple prose to be available to as many people as possible, and the lawyer would know that in many jurisdictions it’s illegal to discriminate against people with disabilities.

Simon: Opera has been championing support for standards for some time now. Was the decision to support open standards primarily an ideological one, or a commercial one?

Lawson: Both. Our customers (for our embedded browsers, our mobile browsers, etc.) require us to adhere to industry standards, so if we don’t then we don’t get the business. Open standards, as I explained before, ensure the widest possible reach, so it’s sensible to champion them and support them.

Fundamentally (and here’s the ideology) we believe that you should be able to reach any website from any device: a desktop, a phone, an in-car browser, a digital picture frame. It won’t necessarily look exactly the same everywhere (in fact, it shouldn’t — a web page might be easier to read if reformatted to fit a mobile phone screen, for example), but you should be able to access it and interact with it.

Simon: It seems to me that open standards take a long time to develop, due to the amount of wrangling it takes to get agreement from all interested parties in reaching the most acceptable solution. Do you think that open standards hinder or slow the pace of browser innovation (and the web, generally)?

Lawson: It does take a long time to develop open standards. But that standardization process pays off very quickly. Developing a typical web page now is much quicker if you do it to those standards than it was during the dark days of the last Browser War, when you had to develop parallel code bases for IE and Netscape, or choose one of them and lock out people who used the other browser.

As to whether open standards slow the development of the browser — that could be true, if we were selfish. If, for example, you wanted to include some new feature in a browser it is indeed much faster just to develop it and add it in, rather than wait for it to be standardized. But that definitely inhibits the development of the open, interoperable web, and for us that’s much, much more important.

In fact, open standards can speed up browser development. Take, for example, XMLHttpRequest — XHR — the technology that powers Ajax-driven websites that feel as responsive as desktop apps. It was invented by Microsoft. Every other browser vendor saw the value of this technology and spent countless man-hours reverse engineering it to get into their browsers. Now, XHR has been standardized. Any new browser vendor wishing to implement XHR just picks up the spec and implements it, with no need for all that reverse engineering. And because the specification is well-written (disclosure: it was edited by Anne van Kesteren, a colleague of mine at Opera) it can be implemented in a way that is interoperable with existing browsers and websites. Everybody wins.

Simon: There’s new browser war raging at the moment — the major vendors all have pretty good products. Competition in the market is fierce, and seems to be being waged on three fronts: features, speed and standards. What future developments are you looking forward to the most?

Lawson: Personally, I’m excited about HTML5 (so excited, in fact, I’m writing a book about it). HTML is the language that the web
is based on, and it hasn’t been overhauled in a decade. The new version — which already has great support in modern browsers — allows websites to
be even more like desktop applications, encompassing on-the-fly image generation, native video and audio, data storage in the browser and offline applications. Consumers might not know there’s a whole new evolution under the hood, but they will notice new robustness, interoperability and things “just working” — no more messages to download and install new plugins.

Widgets are very exciting, too. You can write an app that behaves like a native app, has access to the file system but is written using web standards, so
can be run on any smartphone with a widget manager (see more at widgets.opera.com)

What browser developments are you looking forward to the most?

Related GigaOM Pro content (sub. req.): What Does the Future Hold For Browsers?

Photo by stock.xchng user beuford00

Opera Software today released the Mac version of Opera 10.5. It’s a release I’ve been waiting for ever since the launch of Opera 10.5 for Windows — itself an extremely impressive browser. I downloaded it this morning (confusingly, the version number is 10.52) and put it through its paces, benchmarking it against the latest versions of Firefox, Safari and Chrome, the browsers I use most frequently on my MacBook — it’s blisteringly fast.

As usual, I used WebKit’s SunSpider benchmark test, which runs the browser through a series of JavaScript-intensive tasks and measuring how long it takes to complete them.

The chart shows SunSpider scores in milliseconds; the lower the score, the better. As with the Windows tests, Opera was the fastest, narrowly beating Chrome. The margin between Opera and Chrome was even more slender on the Mac test, though — Opera scored 395.6ms, while Chrome scored 400.8ms. Still, Opera was slightly faster — perhaps just enough to continue to justify Opera’s claim of being the “fastest browser on Earth,” although I doubt you’d notice any difference between them in real-world usage. Safari was also pretty darn quick at around 500 ms, while Firefox lagged behind the pack at 1000ms. (Note that you can’t directly compare the scores from my Windows and Mac browser benchmarks, as they were carried out on different machines).

JavaScript performance is important because we’re all increasingly reliant on JavaScript-intensive web apps — the better our browser is at handling them, the more productive we’ll be. Raw speed isn’t everything, of course, but Opera’s lightning-fast speed, coupled with an attractive UI, support for the latest web standards like CSS3 and HTML5 video, and a slew of useful features like multitouch trackpad gestures, “speed dial” and “turbo mode,” make it a very compelling option — it may even become my primary work browser. You can download Opera 10.5 Mac for free at opera.com.

Let us know what you think of Opera 10.5 Mac in the comments.

Related GigaOM Pro content (sub. req.): What Does the Future Hold For Browsers?

Mozilla has released an update to Contacts, its fantastic little contact management add-on for Firefox. The new version includes quite a few nice improvements, most notably added support for Facebook and Yahoo contacts. The Facebook integration works via the new Facebook Graph API, which despite the developer saying it could still be buggy seems to be working fine for me.

An interesting new feature is  the“person:” URL, which you can use to look up people in your contacts list — or anybody on the web, for that matter. Firefox will combine information from your the address book on your computer with that found on the web to create a profile page about the person — for example, you could try “person:http://facebook.com/simonmackie/”

The update also adds support for auto-completion of contact names in the Awesome Bar. Just start typing a name and it will suggest possible matches, as the screenshot below shows:

Although Contacts is still classed as “experimental” by Mozilla, it’s an incredibly useful free add-on that I highly recommend installing, particularly if details of your contacts are currently spread across a few different services. You can download it here.

What do you use to manage your contacts?

Related GigaOM Pro content (sub. req.): Enabling the Web Work Revolution

The ash cloud caused by the eruption of a volcano beneath the Eyjafjallajoekull glacier in Iceland has caused travel chaos across much of northern Europe, and the disruption is now stretching into a second week. Airports are closed, flights are grounded, passengers are stranded — and many meetings are being missed.

While in some cases a face-to-face meeting is an absolute necessity, sometimes you can get by using technology. If you’re grounded this week, give these apps a try — they’re all available for very low cost (and some of them are free).

• Skype – For a quick teleconference with a few participants, VoIP service Skype is great. You can use a webcam for video calling, and the latest versions of the software enable screen sharing. The basic Skype service is free, and the client software is available for Windows, Mac, Linux and many mobile devices.
• Dimdim — For larger meetings, you’ll need a more robust web conferencing tool than Skype. My personal favorite is Dimdim, as it’s got a great feature set for a good price. Other tools available include WebEx and GoToMeeting.
• SocialText — Corporate social networking tools are useful for communicating with colleagues and keeping them up-to-date with what you’re working on. SocialText is very full-featured (it’s kind of like Facebook for businesses), but there are other, simpler tools, such as Yammer and present.ly.
• 5pm — A good project management tool can go a long way toward keeping stakeholders informed about the progress of a project, reducing the need for update meetings. I like 5pm as it’s well-designed, but other good options include Basecamp and Wrike.
• OffiSync — The latest version of OffiSync (a nifty little program that allows you to sync Office documents using a Google Docs account) allows for document co-authoring — which means that two or more people can work simultaneously on the same document. While it’s never going to be as good as being in the same room with your co-workers, if you need to collaborate on a document remotely, it’s worth trying. Free.
• Tungle — Need to reschedule your meeting? Free app Tungle will help you find a time that’s convenient for everyone.

Are you affected by the ash cloud? What are you doing about it?

Photo courtesy Flickr user thorvaldurkarl, licensed under CC

Related GigaOM Pro content (sub. req.): Enabling the Web Work Revolution

Shortly before midnight last night, the UK’s Labour Government finally managed to push through its Digital Economy Bill. It’s a controversial and wide-ranging piece of legislation that is aimed at tackling copyright infringement and, among other things, will force ISPs to cut off persistent file-sharers. Because the bill was forced through during the “washup” period before parliament is dissolved in advance of May’s General Election, there has been concern that the bill hasn’t been debated thoroughly, and not enough attention has been paid to its implications for digital freedoms — for example, the Bill could have the unintended consequence of forcing places like libraries and cafes to stop offering free Wi-Fi. It could also give the government the power to block sites like Wikileaks, just because it hosts copyright-infringing material.

There have been angry reactions to the passing of the bill in the social media sphere (it’s still a trending topic on Twitter as I write this), and from many tech journalists, bloggers, rights advocates — even many of the Labour party’s own MPs.

One of the main opponents of the bill among Labour MPs was Tom Watson, who voted against the Bill and said of the proposals, “There might be a deal with the Tory front bench and the Lib Dem front bench but there are 20,000 people who have taken the time to email their MPs about this in the last seven days alone.” On Twitter, Watson said that voting against his party (known as “breaking the whip”) made him feel physically sick.

Echoing the comments made by Labour MP Kate Hoey, Techcrunch’s Mike Butcher calls the passing of the legislation “a stitch up” and points out that the bill could cause startups to move from the UK. He also points to Sweden, home of filesharing site The Pirate Bay, where similar legislation was passed last year. At first, Internet traffic nosedived, but P2P filesharing soon recovered, with one crucial difference — much it was now encrypted and untraceable. In a column for the Telegraph, Butcher describes the Bill as “a nightmare of unintended consequences.”

In The Guardian, James Graham launched a scathing attack on the Bill, saying, “You would be hard pressed to find a better example of how broken our current political system is than the passage of the digital economy bill through parliament,” and that the legislation was “made to order on behalf of the so-called creative industries in the face of opposition from pretty much everyone else.” Graham also lamented that a lack of Internet expertise in the House of Lords will mean that the legislation does not get a proper debate there, either.

The Register’s Andrew Orlowski described the forcing through of the Bill as “a sort of procedural speed-dating” and also points out that, in some ways, the efforts of the Open Rights Group actually “helped unleash some really dangerous legislation into the wild.” BoingBoing’s Xeni Jardin is unequivocal in her criticism,  describing the Bill as a “huge blow” for privacy and freedom, and goes on to say that “this thing makes the DMCA look like a warmup act.” TheNextWeb’s Martin Bryant also lamented the Bill, describing its measures as “draconian,” but pointed out that the episode has been an interesting case study in improving the transparency of government and participation in politics through social media.

Meanwhile, if you’d like to know exactly what the Bill means without having to trawl though the entirety of the document, PaidContent has a handy guide to all of the measures proposed in the wide-ranging legislation.

I’m always amazed that more people don’t know the little tricks you can use to get more out of a simple Google search. Here are 10 of my favorites.

1. Use the “site:” operator to limit searches to a particular site. I use this one all the time, and it’s particularly handy because many site’s built-in search tools don’t return the results you’re looking for (and some sites don’t even have a search feature). If I’m looking for WWD posts about GTD, for example, I could try this search: GTD site:webworkerdaily.com.
2. Use Google as a spelling aid. As Rob Hacker — the WWD reader I profiled last week — pointed out, entering a word into Google is a quick way to see if you have the right spelling. If it’s incorrect, Google will suggest the correct spelling instead. Additionally, if you want to get a definition of a word, you can use the “define:” operator to return definitions from various dictionaries (for example, define: parasympathetic).
3. Use Google as a calculator. Google has a built-in calculator — try entering a calculation like 110 * (654/8 + 3). Yes, your computer also has a calculator, but if you spend most of your day inside a browser, typing your calculation into the browser’s search box is quicker than firing up your calculator app.
4. Find out what time it is anywhere in the world. This one’s really handy if you want to make sure that you’re not phoning someone in the middle of the night. Just search for “time” and then the name of the city. For example, try: time San Francisco
5. Get quick currency conversions. Google can also do currency conversion, for example: 100 pounds in dollars. It only has the more mainstream currencies, though — if you’re trying to see how many Peruvian nuevos soles your dollars might buy, you’ll be out of luck.
6. Use the OR operator. This can be useful if you’re looking at researching a topic but you’re not sure which keywords will return the information you need. It can be particularly handy in conjunction with the “site:” operator. For example, you could try this search: GTD or “getting things done” site:webworkerdaily.com
7. Exclude specific terms with the – operator. You can narrow your searches using this operator. For example, if you’re looking for information about American Idol but don’t want anything about Simon Cowell, you could try: “american idol” -cowell
8. Search for specific document types. Google can search the web for specific types of files using the “filetype:” operator. If you’re looking for PowerPoint files about GTD, for example, you could try: GTD filetype:ppt
9. Search within numerical ranges using the .. operator. Say, for example, you want to look for information about Olympic events that took place in the 1950’s, you could use this search: Olympics 1950..1960
10. Area code lookup. Need to know where a phone number is located? Google will let you know where it is, and show you a map of the area, too. For example: 415

What are your favorite Google search tricks?

Opera Software today released the beta of Opera 10.5 for Windows. The big improvement in this new release is a new JavaScript engine; Opera claims that it’s eight times faster than the previous version.

As the web apps we rely on get increasingly complex, we need fast browsers, otherwise the web will begin to feel very sluggish. When Opera 10 was released, I pointed out that while its JavaScript performance wasn’t bad, it couldn’t match the speed of Chrome or Firefox — and since then both Chrome and Firefox have got faster.

So how does Opera’s latest release stack up? Running the latest versions of Opera, Chrome and Firefox through the SunSpider benchmark tests on my test laptop produced some interesting results (I’ve also included the previous version of Opera for comparison):

The chart shows SunSpider scores in milliseconds, where a lower score is better. Opera’s improvement in this release is staggering — the new beta takes roughly a sixth of the time to complete the tests. Opera 10.5 narrowly beats Chrome, so Opera’s “fastest browser on Earth” claim seems justified. It also scores a perfect 100 on the Acid3 test, which tests for compliance with web standards.

Of course, raw speed and web standards aren’t everything, but Opera comes with a nicely designed UI and some neat features, like “speed dial” (for quickly accessing commonly used web pages) and a “turbo mode” for slow or laggy connections. When Opera 10.5 beta is released for Mac (it’s only in alpha currently), it may just become my new favorite browser.

Let us know what you think of Opera 10.5 below.