Say hello to Gmail voice and video chat: “Posted by Justin Uberti, Software Engineer


I’m a big user of Gmail chat. Being able to switch from email to chat as needed, all within the same app, is really great for productivity. But people can only type so fast, and even with our new emoticons, there are still some things that just can’t be expressed in a chat message.

That’s why today we’re launching voice and video chat—right inside Gmail. We’ve tried to make this an easy-to-use, seamless experience, with high-quality audio and video—all for free. All you have to do is download and install the voice and video plugin and we take care of the rest. And in the spirit of open communications, we designed this feature using Internet standards such as XMPP, RTP, and H.264, which means that third-party applications and networks can choose to interoperate with Gmail voice and video chat.

Once you install the plugin, to start a video chat, just click on the ‘Video & more’ menu at the bottom of your Gmail chat window, and choose ‘Start video chat.’ You’ll have a few seconds to make sure you look presentable while it’s ringing, and then you’ll see and hear your friend live, right from within Gmail. You can click the ‘pop-out’ iconto make the video larger, or click the fullscreen iconin the upper left-hand corner for a fully immersive experience. See this all in action in the video below:

Via Gmail Blog

Still buggy on Mac, let’s see if this version is what version 1 should have been… Looks promising.

Tags: browserweb mac 2.0

Via Common Craft

Over the course of a month, he and Humanized’s Web/Systems Architect Scott Robbin worked weekends to bring the idea to life. The site launched on November 8, 2007 and instantly generated significant buzz around the world. Hundreds of bloggers and news writers have praised its elegant user interface, beautiful design, and all-around utility.

Simple, elegant and works great. Love it!

Via Humanized Blog

Blueprint is a CSS framework, which aims to cut down on your CSS development time. It gives you a solid CSS foundation to build your project on top of, with an easy-to-use grid, sensible typography, and even a stylesheet for printing.  

• An easily customizable grid


• Sensible typography


• A baseline (like the background here)


• Perfected CSS reset


• A stylesheet for printing


• No bloat of any kind

I’m going to download it and play with the tutorial. More on this later.

Via Daring Fireball

Nothing of that will happen, as Steve Jobs told us at the last WWDC ‘07, what we know is that we will get Cover Flow style views in our trusty Finder.

What opened my eyes in this video is that same UI approach used with digital images, which really resembles a shoe-box full of photographs one may have.

A demo of this occurs at the very end in the following video.

But you know what? I waited too much now it’s not going to happen but wanted to share this with you anyways.

In essence: A Yahoo acquisition by Microsoft to fight Google, not from business perspective (there’s a lot of it on the Web) but from a technical point of view.

Did you know Microsoft invested 3 years in porting Hotmails FreeBSD centered service to it’s proprietary technology?

Don’t miss this really interesting write-up:

Most of the reaction I’ve seen regarding the rumor of a Microsoft acquisition of Yahoo centers around the business aspects. Combined search traffic versus Google, that sort of thing. Given that Microsoft views Google as their new archenemy, a Yahoo acquisition makes some sense.

But at a technical level, it would be quite a thing, because Yahoo’s software isn’t written using Microsoft technology.

One of the least remarked-upon remarkable things about Microsoft is just how much software they’ve written themselves. Not just their software products – the stuff they sell in shrink-wrapped boxes – but all of the developer technology used to build those products. Their own entire operating systems. Their own file systems. Their own compilers. Their own IDE. Their own web server. Their own scripting and programming languages. Their own SQL database server.

There’s no other company that does anything even remotely like this today.

Long ago, Apple did. Apple wrote the entirety of the classic Mac OS. They had their own compiler, their own networking protocols, built computers using Apple’s own proprietary peripheral ports. Originally, they had to, because the ’80s were a proprietary era. But by the ’90s, that ‘let’s do everything ourselves’ mindset nearly killed the company. The biggest difference between the old Apple regime and the new post-NeXT-merger Steve Jobs regime is that Apple now focuses on just a few things. Wherever possible, Apple now builds on open source. BSD and GNU userland tools in OS X. GCC compiler, Apache web server, open source scripting languages like Perl, Python, and Ruby.

Google writes a ton of their own code and tools, but they do it using open source languages, databases, and operating systems.

That’s what Yahoo does, too. In fact, that’s what most web companies do. Web companies built on Microsoft technology are few and far between. When was the last time you saw a new hit web site developed using Microsoft’s web stack? This is what Paul Graham was talking about when he wrote that ‘Microsoft is dead’ – there’s an entire generation of developers who are growing up without ever even considering Microsoft developer technologies.

And so I wonder what Microsoft would do with Yahoo. It would seem utterly insane to acquire Yahoo and then waste years of time rewriting Yahoo’s existing code to use Microsoft technology.¹ The whole point of such a merger is that both Yahoo and Microsoft feel the need to act swiftly to counter Google’s growth.

Acquiring Yahoo could be Microsoft’s way out of the corner they’ve painted themselves into. The widespread adoption of Microsoft developer technology, historically, has been very good for Microsoft overall. But while technology matters, products matter more. If Microsoft wants killer web products, they need to embrace non-Microsoft web technologies. Acquiring Yahoo would give them a way to do this without directly acknowledging just how poorly their
current web strategy has fared.

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1. 
   

   Remember Microsoft’s acquisition of Hotmail? It was founded in 1995 and was the first mega-popular free web-based email service. It was built using FreeBSD. Microsoft purchased Hotmail at the end of 1997 for $400 million. Microsoft then spent three years porting it to Windows 2000. Imagine trying that with all of Yahoo.’↩

   
   

(Via Daring Fireball.)

Apple recently convinced Google to start offering its YouTube videos in an H.264 format that can be accessed by both the iPhone and Apple TV. The obvious reason for moving to H.264 video rather than using Flash is that Flash requires decoding the video on a general purpose CPU using the Flash/On2 software codec.

Excluding Flash is a huge slap in the face of Adobe, which is pushing Flash as the basis of its AIR and Flex web application strategies. Adobe likes to advertise that nearly every PC has a Flash plugin installed. Suddenly, nearly every mobile that has access to the real Internet won’t have Flash, making it far less attractive across the board

Via Roughly Drafted

Still some peripherals and computers missing, but a very interesting collection.

From those depicted (and some missing) there I have been a proud owner of:

• Apple // europlus
• Apple ///
• Apple Macintosh SE 1/20
• Apple Macintosh LC II
• Apple Newton MP2000 (upgraded to MP2100 and still with me)
• Apple PowerBook G4 17”
• Apple PowerBook G4 15”
• Apple MacBook Pro 15” (my current Mac)
• Apple iPod 3G (my current iPod)
• Apple Airport Extreme Base Sation (my current WiFi router)

• Mighty Mouse and Wireless Mighty Mouse

  Soon to be followed by an iPhone (europe version) for sure…

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