O'Reilly News & Commentary

Android Rising: O'Reilly Android Apps Gaining Ground on iPhone

O'Reilly sells apps in both the iPhone App Store and the Android Market. Most apps (for now) are just app presentations of our ebooks, built using ereader apps popular on each platform (Stanza on iPhone, Aldiko on Android). That means many of our apps are essentially the same on each platform, so any difference in sales can be at somewhat...

Featured Video: The Known Universe - From the American Museum of Natural History

A Story Before Bed

I'm totally gaga over Jackson Fish Market's new site, A Story Before Bed. This might be one of those things that parents and grandparents will flip out with happiness about while everyone else scratches their heads, but as a new parent, finding it made me feel like a special delivery had arrived expressly for my daughter. The idea of the site is to make it easy for people far from kids they love -- grandparents in another city, parents on a business trip, soldiers in training or deployed -- to read a story to a child. But you really have to watch a demo video to see what a jewel of a product they've made.

Playing With Foursquare Data

Foursquare is the new Dodgeball. Which is to say that it is my (and many other people's) method for tracking where we go (and in most cases our social activities). On a daily basis I use the iPhone app to announce some of my whereabouts to friends. I share specifics selectively, but in aggregate my information is shared publicly. (Disclosure: Foursquare is an OATV investment)

Four short links: 21 December 2009 - Social Networking Data, Memory Tech, Sim News, Microbe Jalopy Breakthrough

See Bacteria-Powered Micro-Machines. This and more in today's Four Short Links.

Being online: Your identity online--getting down to basics

What men daily do, not knowing what they do!The Internet provides minimal information about us when we go online, but compensates by providing immediate, dynamic exploitation of that information. This post in the identity article series shows what we tell others just by connecting to the Internet. Previous posts in this series explored the various identifies that track you in real life. Now we can look at the traits that constitute your identity online. A little case study may show how fluid these are.

Does your UI work for the masses? Test it with Google Browser Size

I was perusing the Google Code blog recently, and stumbled across a post explaining the new Google Browser Size tool. This is a tool that allows you to compare the size & layout of your design against data showing the most common browser sizes of client machines.

Surviving a Re-Org

End of year is a time when companies and departments reflect on the previous year and begin planning for new projects and challenges in the coming year. It's also a time when departments usually restructure to bring more focus and fortification to the challenges ahead. It's a time to re-org. Re-orgs can be stressful. If you've spent the previous year in one role it's natural to be a little intimidated if your role has changed. But re-orgs are a good thing.

Why Using ShopSavvy Might Not Be So Savvy

Reading this morning's New York Times story, Mobile Phones Become Essential Tools for Holiday Shopping, I was reminded again of the fundamental shortsightedness of so many of our economic decisions, that flaw in human nature that makes us seize on temporary advantage without thinking of the long-term consequences. The article focuses on the use of applications like ShopSavvy and RedLaser to do comparison price checking while in the store. On the surface, these are great tools for consumers (and there are other applications besides price comparison.) But remember, cutthroat pursuit of the lowest price will hasten the demise of many retailers, while strengthening others (usually, the biggest and most efficient, who can make money on the slenderest margins.) But what happens once those mega-retailers are the last one standing? Prices are likely to go up.

Featured Ignite Video: Clunkers for Cash - Ignite Show Episode 41

O'Reilly is launching the first-ever Global Ignite Week, to bring together as many local Ignites as possible. Read more.

The Best and the Worst Tech of the Decade - It was the best of decades, it was the worst of decades...

With only a few weeks left until we close out the 'naughts and move into the teens, it's almost obligatory to take a look back at the best and not-so-best of the last decade. With that in mind, I polled the O'Reilly editors, authors, Friends, and a number of industry movers and shakers to gather nominations. I then tossed them in the trash and made up my own compiled them together and looked for trends and common threads. So here then, in no particular order, are the best and the worst that the decade had to offer.

David Pogue Revisits DRM Question about Ebooks

In a blog post today, New York Times Columnist (and bestselling O'Reilly author) David Pogue responds to a reader question about DRM (he calls it "copy protection") in light of all the recent ereader buzz, and he's very honest and open about his (very natural) reaction to finding copies of his books out in the wild: "As an author myself, I, too, am terrified by the thought of piracy. I can't stand seeing my books, which are the primary source of my income, posted on all these piracy Web sites, available for anyone to download free." He then discusses sales for one of his books since we began offering it as a (DRM-free) ebook: "The thing was pirated to the skies. It's all over the Web now, ridiculously easy to download without paying... The crazy thing was, sales of the book did not fall."

Being online: identity, anonymity, and all things in between

To be or not to be: that is the question.Hamlet's famous utterance plays a trick on theater-goers, a mind game of the same type he inflicted constantly on his family and his court. While diverting his audience's attention with a seemingly simple choice between being and non-being, Hamlet of all people would know very well how these extremes bracket infinite gradations. Our fascination with Hamlet is precisely his instinct for presenting a different self to almost everyone he met. Social networking gives us an impetus to review how we appear online. When people ask who we are, questions multiply far beyond the capacity of a binary "to be" digit.

Scott Berkun on How to Get People to Pay Attention - Speaking is Not Trivial

The Importance of What You Say — "People laugh when I tell them I'm a professional speaker. They assume at first that I'm some kind of self-help guru or infomercial star," writes Scott Berkun in a new O'Reilly Insights column on Forbes.com. In the column, the bestselling author of the newly released Confessions of a Public Speaker discusses how to choose what to say and which angle to take. Read more.

Featured Ignite Video: The Plight of the Digital Chicken - Ignite Show Episode 42

Subscribe to this video podcast series via iTunes. Or, visit the O'Reilly Media area at iTunes to find other podcasts from O'Reilly.

Four short links: 17 December 2009 - Desirable Devices, iPhone Piracy Numbers, Internet Trend Numbers, Value of Privacy

iPhone Piracy -- over 70% of submitted game scores for this game (Tap Fu) were from pirated copies. Having seen our data and the fact that not a single pirate bought Tap-Fu after playing it, these arguments all sound a bit delusional to me. It seems like an attempt at trying to be legitimate while hiding the real reason. They should just change their page to say "We pirate because we can". That seems to be a much more honest statement based on the data we've seen. (via timoreilly on Twitter) This and more in today's Four Short Links.

'Twas the Holiday Season in the Digital Age

'Twas a night during the holidays, when all through the house Everyone was connecting and using their mouse. The screens were alight and holding their stares, While holiday music from iTunes loudly blared. The children were chatting and texting their friends, Searching for YouTube clips they just had to send; And Daddy with his iPhone and I with my RIM Were synching our calendars to meet at the gym.

Sneak Peek: "First Look: Microsoft Office 2010" - Limited Time! Download this Free Ebook

"First Look: Microsoft Office 2010," by Katherine Murray, offers 14 chapters of early content. This free sneak peek introduces you to changes in Office 2010 and shows you how to make the most of the new features. Download the sneak peek here. Find more information about this free download on the Microsoft Press blog.

Global Ignite Week: 40+ Ignites Coming Next March

Just over three years ago, Bre Pettis and I threw a geek night in our home town. We called it Ignite Seattle. Since that first amazing night in 2006, Ignite has spread to over 60 cities, bringing together thousands of geeks and generating hundreds of videos of Ignite talks. This March, it gets much, much bigger. O'Reilly is launching the first-ever Global Ignite Week, to bring together as many local Ignites as possible.

Four short links: 16 December 2009 - Global Broadband, A/B Testing Stats, Streaming with SSDs, Online Videos Sell

Videos Sell More Product -- Zappos sells 6-30% more merchandise when accompanied by video demos. By the end of next year, Zappos will have ten full working video studios, with the goal of producing around 50,000 product videos by 2010, up from the 8,000 videos they have on the site today (via johnclegg on Twitter) This and more in today's Four Short Links.

Using R to answer a football question

Last Monday night, I was watching the Ravens playing the Packers at Green Bay. Mostly, I was watching penalties. This game featured an astounding number of penalty calls: 23 calls, 310 yards. I wondered whether penalties really affect the outcome of football games. Here's what I figured out in 15 minutes, with a little help from R.

First Look at nook: Not Encouraging

We (finally) received our nooks (pre-ordered quite some time ago), and the early results are ... disappointing. Loading one (any) of our EPUB ebooks causes the nook to hang, and the book never opens. I tried loading a number of O'Reilly Media titles that are valid and work on the Sony Reader and every other ePub device. The Nook only brought up the "Formatting" message, and then hung. Only a full restart would bring it back. This is an extremely serious problem.

Government 2.0: Five Predictions for 2010-12

Under no pressure from anyone, I’ve forced this obligatory “end of year predictions” post upon myself. People always ask me where I think Government 2.0 is going anyway, I may as well get some writing mileage out of it, right? So, here are some non-exhaustive, somewhat creative, and entirely debatable trends and ideas that I foresee taking shape in the next three years or so: Local governments as experiments The rise of Citizen 2.0 Mobile devices as primary devices Ubiquitous crude video content Always on-the-record

Four short links: 15 December 2009 - Open Source Imagery Analysis, GPL Lawsuits, Small World, Regina v Internet

Best Buy, Samsung, And Westinghouse Named In SFLC Suit Today (Linux Weekly News) -- the Software Freedom Law Center is suing them for selling GPL-derived products without offering the source. They've been unresponsive when contacted outside the legal system. This and more in today's Four Short Links.

Innovation from the Edges: PayPal Taps the Developer Community to Build Next-Gen Payment Apps - Developer Challenge offers big prizes for best apps using new APIs

Two enduring tenets of Web 2.0 are "A platform beats an application every time" and "All the smart people don't work for you." Online payment giant PayPal took those bits of wisdom to heart and recently announced the PayPal X APIs, a new group of developer APIs designed to enable new applications that can more tightly integrate with PayPal services. To encourage developers to create some awesome applications with the APIs, PayPal is offering prizes $100,000 and $50,000 (in cash plus waived transaction fees) for the best new applications. We caught up with PayPal's director for their Developer Network, Naveed Anwar, and he filled us in on what the new PayPal APIs bring to the table for application designers.

5 Tips For Version Controlled Site Deployments

Advanced Flash Tactics or AFTs are techniques that come from deep within the Flash Art Of War, the oldest Flash military treatise in the world. In this AFT I will go over 5 Tips For Version Controlled Site Deployments. After relaunching my own blog I thought it would be a good idea to share some of the techniques I have used on larger sites and how they can be applied to smaller ones. Blogs and small sites are excellent times to practice version controlled deployments. This post will discuss what I have learned and recently implemented.

Apps Per Seller Across the US iTunes Categories

Measured in terms of number of unique apps, the Top 5 categories in the U.S. app store have been Games, Books, Entertainment, Travel and Utilities. But comparing categories in terms of number of apps doesn't capture the challenge of developing applications in different categories. As I noted in an earlier post, it's much easier to develop a Book app than an interactive game. One crude measure for the relative complexity of developing apps across categories is to compare the number of apps per seller.

Four short links: 14 December 2009 - Archival Footage, Interesting Visualization, Year of Ideas, Zoomable Time Graphs

Videos from the vault of the National Archives -- the public domain US government videos that public.resource.org have been scanning. Check out China's Great Leap Forward (the Beijing landscape has changed!), John James Audubon's Birds of America, and Nature's Half-Acre. This and more in today's Four Short Links.

Make Magazine Weekend Project: Alien Projector

Featured O'Reilly Answers Video: How Twitter followers propagate information

Share knowledge, ask questions on O'Reilly Answers today.

Four short links: 11 December 2009 - Real Time Text, NoSQL Reading List, New data.gov, and a Breakdancing Robot

It's Official, data.gov 2.0 is Coming -- pointer to the design and philosophy document for the next iteration of data.gov. Interesting to see so much activity on US open government happening now: open government directive and progress report were released, along with a request for ideas on open access to publicly-funded science research. This and more in today's Four Short Links.

Happy Birthday Internet!

I love a celebration (who doesn't like cake) - especially for those who really deserve to be recognized. The Internet, as you probably know, turned 40 this month. Maybe it's the mother in me, but I would like to take a moment and reflect on how far it has come since its infancy. It's hit quite a few milestones!

Visualizing and Categorizing the 911 Wikileaks Data Set

On November 25th, Wikileaks released 500,000 text pager intercepts from the 24 hours surrounding the horrific 9/11 attacks. The personal, corporate and governmental come from the Washington D.C. and New York City areas. These can be found on their own subdomain at https://911.wikileaks.org/ and are released under the CC-BY-SA license. As with the AOL search logs and the Enron email archives this data set will be examined and visualized.

Happening Today: Gov 2.0 Online Conference - Facing Challenges and Winning: Five Gov 2.0 Examples

When citizens interact with their government, powerful things can happen. It means doing more with less people. It means breaking down too-familiar "cylinders of excellence." Web 2.0 is the industry which has shown that transparency, participation, collaboration add up to increased efficiency. Gov 2.0 harnesses this for the public good, as we'll explore in these sessions: City of Santa Cruz Budget Crisis: A Blueprint Using Social Media + Q&A; txts 4 africa + Q&A; Transit 2.0 at Bart.gov + Q&A; Utah Department of Public Safety Media Portal + Q&A; Digital Diplomacy: Understanding Islam through Virtual Worlds + Q&A; Register now to participate in this free online event.

28 Rich Data Visualization Tools

All of our clients have data rich applications and need equally rich data visualizations to help their end customers analyze data quickly and effectively. What makes my job really interesting is that these clients are in different industries and are using different technologies. So we have pulled together a set of 28 tools for creating graphs, Gantt charts, diagrammers, calendars/schedulers, gauges, mapping, pivot tables, OLAP cubes, and sparklines, in Flash, Flex, Ajax or Silverlight.

Four short links: 10 December 2009 - Open Source CMS and OPAC, Timely SQL, A Bid Secret, Basic Research

Scriblio -- open source CMS and catalogue built on WordPress, with faceted search and browse. (via titine on Delicious) Scriblio is an award winning, free, open source CMS and OPAC with faceted searching and browsing features based on WordPress. Scriblio is a project of Plymouth State University, supported in part by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. This and more in today's Four Short Links.

Charles Platt on the Basics of Electronics - Make: Electronics and Learning Through Discovery

Want to learn the fundamentals of electronics in a fun, hands-on way? Author Charles Platt (@charlesplatt) has created a book in which you will explore all of the key components and essential principles through a series of fascinating experiments. I asked him a few questions about Make: Electronics earlier this week so I could understand a little bit more about electronics (and why he wrote this book) for myself.

Featured Video: What Does Gov 2.0 Mean to You?

Register now for Thursday's free Gov 2.0 Online Conference.

Top security threats to Flash/Flex applications and how to avoid them - Part 1 - Cross-domain Scripting Vulnerability

In this new InsideRIA series I will be covering specific security vulnerabilities, showing examples of how an attacker can abuse Flash/Flex applications, and pointing out ways to help prevent these attacks. The purpose of these articles is to increase awareness so you will take security into consideration when building your applications. In part one we'll examine cross-domain scripting vulnerability.

Four short links: 9 December 2009 - Bioinformatics Myths, Internet Policy, Archivist Tools, Life Visualisations

Nebul.us -- startup that aggregates and visualises your online activity. In private beta, but there's a screenshot and brief discussion on Flowing Data. This and more in today's Four Short Links.

GWT Now With SpeedTracer

Google is releasing v2 of GWT (pronounced "Gwit") tonight at a Campfire One in Mountain View. The open-source Google Web Toolkit enables developers to code Ajax web apps in Java. This latest release is focused on speed (just like the latest iPhone) and improved dev-designer collaboration. I was on a call with Bruce Johnson and Andy Bowers to learn more about the release. There are three new major features being released tonight. Of the three SpeedTracer seems to have the greatest implications.

Poll Revisit: What mobile platform are you most interested in programming for?

Back in October of 2008, I posted a poll that focused on the many mobile platforms and asked which platform you were most interested in developing for. Since that time Android and Palm WebOS have matured a bit and Apple also updated the iPhone operating system. So, I thought it might be interested to run this poll again and see if the results have changed at all.

Featured Video: There's a #Hashtag for That - Baratunde Thurston at Web 2.0 Expo

Getting Real with LCDS 3, Part 2 - Follow Along Development Lesson, Code Included

In Part 1, we experienced the joy of model driven development and built a complete LCDS 3 backend using the new Modeler plugin. Amazingly, no Java was needed to create a full production-ready backend. In Part 2, we will build a complete Flex 4 frontend while exercising some of the cooler client-side LCDS 3 features along the way. And once again, I won't skimp on the details.

Four short links: 8 December 2009 - Python Moratorium, Math Pictures, Assemblers Needed, Tennis Vision

Python's Moratorium -- Python language designers have declared a moratorium on enhancement proposals (feature requests) while the world's Python programmers get used to the last batch of New And Shiny they shipped. I'm reasonably sure that the ALGOL designers went through exactly the same discussions, and I know Perl did too. So, don't be afraid of it - don't think that Python is evolutionarily dead - it's not. We're taking a stability and adoption break, a breather. We're doing this to help users and developers, not to just be able to say 'no' to every random idea sent to python-ideas, and not because we're done. Reminds me of Perl god Jarkko Hietaniemi's signature file: "There is this special biologist word we use for 'stable'. It is 'dead'. -- Jack Cohen. This and more in today's Four Short Links.

Japanese Standard for ODF

Based on a cryptic twitter from Dr Murata, it looks like the Japanese standard for ODF has been released. Congratulations to all involved, it is a good step forward to enable competition, substitution and industry in this area.

Flex 101: Creating a Swipe/Slide Effect With Flex

In this example, we will walk through the creation of a swipe/slide effect inspired by the transitions that you often see in touch-capable devices when you use a finger to swipe from one screen to the next. One piece of content slides off to one side, and another piece of content seamlessly slides in from the opposite side.

Twitter Approval Matrix - November 2009

This is the sixth post for the Twitter Approval Matrix with data that spanned the month of November and different sources such as klout.com, tweetsentiment.com, twopular.com, scraping archives, and observations. This month I received help from Joe Fernandez the CEO of Klout.com. I have included Twitter Trends which is simply the raw trend found on Twitter. The matrix shows four quadrants used to describe trends found on Twitter.

Confessions of a Public Speaker -- Slashdotted! - Excellent Review of Scott Berkun's New Book

"Confessions of a Public Speaker is unique in that it takes a holistic approach to the art and science of public speaking. The book doesn't just provide helpful hints, it attempts to make the speaker, and his associated presentation, compelling and necessary," writes Ben Rothke in his Slashdot review. "Confessions is Scott Berkun's first-hand account of his many years of public speaking, teaching and television appearances. In the book, he shares his successes, failures, and many frustrating experiences, in the hope that the reader will be a better speaker for it."

Four short links: 7 December 2009 - Touchscreen++, Data Analysis, Open Science and Social Software, Google Makes Good

3D Touchscreens -- Japan Science & Technology Agency and researchers at the University of Electro-communications have made a "photoelastic" touch screen. The LCD emits polarized light, picked up by a camera over the screen. Transparent rubber on the screen deforms when pressed, and the camera can pick this up. Interesting hack, though it's not yet a consumer-grade product. This and more in today's Four Short Links.