Technology Effect

The Release Candidate of Internet Explorer 9, available now at www.BeautyOfTheWeb.com in 40 languages, reflects our unique approach to building the best experience of the Web on Windows. IE9 also reflects a more open and transparent approach with its regular cadence of platform previews for developers and enthusiasts. With the Release Candidate, we’ve taken to heart over 17,000 pieces of feedback about IE9. You will find the product has made progress on all fronts—performance and standards, user experience, and safety and privacy. We want to thank the millions of people who have installed and used Internet Explorer 9 during pre-release testing. The value of your feedback in developing the product is hard to overstate. The rest of this post highlights some of the changes made as we listened and acted directly on this feedback. Performance & Standards: The Web Platform for Developers The IE9 RC is faster with real wo...

User Experience Designers usually aim to make application interfaces intuitive and easy to use without relying on help or a manual to guide the user through how to use the app.  However, there are times when an interface is most effective and efficient to use once some initial behaviors are learned.  In these cases, designing an application to be completely intuitive upon first-time use can be impractical or detrimental to repetitive use.  There are also times where a quick introduction on how to use an app simply makes the user feel more comfortable interacting with it for the first time, and is not a reflection of a poorly designed interface. iPhone applications that introduce new, innovative interaction models or that allow the user to access a wide range of information or complete several tasks often use first-time use help screens to help users learn how an app works.  This help can come in a wide variety of styles: demos, tutorials, single screen o...

Back in August 2008, launched a Google Translate HTML5 web app for iPhone users. Today, the official Google Translate for iPhone app is available for download from the App Store. The new app has all of the features of the web app, plus some significant new additions designed to improve your overall translation experience. Speak to translate The new app accepts voice input for 15 languages, and—just like the web app—you can translate a word or phrase into one of more than 50 languages. For voice input, just press the microphone icon next to the text box and say what you want to translate.

  Several weeks ago we released Android 2.3, which introduced several new forms of communication for developers and users. One of those, Near Field Communications (NFC), let developers get started creating a new class of contactless, proximity-based applications for users. NFC is an emerging technology that promises exciting new ways to use mobile devices, including ticketing, advertising, ratings, and even data exchange with other devices. We know there’s a strong interest to include these capabilities into many applications, so we’re happy to announce an update to Android 2.3 that adds new NFC capabilities for developers. Some of the features include: A comprehensive NFC reader/writer API that lets apps read and write to almost any standard NFC tag in use today. Advanced Intent dispatching that gives apps more control over how/when they are launched when an NFC tag comes into range. Some limited support for peer-to-peer connection with other NFC devices. We hope you...

Today, we’re launching Flash Player 10.2 for Windows, Mac, and Linux. We’re especially excited that this release introduces Stage Video , a full hardware accelerated video pipeline for best-in-class, beautiful video across platforms and browsers. Additionally, this version of Flash Player offers all the new capabilities previewed in our beta release , like custom native mouse cursors , multiple monitor full-screen support , Internet Explorer 9 hardware accelerated rendering support, and enhanced sub-pixel rendering for superior text readability. In The City That Knows How*, A History of Moving Images Here in San Francisco, we’ve had a bit of tradition around changing how folks see the world with images. In the 1870s, a San Francisco photographer named Eadweard Muybridge captured some of the earliest motion pictures. In 1927, Philo Farnsworth transmitted the first electronic television image in his laboratory on 202 Green Street. And way back in 2002, a small team in San Francis...

We do know that the landing page of the Motorola XOOM has already gone live a few days ago, and that will clearly heighten the anticipation for folks who want one of the more promising tablet devices out there in the market sometime down the road. Well, as you all know, any electronic device that intends to make their way to the US will first have to jump through the hoops put forward by the FCC, and there is a new Motorola XOOM apparently that has arrived at such a turning point. This model seems to be a Wi-Fi only version (reminds you of the iPad as well as the Amazon Kindle, doesn’t it?), so if such a variant were to make its way to the market, you can bet your bottom dollar that this means it will be more affordably priced than the $800 quoted for the 3G Motorola XOOM tablet. The recent filing spotted pointed towards the FCC testing a “wireless tablet with embedded WLAN” manufactured by Motorola, and surely it doesn’t mean another tablet ap...

Smart Communications, which is the Philippines’ leading mobile operator with 44.1 million subscribers, and Red Bend Software unveiled the Netphone, touting it as the world’s first smartphone featuring widgets from the Wholesale Application Community (WAC) that can be independently managed over the air. The revolutionary part — at least when mobile operators are concerned — is the ability to add widgets without user’s permission. This way, mobile operators can increase ARPU while at the same time presenting users with new features they may haven’t tried or seen before. The mentioned Netphone is an Android 2.2-powered touchscreen smartphone that comes with popular social networking clients alongside relevant customer account services and select apps that are said to be relevant to emerging market customers. Using Red Bend’s standards-based vRapid Mobile Software Management solution, SMART is able to manage its suite of embedded software and applications, including WAC-...