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I try to summarize the most relevant news from the world of Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) every month. Here’s the digest for July 2006. Click To Read More...

The IEBlog just posted videos from MIX06 (Microsoft conference in March 2006). I’ve watched two of the hour-long videos. Here are my take-away summaries. Click To Read More...

The Laszlo blog announced yesterday that OpenLaszlo will use and contribute to Dojo. For the uninitiated, Dojo is one of the many DHTML/Ajax toolkits that help DHTML developers get their work done. Since OpenLaszlo is moving towards supporting more runtimes (other than Flash) and DHTML is one of those “runtimes”, this sounds like a great idea (rather than have the Laszlo team write their own toolkit from scratch). The fact that they’ll be bringing their contributions back to Dojo sounds like a win-win.

Via Arve. Opera releases the first Beta for Version 9 of their browser today. Big news from my perspective is support for the audio object. Click To Read More...

Over a month ago, I got an invitation to try out Hotmail evolved: Windows Live Mail Beta. I decided to go for it, since I don’t use my Hotmail account for anything critical and most of my colleagues have switched over to using my Gmail account when they want to send me an email. I was disappointed but not surprised to find out that Windows Live Mail Beta is nowhere near fully functional in Firefox and Opera. The ony things you can do are: Read your mail, Delete your mail and Write a New Message. You can’t attach files to mails. You can’t edit in rich text mode. You can’t even reply to mails that you get from within Firefox/Opera. This is a significant step BACKWARDS in functionality that already existed in Hotmail! Click To Read More...

Just last week, I posted about how impressed I was with Outlook Web Access 2003. On slashdot today along comes the story that MSN Hotmail is going to undergo a much-needed Ajax facelift (called “Kahuna”). The screenshots look very similar to Outlook Web Access 2003 but with ads, so I’m sure most of the code is shared.

The update is going public some time in 2006, though phase 2 of the deployment, rolling out to 200,000 “technical enthusiasts”, is starting today. Hey, I’m an “enthusiast” too…maybe I was 200,001st on their list…

This is good news, not just because Hotmail feels woefully outdated after using Gmail for a year, but I’m sure this means they’ll maximize their user base and ad revenues (and avoid holy wars) by fixing the broken bits in Outlook Web Access when using browsers like Firefox and Opera. Those fixes should logically trickle back to Outlook Web Access 200x and this would strengthen the case for alternative browsers in the corporate environment…. Hmm, maybe it’s not so “logical” after all

My work environment has support for Outlook web access to our Microsoft Exchange Servers so we can access our email anywhere from Internet Explorer as long as we’re connected to the corporate LAN. They recently updated the version of it and I was really impressed this morning when I needed to use it (so much so that I decided to write about it). Click To Read More...