Mike Chambers posted some awesome news today. This is a big step for Apollo and a much needed feature. The Apollo Beta (to be released “sooner rather than later”) will include an embedded SQLite database to aid in the creation of occasionally connected Apollo applications.

I’m anxious to see how the developer will be able to interact and admin the embedded database. Will Adobe provide tools to manage the database? Or will the developer be able to connect to the database with a third party admin tool somehow? Time will tell.

Mike also noted that the team at Adobe is working to align the APIs of the Apollo DB and Google Gears. Google Gears is a project that uses SQLite “to allow browser based applications to work off line.” To me, this approach seems less practical than having a DB built into Apollo. Off line browser based apps would be a usability nightmare for most users. Maybe nightmare is harsh, but it would certainly be a less intuitive experience than having a desktop app that just works off line…

Microsoft has announced a product that may change the way you work.

Check out the Microsoft Surface promo site to get a glimpse of what will be possible with fully interactive multi-touch displays.

Google has quietly implemented a new feature on Google Maps that allows the user to zoom all the way into a street, and view panoramas of certain areas of the map! You have to see it to appreciate it. Be sure to spin the image around to see the full pano effect…

Google Maps 3d Panoramas

Or check out MTV’s TRL here

Sometimes I get the feeling that Google has some bright folks working for them…

While AJAX has some minor advantages over the Flash platform (requires no plugin…and….um, I’m sure there are others ), I usually find myself really having to dig to find any significant advantages in AJAX development. James Ward has put together a nice little Flex 2 app that gracefully shows performance comparisons between various data transfer methods. AJAX falls far short in these comparisons.

View the application here: RIA Data Loading Benchmarks

AMF3 leads the pack, but I am particularly excited to see a comparison between Flex XML E4X and Flex AMF3. AMF3 has the advantage of being a binary object format for Actionscript objects…which means less data to transfer and a much quicker render time.

James on AMF3:
The performance of loading and rendering 20000 rows is extremely fast with AMF. The bandwidth is much smaller than text based serialization methods (XML and JSON). And sort time is nearly instantaneous for all 20000 rows.

James on E4X:
This method is the fastest non-AMF method in Flex. E4X in the Flash Virtual Machine is extremely fast at querying XML structures so parsing happens very quickly. Also because the Mozilla Tamarin is JIT enabled, rendering happens extremely fast. Sorting performance is decent, but not as fast as when working with structured AS objects.

Y’all have heard me talk about my hacked together arcade machine that I made, so thought I would share some pics…

Cinnarcade 0.5
This is a machine that i built for the kiddies…ended up being an end table in my living room.

Cinnarade 1.0
WACA - WACA - WACA < - - - - 0

http://curecd.com/

Very cool site.

Have you ever seen the Fear Factor episodes where they eat the 100yr old duck eggs?  Let’s just say that unless you really like the smell of a bait bucket after setting out in the sun all day and the texture of jello / cottage cheese..  I wouldn’t recommend the duck eggs.   Anyhow, enjoy the show and make sure that you look at Bryan’s facial expressions.  Plus he is so hard core he need to add a little seasoning to his egg.

I’m sure some of you have probaly seen this software, but I thought I would mention it because it looks like it could be really useful. I installed the trial on my home machine and it works great.

From the website: “Parallels Workstation is a powerful, easy to use, cost effective desktop virtualization solution that empowers PC users with the ability to create completely networked, fully portable, entirely independent virtual machines on a single physical machine.”

It allows you to run virtual computer inside your existing OS…inside a window. This could be great for setting up virtual servers, or virtual testing environments on a single machine. For example, we could install Windows Vista, Windows 98, Windows 2000, and Windows ME on top of any other Windows installation, then boot up the virtual machines(inside windows), and use it as a testing environment for applications that we create. Read more about it here:

http://www.parallels.com/

There is also a feature that allows you to run Windows applications inside of OSX, as if they were native OSX apps! Check out this video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rN9jNNeEd98

The virtual machines are portable as well. Once you set up a VM, it basically creates 2 files: a config file, and a simulated Hard Disk Image file. So, after setting up the OS, you can copy or move the 2 files to another location or another machine, and run them.

Nice!