Links for February 11th through February 15th

Posted on February 15, 2013 by Vinny

Boxen is your team’s IT robot. It’s a dangerously opinionated framework that automates every piece of your development environment. – Boxen is a framework for managing almost every aspect of your Mac. We built a massive standard library of Puppet modules optimized for Boxen to manage everything from running MySQL to installing Minecraft.
A New Java Library for Amazing Productivity | Javalobby – Personally, I think this library is a godsend, and I think there’ll be a LOT of teams picking it up over the next five years, just like the popularity of Spring has swept the globe due to all the efficiencies it bestows on developers. The library, by the w
Raible Designs | The Modern Java Web Developer and Java Web Security at Denver JUG – The first talk, The Modern Java Web Developer, was inspired by the book titled The Well-Grounded Java Developer. Ben Evans and Martijn Verburg mention in the beginning of the book that they wrote it as a training guide to get new Java developers up to spee
The Making of Fastbook: An HTML5 Love Story – This four-minute video gives you a quick overview of Sencha Fastbook, and shows you a side-by-side comparison of how well our HTML5 app performs against both the native iOS and the native Android Facebook apps (versions 5.2 and 1.9.12 respectively, the latest available when we made this video on December 10th).
Promoting iOS Apps with Smart App Banners – Safari has a new Smart App Banner feature in iOS 6 and later that provides a standardized method of promoting apps on the App Store from a website. <meta name="apple-itunes-app" content="app-id=myAppStoreID>
How Lockheed Martin’s ‘Kill Chain’ Stopped SecurID Attack – Dark Reading – A rare inside look at how the defense contractor repelled an attack using its homegrown 'Cyber Kill Chain' framework
Plivo Cloud – Cloud Platform to Build Voice & SMS Applications (Voice & SMS API Platform) – Build powerful Telephony Apps. Leave the Infrastructure plumbing to Us.
apiary.io — REST API documentation, Reimagined – It takes more than a simple HTML page to thrill your API users. The right tools take weeks of development. Weeks that apiary.io saves.
Love the idea that my next car has a REST API! Go Tesla – An unofficial documentation of the Tesla Model S REST API
Cloud 66 | Code to Cloud in 5 minutes – Build your own Rails PaaS – The easiest way to get your code hosted on your servers. Provision, deploy and manage your Ruby on Rails apps on your cloud or your own servers.
Gartner Positions Tableau as a Leader in 2013 Magic Quadrant – Tableau is a "Leader" for first time in the Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence and Analytics Platforms report.
VMware Marching Towards Software Defined Datacenter with Software Defined Storage Acquisition of Virsto | SiliconANGLE – As part of its strategy to deliver the software-defined datacenter, VMware continues to invest and innovate to extend the benefits of virtualization to every domain in the datacenter — compute, network, storage and the associated security and availability
Bill Gates did a AMA (ask me anything) on Reddit – Feb 11 2013 – Bill Gates did a AMA (ask me anything) on Reddit and here is the transcript.
The Porsche 911: An ode to iteration (via @daringfireball) – 50 years of iterative refinement.
Developing Java Apps for iOS–Codenameone, An Interview – Develop in Java, deploy on iPhone, Android and Windows Phone. What is codenameone? An interview with Chen Fishbein.
Building Twitter Bootstrap · An A List Apart Article – Thanks to the foresight and focus of a small group of designers and developers, we were able to evolve our development process, build an extensive front-end toolkit, and help thousands of others bootstrap the projects they love
Infotron Spreadsheet Analyzer – Breviz, the Spreadsheet Visualization Tool reveals the hidden logic of a spreadsheet, to help you spot errors and make your spreadsheets less risky and more efficient.
IntelliJ IDEA 12 Wins Jolt Award for Coding Tools 2013! | JetBrains IntelliJ IDEA Blog – We are excited to announce that a few days ago IntelliJ IDEA 12 was named the winner of the Jolt Award for Coding Tools 2013, an annual award run by Dr. Dobbs to showcase the best IDEs and coding tools of the year.
Apple iTunes becomes much more than a "break-even" business. – iTunes now is a blend of many business models. Some, like music, use a wholesale revenue recognition method and have very low to zero margins, others, like eBooks and Apps, are sold using an “agency” revenue model with potentially higher margins and some, like Software, are recognized at full value with very high margins.

Links for November 22nd through November 30th

Posted on November 30, 2012 by Vinny

Turbo-Charging Agile Software Development with Lean Methods – Satish Thatte introduces Scrum, Agile and Lean, then explains how Lean can be used to enhance Agile practices.
tabIndent – Javascript object that allows you to enhance a plain old textbox with "tab" behaviour. – tabIndent.js does two things to enhance the traditional text-box:
– Disables the default browser behaviour (moving to the next input box)
– Enhances the existing textbox to capture the "tab" key and replicate behaviour similar to that found in editors. (Inserting a tab character, intentation
The Case for Drinking as Much Coffee as You Like – The most recent findings that support coffee as a panacea will make their premiere this December in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition. Coffee, researchers found, appears to reduce the risk of type 2 diabetes.
New Kendo UI Framework for Java Developers — Application Development Trends – Developer tools and solutions provider Telerik has released a new version of its framework for building applications and Web sites with HTML5 and JavaScript that supports Java.
5 APIs that will transform the Web in 2013 | Alex MacCaw – The reason why the future is so bright is evergreen browsers, or browsers that automatically update in the background. It takes about 18 weeks for a new feature in Chrome’s Canary to be rolled out to its ~350 million users. That’s an incredibly fast adoption rate, and innovation is happening quicker than ever before
Chatting with Obama For America’s Director of Frontend Development: Daniel Ryan | Nettuts+ – Recently, we had the opportunity to interview Daniel Ryan – the Director of Frontend Development for “Obama for America” – about the strategies, technologies, and experiences that were a part of the race to November 6.
The Release Windows Archaism | Monday Note – Even taking in account the unavoidable piracy (which also acts as a powerful promotional channel), with two billion people connected to the internet outside the US, the math heavily favors the end of the counter-productive and honest-viewer-hostile Release Windows archaism.
Redline Smalltalk – because nothing is as productive as Smalltalk, and the App has to run on the Java Virtual Machine. – a couple of major barriers keep Smalltalk out of reach for many developers. I want to bring Smalltalk to everyone, so I created Redline, a thoroughly modern version of Smalltalk that runs on the Java Virtual Machine.
The Legacy of Linus Torvalds: Linux, Git, and One Giant Flamethrower | Wired Enterprise | Wired.com – Linus Torvalds created Linux, which now runs vast swathes of the internet, including Google and Facebook. And he invented Git, software that’s now used by developers across the net to build new applications of all kinds. But that’s not all Torvalds has given the internet.
The RedMonk Programming Language Rankings: September 2012 – tecosystems – while there may be a few surprises on this list – the continued traction of Java, as an example, is unexpected for some – by and large this list seems like nothing more or less than a reasonable representation of programming languages in use today
Keynote: The New Application Architectures – Adrian Colyer discusses the application architecture emerging these days defined by a departure from server-side apps to a model characterized by smart clients and services.
Keynote: Spring 2012 and Beyond – Adrian Colyer, Juergen Hoeller, Mark Pollack and Graeme Rocher present SpringSource’s Unifying Component Model, current developments regarding Big Data, and betting on Grails.
Changing times for web developers – 6 Tips You Should Read to survive – Think about crafting your web applications properly. Use commonsense to mix and match based on scenarios. Here we go with 6 Tips to be a responsible web developer, and to stay on top of what you do.
18 Useful Twitter Boostrap Goodies You Should Know | Queness – In this post, I have found many useful tools, plugins and themes created specifically for Twitter Bootstrap. If you love using Twitter Bootstrap, I'm sure you will love all these resources.
50 Tricks for Faster Web Applications – Jatinder Mann, an Internet Explorer PM at Microsoft, held the session 50 performance tricks to make your HTML5 apps and sites faster at BUILD 2012, providing many tips for creating faster web applications. The advice provided by Mann was organized around six principles outlined below.
Apple and Twitter – Almost anything Apple does which involves the internet is a mess – My friend and co-worker Tom has a thesis about Apple’s biggest problem: Google is getting better at design faster than Apple is getting better at web services.

Links for November 15th through November 18th

Posted on November 18, 2011 by Vinny

Google Guava – Synchronization with Monitor – The Google Guava project is a collection of libraries that every Java developer should become familiar with. The Guava libraries cover I/O, collections, string manipulation, and concurrency just to name a few
First look: Oracle NoSQL Database | Data Explosion – InfoWorld – Oracle's take on the distributed key-value data store is fast, flexible, and enterprise-grade serious
BlueEyes is a lightweight web 3.0 framework for the Scala programming language. – A lightweight Web 3.0 framework for Scala, featuring a purely asynchronous architecture, extremely high-performance, massive scalability, high usability, and a functional, composable design.
Martin Fowler on Polyglot Persistence | Architects Zone – What all of this means is that if you're working in the enterprise application world, now is the time to start familiarizing yourself with alternative data storage options. This won't be a fast revolution, but I do believe the next decade will see the database thaw progress rapidly.
InfoQ: The Kotlin Programming Language – Andrey Breslav introduces the upcoming Kotlin language created by JetBrains, a general purpose JVM-based language, statically typed, object-oriented, and meant to be more concise than Java.
iPad and iPhone Application Development (HD) – Download free content from Stanford on iTunes – Tools and APIs required to build applications for the iPhone platform using the iPhone SDK, Objective-C programming language. iPhone APIs and tools including Xcode
How StackOverflow Scales with SQL Server (Video) with Brent Ozar – The most popular tech Q&A site in the world serves 12-14 million web pages per day with Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2. They’re passionate about performance, and they’ll share the scalability lessons they learned along the way.
Raible Designs | Play 2.0, A web framework for a new era – This was a great talk on what's new in Play 2.0. I especially like the native support for LESS and CoffeeScript and the emphasis on trying to keep developers using two tools: their editor and the browser. The sample apps look great, but the documentation look sparse. I doubt I'll get a chance to migrate my Play 1.2.3 app to 2.0 this month, but I hope to try migrating sometime before the end of the year.
Google Music Store Chases Apple’s ITunes 8 Years Too Late: Tech – Businessweek – Google Inc. is entering the online music market almost a decade too late to pose a threat to Apple Inc., the largest seller of songs on the Web.
Reading Needs a Platform: Introducing the New Readability – For free!! – Wherever you read — your browser, iPhone, iPad, your Amazon Kindle — Readability is going to be there. For free.
Google Web Toolkit Blog: GWT and Dart – We view Dart as an ambitious evolution of GWT’s mission to make web apps better for end users … we anticipate working closely with the GWT developer community to explore Dart.

Links for September 15th through September 17th

Posted on September 17, 2011 by Vinny

Configuring SQL Server in Amazon EC2: Training Video – To learn more, check out Jeremiah’s post on Configuring SQL Server in EC2. It covers who’s deploying EC2 VMs with SQL, what problems they’re running into, and how to improve performance
SQL Server in EC2 – So, there you have it – it’s possible to get great performance for certain types of SQL Server operations in EC2. If you’re looking for a cheap way to set up a data warehouse, you should look elsewhere
Java Is #1 In OpenSource …And Still Climbing – It seems like Java is not only the most popular language, but also the most used language for OpenSource development [according to: http://www.ohloh.net%5D.
Previewing Sencha Touch 2: Native Packaging and Performance | Blog | Sencha – Native packaging is now a feature in Sencha Touch 2. With just one command, you can package your application for iOS and for Android. You’ll no longer need to write your own wrappers or wrangle with other solutions, it’s all built in to Sencha Touch. Best of all, you’ll be able to package for both iOS and Android from both Mac and Windows.
Why I Go Home: A Developer Dad’s Manifesto | A Work in Progress – I love my job, I love my career, I love solving hard problems, and I love crafting great software. Just not as much as a I love my daughter
Facebook and Heroku sitting in a tree – We're delighted to announce that Facebook and Heroku have teamed up to bring you the fastest and easiest way to get your own Facebook app up and running in the cloud.
For Android Users, a Cure for iTunes Withdrawal – NYTimes.com – DoubleTwist, which is free, gives people a way to easily sync their iTunes music library with their Android phones. As such, it’s one of the most important, yet often overlooked, pieces of software on the Android market.

Daily del.icio.us for February 8th through February 9th

Posted on February 9, 2009 by Vinny

A Really Close Look at the Inauguration – Pogue’s Posts Blog – NYTimes.com – Photographer David Bergman dropped me an intriguing e-mail message with the subject line, “How I Made a 1,474-Megapixel Photo During President Obama’s Inaugural Address.”
Carbonite Stacks the Deck on Amazon – Pogue’s Posts Blog – NYTimes.com – This one, kindly offered to Pogue’s Posts readers as an exclusive, is a tale of another company trying to game Amazon’s system. This time, the sleazy company is the online backup service Carbonite.
Google turns on Exchange for iPhone and Windows Mobile users – Ars Technica – Google on Monday announced Exchange support for iPhone and Windows Mobile devices, allowing them to synchronize Google Calendar events and Gmail contacts almost instantly via push technology
AppleInsider | Microsoft plays catch up to MobileMe with My Phone – Apple#039;s smaller teams working on MobileMe, iTunes, and the iPhone work with closer contact and within a central strategy managed by a smaller executive team, compared to Microsoft#039;s wider focus and broader strategies in parallel development within the company#039;s various divisions, as well as in incorporating some of the company#039;s many acquisitions.
Amazon Introduces Upgraded Kindle Book Reader – NYTimes.com – Amazon said the upgraded device had seven times the memory as the original version, allowed faster page-turns and had a crisper, though still black-and-white, display. The Kindle 2 also features a new design with round keys and a short, joysticklike controller
ioannis cherouvim » Blog Archive » The * stupidest things I’ve done in my programming job – I’m not ashamed of those sins any more, so here you go 🙂
Seth’s Blog: Learning all the time – The #1 habit successful people share with me is this: They read books to learn. They do it often and with joy. It#039;s cheap (or free, at the library or online) and portable and specific
Drunk on Software » Blog Archive » Episode 8: First Steps in Flex with Bruce Eckel – In the video, we discuss the Code Jams and OpenSpace conferences Bruce hosts, the RIA landscape, and James and Bruce’s book
New Spring/BlazeDS Integration Test Drive : Christophe Coenraets – I put together a new “Spring / BlazeDS Test Drive”. This Test Drive consists of a minimal version of Tomcat with BlazeDS and the “Spring / BlazeDS integration” preconfigured and ready to use. It also includes a series of samples running “out-of-the-box” that should allow you to get up and running integrating Flex (and Adobe AIR) with Spring in minutes.
Apache Cayenne » Why Cayenne? – Cayenne is a Java object relational mapping (ORM) framework. In other words, it is a tool for Java developers who need to talk to a database (or many databases). Rather than hardcoding SQL statements through Java code, Cayenne allows a programmer to work only with Java objects abstracted from the database.

Daily del.icio.us for December 31st through January 4th

Posted on January 4, 2009 by Vinny

Barack Obama Is Your New Bicycle – Barack Obama Is Your New Bicycle
I’m using Git because it makes me feel cool | unethical blogger – As 2007 became 2008 the writing was on the wall, Git was our new bicycle. It had been blessed by Saint Torvalds and clearly we needed to get in on the ground floor of the new cool before it became mainstream.
We needed to switch to Git immediately. Who cares if Git is extremely fast, it's not like time is money or something ridiculous like that
Why Git is Better Than X – This site is here because I seem to be spending a lot of time lately defending Gitsters against charges of fanboyism, bandwagonism and koolaid-thirst. So, here is why people are switching to Git from X, and why you should too. Just click on a reason to view it.
Microsoft Readies Cost-Cuts; Though Massive Layoff Unlikely – NBCBAYAREA- msnbc.com – Microsoft will embark on a significant cost-cutting initiative in 2009, which might begin as early as this month, to offset a global slowdown in sales. However, sources tell Jim Goldman of CNBC, the cuts will largely be handled through attrition and the non-renewal of contract employees, rather than through a rumored, sweeping layoff.
Google Launches ‘The Google’ For Older Adults | The Onion – America’s Finest News Source – The popular search engine Google announced plans Friday to launch a new site, TheGoogle.com, to appeal to older adults not able to navigate the original website's single text field and two clearly marked buttons.
Javascript Best Practices – This document is a list of best practices and preferred ways of developing javascript code, based on opinions and experience from many developers in the javascript community. Since this is a list of recommendations rather than a list of absolute rules, experienced developers may have slightly differing opinions from those expressed below.
ie7-js – A JavaScript library to make MSIE behave like a standards-compliant browser. – IE7 is a JavaScript library to make Microsoft Internet Explorer behave like a standards-compliant browser. It fixes many HTML and CSS issues and makes transparent PNG work correctly under IE5 and IE6.
Main – browsersec – Google Code – Browser Security Handbook landing page – This document is meant to provide web application developers, browser engineers, and information security researchers with a one-stop reference to key security properties of contemporary web browsers. Insufficient understanding of these often poorly-documented characteristics is a major contributing factor to the prevalence of several classes of security vulnerabilities.
With 2008, Let’s Say Good-bye to Mediocrity – It is our acquiescence that has led to the spread of this culture of mediocrity. We accept dropped phone calls on our wireless networks, computers that constantly crash, broadband networks that are best effort.
HtmlUnit 2.4 Released – A new release of the pure GUI-Less browser is available, which allows high-level manipulation of web pages, such as filling forms, clicking links, accessing attributes and values of specific elements within the pages, you do not have to create lower-level requests of TCP/IP or HTTP, but just getPage(url), find a hyperlink, click() and you have all the HTML, JavaScript, and Ajax are automatically processed.
Audiolizer Puts Your iTunes Library In The Cloud, But Lala Does It Better – Audiolizer is a new music streaming service that lets you put your iTunes library in the cloud. After uploading your iTunes Library database file, the site will automatically compile a list of links to every song, allowing you to access your favorite music when you’re away from your home computer. Users can also manually search for individual songs.

Daily del.icio.us for May 4th through May 7th

Posted on May 7, 2008 by Vinny

People Over Process » A Roadmap for JavaFX – Adobe’s Beat Them By a Week, But So What? – JavaOne 2008 – The fact that Adobe, Microsoft, Sun, and others are all racing towards the same end should be encouraging, not frustrating. Getting preempted by a week with, basically, the same sort of announcement is meaningless in the grand scheme of things
JavaFX’s day in the Sun | The Universal Desktop | ZDNet.com – JavaFX has a LONG way to go especially when you look at Adobe’s RIA strengths and Microsoft’s very enthusiastic entry into the space. But I think JavaFX will be a breath of fresh air for people and will help in expanding the RIA footprint further
Java platform to get modularity, OSGi support | InfoWorld | News | 2008-05-07 | By Paul Krill – Upcoming versions of the Java platform will be fitted with capabilities such as flexibility, OSGi support, and modularity, Sun Microsystems officials said Tuesday afternoon at the JavaOne conference in San Francisco.
Dell Expands Virtualization Offerings – Dell is adding to its virtualization portfolio by embedding Citrix XenServer into its hardware and expanding its services for customers investing in the technology.
Andy Kessler: WSJ: The War for the Web – The continuing battle between Microsoft and Google will mean fierce competition – adding features, building data centers, cutting deals and spending money on speed and customer convenience
Archiva – The Build Artifact Repository Manager – Apache Archiva is an extensible repository management software that helps taking care of your own personal or enterprise-wide build artifact repository. It is the perfect companion for build tools such as Maven, Continuum, and ANT.
JavaOne 2008: Day One (So Far) – JavaOne 2008 Day One has started, of course, and it's an interesting show, with a lot of undercurrents about JavaFX (as expected) and multimedia – and mobile applications. There's a lot more, of course, and this thread is meant for people to add comments
The day the music died [dive into mark] – This is a letter I sent to my father to explain what it means that Microsoft is pulling support for MSN Music. Tech issues like this often bubble up into the media that he reads, but they are rarely explained well. My father assumes I have an opinion on s
Amazon Now Serving OpenSolaris on EC2 – GigaOM – Sun’s OpenSolaris OS will be available on the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) customers for free. It is in beta for now. Sun will provide premium technical support for MySQL database running on Linux and Amazon EC2.
Julien Lecomte’s Blog » JavaScript: The Good Parts – In JavaScript: The Good Parts, Douglas extensively describes that good subset of the JavaScript language, occasionally warning to avoid the bad. I consider Douglas’ book a must-buy for anybody who’s serious about developing professional apps for the w

iTunes & Ehcache – You figure it out

Posted on April 5, 2008 by Vinny

Thanks to Greg Luck, I discovered something new in iTunes called My iTunes that lets you export your purchases out as RSS or as a widget to display on your website. Check out a sample of my purchases below – With DRM free music from Amazon, I’m not buying anything from iTunes that’s available on Amazon. By the way, Greg Luck is one of the lead developers of Ehcache, which IMHO is the best and most widely used Java distributed caching framework.

http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStoreServices.woa/wa/widget?type=1&sf=143441

Daily del.icio.us for Apr 03, 2007

Posted on April 3, 2007 by Vinny

From Java EE security to Acegi – The right way to protect your Web applications – This article is an in-depth introduction and comparison of Java EE security and Acegi. They both offer a variety of security services to make application security programming easier. The declarative and annotation-based programming methodologies let devel
Microsoft Watch – Games & Consumer – What Apple DRM-Free Means to Microsoft – Apple will offer EMI music free of DRM for 30 cents more a track; album prices will remain the same. Apple makes the EMI catalog more attractive than other iTunes music in two ways: No DRM and higher encoding
BEA cites Java, availability in app server upgrade | InfoWorld | News | 2007-03-30 | By Paul Krill – WebLogic Server builds on Spring internally, said Rod Johnson, founder of Spring and CEO of Interface21. "The architecture that they’ve adopted, building on Spring, enables them to move to a situation where Spring components can be deployed natively to We
The Aquarium: GlassFish Components in BEA’s WebLogic Server 10.0 – BEA has released WebLogic Server 10.0, as a Technology Preview for their Java EE 5 support. BEA is using the GlassFish implementations for JAX-WS 2.0, and JAXB 2.0, which were part of GlassFish v1 UR1
The Impact of Emerging Technologies: Media Viewer – Tim Berners-Lee explains how the Semantic Web works and how it will transform how we use and understand data.
JScrape – Simple Java & Xquery based HTML Scraping API – JScrape is a simple yet powerful java api for scraping (aka screen scraping) data from a web page using XQuery. This API makes it simple to pull data from other sources and maintain them in a simple way
Dev2Dev Editor’s Blog: WebLogic Server 10! WebLogic Portal 10 and Workshop for WebLogic 10 too! – BEA WebLogic Server 10, BEA WebLogic Portal 10 and BEA Workshop for WebLogic 10 are all available now
Performance Research, Part 3: When the Cookie Crumbles – Yahoo! User Interface Blog – This article, co-written by Patty Chi, is the third in a series of articles describing experiments conducted to learn more about optimizing web page performance
Performance Research, Part 2: Browser Cache Usage – Exposed! – Yahoo! User Interface Blog – This is the second in a series of articles describing experiments conducted to learn more about optimizing web page performance.
Performance Research, Part 1: What the 80/20 Rule Tells Us about Reducing HTTP Requests – Yahoo! User Interface Blog – This is the first in a series of articles describing experiments conducted to learn more about optimizing web page performance.
Blogbody: IDEA Really is That Good – I consistently find myself trying to explain why IDEA is so good. This is my attempt to explain my favorite "features". I say "features" because many of these aren’t the type of bullet-point features you might see in a direct comparison (ie: "EJB3 Support

Amazon Unbox Video – More of the same

Posted on September 10, 2006 by Vinny

Amazon launched their latest offering entitled Unbox Video which is essentially a video (TV shows, movies, etc) download to buy or rent service. Rumor is that Amazon rushed this out on Friday, September 8th to beat some super secret announcement coming from Apple later next week.

The Unbox video service doesn’t offer anything new and is in fact more of the same. I can buy a movie but I can't burn it onto a DVD to watch it on my TV. Media center PC's are exceptions if you have a Media Center PC hooked up to your TV or are using something like Media Center Extender to broadcast the output to a TV. The videos that you download from Amazon are DRM'd Windows Media (WMV) files and so you cannot put in on your video iPod. Apple essentially works the same way with their DRM but you since they control the mobile music and video player market; it's less of an issue. I'm guessing you've probably already got the sense that Unbox video is only for Windows and you would be right. No MAC or Linux support at this time.

There are 2 new concepts introduced that set Amazon Unbox video apart from iTunes and other similar services. To my knowledge, Amazon is the only one that will let you rent a movie by downloading it to your computer. You have 30 days to watch it and 24 hrs to complete watching it before the video is automatically deleted. I know Netflix is working on a download-n-rent but I don't believe that's available at this moment. Please correct me if I'm wrong.

Another concept that I consider a move in the right direction is the concept of the Media Library. Everything you buy or rent is in your Media Library on Amazon and so you can buy an item on 1 machine and download to watch it on another registered machine. Both machines must have the Unbox video player and be registered on Amazon as your machines. As an experiment, I bought a TV show on my laptop and downloaded it. I then copied the video over to my desktop and dropped it the directory where Amazon would expect its videos to reside. The Unbox player didn't see and I wasn't able to play it directly without downloading it from my Media Library to the desktop. The video player was smart enough to realize that the file was already there and started playing in seconds after it marked the video as downloaded on the desktop. The subtle point here is that if your computer crashes and you lose your purchased content, you will be able to download it from your Amazon Media Library. It would be interesting for Amazon to make this a paid-service and use their S3 service to automatically back-up your purchased content for you.

The video quality of the TV shows that I purchased was good and the sound was fine as well. I guess a true test would be to buy a widescreen movie and see if the Dolby 5.1 surround-sound works as advertised. All in all, the video service is nice but nothing earth shattering and left me wanting more. Another major issue with this offering is the licensing agreement that you agree to as part of the software installation and it requires you to apply all patches from Amazon whether you want them or not and Amazon can delete your movies if you uninstall their video player. Yikes! Doesn't like a lot like that Amazon we know and love, does it? More information at the uninnovate blog and CNet.

Why is it so hard to come up with a video service where I can buy a movie and burn it onto a DVD to watch it on my TV? I hate DRM but I understand the need to protect copyrights but there has to be a way to protect content and allow me as the purchaser fair-use of that purchased piece of content. I guess the key here is purchase – I am paying for something. Don't put limitations on my personal usage of that. Anyone that can produce a service that allows that will eat everyone's lunch. I hope Apple or Netflix or YouTube or dozen of the other YouTube clones/wannabe's out there come up with a way to legally distribute video content but allow the purchaser some flexibility on where they can view that piece of content. It would also be great if they could include some future-proofing on your purchase and so if you bought 2nd season of The Office with some proprietary DRM, you could exchange or upgrade it for any future format that's different without having to repurchase the movie all over again. Ah to dream…..

Vinny Carpenter’s blog

{ “passion”: “software development” }

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