There is a fair amount of tech news this week, and for a change a lot of it is rather interesting! The main bits of news are, in order of general interest, Windows Seven, Amazon Kindle and Google Wave.
So to start off with a nice and short piece of news; Windows Seven is now available for £30 to students from microsoft.com. Also because they are feeling fairly nice they are offering Office for £40 in the same deal. If you want to read a little more about this one please have a look at my previous blog post.
The next piece of exciting news is that The Times is reporting that the Amazon Kindle will be released in the UK within the next couple of weeks. The Kindle is an ebook reader which uses technology called e-ink rather than a standard display, the benefit of this is that it only draws power when the display is changed rather constantly to output the pages of the book. This means that the battery of the device lasts for almost a fortnight! The Kindle also comes with a free connection to the Kindle store so that you can download new books onto the device anywhere. You can find out more details for the Kindle on Amazon.com.
Finally the big release of the week is Google Wave, which for the majority of people will go completely unnoticed! Basically Wave is a cross between email, instant messaging, social networking and collaborative editing. I’ve put the official introduction video below (warning it is long) however I will attempt to give a brief, simple, explanation of what Google Wave is and the purpose.
The idea of wave is to make it easier for people to work on projects together. Each email, document, or file are presented in the form of waves and can be shared between two or more people, there they can work on a plans, through around ideas, etc. One of the key features of Wave is that it is extendable, as with other Google products like iGoogle, you can add extra widgets, applications and enhancements created by other developers to extend to meet the purpose of of the project, for example you can add in a calendar application to create deadlines, etc. Wave is going to be used as a business tool, however I can see it being very very useful if it is successful. I am still waiting for my invite to come through for Wave so when it does I’ll give a more detailed walk through of the system.
The other smaller news is that there may (or may not) be new iMac’s, MacBooks and MacMini’s next week so don’t buy anything tomorrow!
Post changelog
- 2020-05-17 – Remove old insecure image references, hotlinks, etc
- 2020-05-17 – Decouple gulp from SCSS generation
- 2018-12-24 – Generate (but not use yet) RWD images
- 2018-09-01 – Importing all the old blog posts
