Mar 04

Mobile Web News: Gears, Silverlight, AIR

Tech with tags: , , No Comments »

There has been a lot of news in the mobile Web space.

AIR

At Adobe Engage, Kevin Lynch showed screen shots of AIR running on a phone and gave a sneaky demo of it running on a tablet running Windows on a Nokia device (Nokia will probably end up with devices running everything :).

Silverlight

Nokia and Microsoft announced Silverlight support:

Nokia today announced plans to make Microsoft Silverlight available for S60 on Symbian OS.

Gears

We released Google Gears for Mobile. Although the first release is for WinMo only, we actually have something that you can use right now and third parties implemented solutions in very short order indeed. I can’t wait to see this spread to other devices.

iPhone

March 6th baybee. 2008, the mobile Web hits hard.

Nov 04

Microsoft Sync Framework != Google Gears (even if the press wants to make it look that way)

Google, Microsoft with tags: , , 3 Comments »

I saw Microsoft’s Answer to Google Gears popup in my news feed, along with Mary Jo’s piece itself: Microsoft delivers first test build of its online-offline sync platform.

I was excited to read about the sync platform and see how it compares with the Database, LocalServer, and WorkerPool components that you get with Gears.

Instead I end up at the main documentation which makes the sync framework look nothing like Gears at all.

Instead you see the providers:

  • Sync Services for ADO.NET: Synchronization for ADO.NET enabled data sources
  • Sync Services for File Systems: Synchronization for files and folders
  • Sync Services for SSE: Synchronization for Simple Sharing Extensions (SSE) such as RSS and ATOM feeds

This looks interesting from a client-side perspective, and I want to take some time to look at the sync API itself and see what good stuff we could potentially use in Gears. Microsoft has had to do various sync protocols over the years, so I am sure there is a lot to learn, but this isn’t a Gears rival in its current form.

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