Sticking with the Belgian theme, it looks like the Google Analytics Reporting suite may be about to come out of Beta…
Marketing activity seems to be ramping up and Nicolas Lierman, the creator of this AIR app has set up a LinkedIn Group for people interested in the reporting tool.
I saw a demo and mock ups of the new version at the beginning of April during the AIR tour in Brussels and it is radically different to (and better than) the current Beta.
Finally. On July 11, the iPhone becomes available in Belgium via Orange’s partner here, Mobistar.
Apple combatted their reputation for being a provider of expensive hardware by halving the (dollar) price as part of the iPhone’s official expansion into most of Europe and beyond.
Apple really is set to keep growing because of one very important factor. Generally, their products don’t. Apple are a miniturisation company and they are very good at it.
No other company pays so much attention to the form factor of their products and keep changing and refining that form factor. When people come round to my place, they look at my iMac, say “Nice screen.” and ask where the computer is. I can hold the music that previously took up the space of a wall in a room in the palm of my hand. I reckon I’ll succumb to the iPhone as well, so soon I’ll have an entire OS in my hand as well.
If you take miniaturisation to it’s logical conclusion you have nothing and that is exactly what they have built in iTunes. Movies, TV shows, music, books, it’s all their in a virtual format, part of our dematerialised economy.
They didn’t invent any of this stuff, but they are good at implementing it and bringing it together.
Roll on July 11 and vive la pomme!
[Update, looks like Mobistar are rolling back on the July 11 date and saying some time in the summer instead] [Further update, it is not back to July 11. see here]
Performance remains top of the web app agenda with browser vendors continuing to slug it out with claims of shaving milliseconds off JavaScript performance in each new release. Meanwhile the developers of JavaScript libraries are also waging a performance war which we’ll all benefit from in the long run as web apps become more sophisticated.
But all of this is focussed on how quickly JavaScript runs in the browser and in the case of JavaScript libraries, how quickly they run, once they have been downloaded to the browser. And that’s the key point. There is still an easy performance gain to be had by eliminating the time and resources required to download these libraries from your server to the client’s browser.
So Google have begun hosting a selection of the most commonly used JavaScript libraries so that over time, they will be cached on a lot of users’ machines.
At present, if I visit a shopping web site that uses jQuery and I then visit a travel information web site that also uses jQuery then my browser will have to download the jQuery library once when I visit the shopping site and then again when I visit the travel information site even though both sites are using the same file.
If both sites download the jQuery library from a common source, in this case Google, then the file only has to be downloaded once and is available for any other sites that use jQuery as well.
By using this method, you’ll take some of the pressure off your own web server, save a bit of bandwidth and make initial performance of your site better. The latter is something that your visitors using dial up or in countries with slow connectivity will definitely appreciate.
At the moment, the libraries provided are:
dojo
jQuery
MooTools
prototype
script.aculo.us
Google will be expanding this selection in future and its success is dependent on uptake.
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