studiowhiz ramblings

I’ve written about this before here on Studiowhiz, in fact I was involved in early beta tests with the Macromedia team to create a way to allow developers to drive internet based applications without the need of a browser. Kevin Lynch was then one of the top dogs at Macromedia, he coined the term “KevinCloud” and was probably one of the first to think of the internet as a cloud.

Today GigaOM and the New York Times both talk about how Adobe is gearing up to release AIR to the public. Of course this is a good thing and I for one am happy to see this come about. After all I’ve been saying for years it’s time for the internet to operate outside the browser. Read the rest of this entry »

Firefox 3 is getting closer to full release with each new day. It’s great to see today that the 2nd beta version is now available for download, as announced by Mozilla

For those of you new to software you don’t have to purchase, many companies now include the wider internet community in the testing process. Firefox for example was first released as ‘alpha’ software. This means it’s sort of usable, prone to crash but gives cutting edge people a chance to help shape the future of the product.

When a product goes into ‘beta’ it means its almost ready to go, but might still have a few things to work out. Firefox for example is now very close to production ready, with small (mainly visual) things to tweak. By allowing more and more people to download and use the beta, the Mozilla team have more chance of having bugs reported before the software goes into release candidate.
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