App Ruins Your iPad by Running Windows on It
OnLive streams apps to tablets rather than running them locally
You can’t own a tablet for more than a month without thinking that it’s secretly a fully-functioning computer that was crippled at the factory just so you wouldn’t replace your laptop with it. Now OnLive has more or less proved that point, by rolling out an app that allows you to “run” windows on your iPad.
But you’re not actually running Windows on the iPad, just streaming a continuous video feed of Windows directly to your iPad. So you have to be on a reasonably fast connection (wifi, not 3G) for it to work. Windows and its apps run in “the cloud,” or in this case OnLive’s remote servers.
OnLive is better known for applying this same technology to streaming gaming, which it unveiled just 18 months ago.
All kidding about the advisability of running Windows on an iPad aside, this is an interesting application of a much larger trend: offloading some, or in this case nearly all, of the processing for an application into the cloud. For example, processor-intensive tasks like face recognition are better accomplished by remote servers, and everything from location services like Skyhook to your cell phone’s email client represent a series of trade-offs between server and client side processing. AJAX, Web 2.0, etc. are also part of this trend of re-balancing which parts of the application are best chewed through locally or somewhere else.
Some folks have even turned this paradigm on its head, running “the cloud” on cell phones instead of servers.
At any rate, OnLive’s Windows-on-any-device cloud strategy could point the way to a future of (very) “thin clients” that can access any amount of computing power anywhere at any time, and contain just enough processor power to run a display and accept inputs. Or at least that’s the future this would point to in a world of unlimited bandwidth. As long as cell data service remains capped and people want to take their devices on airplanes, however, I imagine most of us will want to keep our apps client-side.
Viewed 5975 times by 1072 viewers
Categories: Microsoft Tags: Cloud computing, IPad, Microsoft PowerPoint, Microsoft Windows, OnLive, Servers, Web 2.0, Windows
Microsoft Touts New Accessibility Add-ins for Office 2010
Microsoft today posted about two new accessibility-oriented add-ins for its Office 2010 productivity suite. They providing video subtitling for PowerPoint and Digital Accessible Information System (DAISY) compatibility for Word, respectively.
“Microsoft wants to make sure customers of all abilities can use Microsoft Office to get their work done,” a post to Microsoft’s official Office Blogs reads. “Last spring we released beta versions of two Office add-ins that make working with Office docs easier for people with hearing and print disabilities. We received lots of helpful feedback from people in the accessibility community, and made significant changes and improvements to them.”
These add-ins are:
Subtitling Add-In for Microsoft PowerPoint (STAMP). This add-in lets you add closed captions to the video and audio files in PowerPoint presentations, which means people with hearing disabilities can more fully experience and understand them.
Save as DAISY for Office 2010. This add-in builds on Microsoft’s partnership with the DAISY Consortium and lets Microsoft Word users convert Word Open XML files to the Digital Accessible Information System (DAISY) format. Save as Daisy powers digital talking books and compatible software, and braille readers for those with print disabilities.
According to Microsoft, these add-ins actually support Office 2003 and 2007 in addition to Office 2010, and they work in all the languages Office currently supports around the world.
Viewed 6150 times by 689 viewers
Categories: Uncategorized Tags: DAISY, Microsoft, Microsoft Office, Microsoft Office 2010, Microsoft PowerPoint, Office, Office 2010, Office suite
