JavaScript has emerged to become a key battleground in a second era of Web browser wars.

JavaScript, which lets developers create everything from basic Web site menus to online spreadsheet applications, was born in the mid-1990s when Microsoft's Internet Explorer challenged the incumbent browser, Netscape's Navigator. IE won that war, but now it faces its own challenge from the heir to the Navigator throne, Mozilla's Firefox, along with upstarts including Google's Chrome, Apple's Safari, and Opera.

All the challengers tout JavaScript performance as a major part of their competitive attack--even to the point of naming their JavaScript engines built into their browsers: Chrome's V8, Firefox's TraceMonkey, Opera's Futhark and upcoming Carakan, and Safari's newly branded Nitro, which is Apple's version of WebKit's Squirrelfish.

Though IE lags all these rivals in JavaScript performance, Microsoft does care about performance overall and JavaScript performance specifically. Even as Microsoft launched a brand-new browser version, Internet Explorer 8, on Thursday, however, it's also clear the company has a big difference of opinion about the matter.

"We're going to keep making the script engines faster (but) right now it's not clear how many people are gated by script performance," said IE general manager Dean Hachamovitch in an interview. "JavaScript comprises a small portion of how fast a Web page will render. It is a piece, but by no means the holy grail."

Because it's easy to measure, JavaScript performance has "become shorthand for browser performance," Hachamovitch added. Microsoft has begun touting its new test of page-loading speeds (right) in which IE 8 fared better overall than Firefox 3.0.5 and Chrome 1.0. A supporting slow-motion video (click "Case Study Videos, then Performance Testing) shows page-loading speeds down to the hundredth of a second.

Likely not coincidentally, though, Google offered its own propaganda the day before the IE 8 launch. Google launched its Chrome Experiments site to tout what can be done with high-performance JavaScript and to promote its browser. While Chrome generally runs sites' applications with aplomb, that isn't the case for IE.

Browsing vs. running applications
Here's what the difference between the companies boils down to: Microsoft is focusing on today's Web, and the rivals are focusing on tomorrow's.

The Internet is growing from a Web made of static pages to be read with links to be clicked into a Web that also includes applications that perform computational tasks and that people interact with. In other words, browsers now have to process data as well as load pages. Microsoft's dominant share--67 percent according to Net Applications' figures--reflects the more mainstream world, and the challengers are aiming for where they think the mainstream will be going.

"The faster we make JavaScript, the more interesting and interactive the Web becomes," said Mike Beltzner, Mozilla's director of Firefox.

Google agrees. "We saw a lot of Web developers lamenting the fact that they couldn't do what they wanted to do because JavaScript was a limiting factor," said Darin Fisher, a Chrome engineer at Google. It's certainly not the only bottleneck, but Google concluded that "by far the biggest performance opportunity we saw was to improve JavaScript."

Google has a direct interest in faster JavaScript. It's among the biggest advocates of cloud computing, in which Internet-based applications and services replace those running natively on a personal computer.

But Google Docs, Google Calendar, and Gmail aren't rarities. Yahoo, Facebook, and countless other sites make extensive use of JavaScript, and Microsoft itself is working to produce online versions of its Office suite.

AdventNet's Zoho division, which also offers Web-based tools for word processing, spreadsheets, and other tasks, is another company eager for faster JavaScript. Currently the company has to show a separate site with reduced abilities to people who use IE 6 with the site, said Zoho Chief Executive Sridhar Vembu.

"We're excited because this represents a fundamental breakthrough in JavaScript performance and capability for applications like ours," Vembu said of the new generation of browsers. "Within a year I think we'll see such browsers dominating the landscape."

He's also optimistic that Microsoft will close the JavaScript gap with its rivals. "I believe Microsoft will catch up," he said.

To emphasize only JavaScript for Web applications is to oversimplify the situation. (And of course there are any number of other aspects of browser quality, including security, plug-in availability, operating system support, user interface responsiveness, Web site support.) Web applications also benefit from new technology arriving Web standards including HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) 5 and CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) 3. But JavaScript provides the programming language to join all those elements into a Web site that does something, not just shows something.

"All that is mediated by JavaScript. It's really the control structure of the Web," said Mozilla's Beltzner said.

A horse race
JavaScript didn't just catch on yesterday. Its popularity has been gradually building as programmers discovered how to use it to reproduce some of the interactivity of PC-based software in Web-based applications. For example, in Yahoo Mail, people can click on a message and drag it to a folder. Collectively, this higher-end JavaScript technology is called Ajax.

Microsoft's Internet Explorer remained the dominant browser in February 2009 but challengers have secured about a third of the market. (Credit: Net Applications)

"A couple years ago, people started embracing new development models that were even more JavaScript-heavy than before," Beltzner said. "We were getting to a point where Web developers wanted to do more than the browsers could handle."

In 2008, the JavaScript engines started hogging the spotlight in browser advancement circles. In June came Squirrelfish from WebKit, then Squirrelfish Extreme in September. Firefox announced TraceMonkey in August. Google touted V8 with its release of Chrome in September. Opera in February announced its aspiration to beat them all with Carakan, and later that month Apple touted the JavaScript speed of its new Safari 4 beta version.

"It was WebKit I think that really ignited the competition," Beltzner said. "Having somebody else play along (gave us) a way of us questioning our own assumptions about whether we have done the best we can do." And Chrome is "certainly keeping the pressure on."

Microsoft defends its priorities. "We're certainly aware of what the other browsers are doing," said IE senior director Amy Barzdukas. "Browser makers need to be sensitive not just to the cutting edge but to people who use the Web."

JavaScript vs. Flash and Silverlight
Microsoft also has another answer for those who want to build elaborate Web applications: its Silverlight software, version 3 of which the company detailed Wednesday. Silverlight competes most directly with Adobe Systems' Flash, the dominant browser plug-in used to provide applications with a lot of pizzazz.

The current trajectory of JavaScript means that it's encroaching more on the turf of Silverlight, which uses Microsoft's C# programming language, and Flash, which uses a JavaScript relative called ActionScript.

"JavaScript in Chrome almost reaches the speed of Flash," said programmer Mr. Doob, who wrote Chrome Experiments called Ball Pool and Google Gravity, in a blog post about them this week.

In an interview, Mr. Doob--a Flash programmer who learned JavaScript just for the Chrome Experiments and declined to give his real name--said JavaScript is about three quarters Flash's speed. There are weaknesses, though. For one thing, he found JavaScript developer tools to be primitive. For another, JavaScript varies from one browser to the next.

"The main benefit of ActionScript is that it will look exactly the same in any browser and in any version of the browser, even on IE6! With JavaScript it depends on which features the browser supports so you would spend more time making sure the project looks good in all the browsers than actually developing the project," he said. To make his Chrome experiments work on other browsers, "I'll have to introduce some hacks which will slow down performance and will dramatically affect the user experience."

Typically, though, as programming technologies mature, they settle into standards and get more refined tools. For now, performance is the top priority--at least until JavaScript gets fast enough that other problems move to the fore.

"All it took was a little competition to get other companies focusing on this problem," Fisher said. At some point, "Suddenly this problem won't be a problem anymore and we can move on to the next issue."

This article was originally posted on CNET News.

Google Voice and Google Reader: Communicating Is Easy

Mountain View search engine giant Google has announced the availability of a Google Voice preview release that should aid you in managing voice communications, and has also announced new commenting functionality in Google Reader. And since we are on the topic of socializing, you should also know that Facebook revamped their home page so that it would offer you greater ease of use and enhanced functionality.

Google Voice will initially be made available to GrandCentral users – it makes sense, since Google acquired the service back in 2007 and based their Google Voice application on it. On top of GrandCentral’s existing functionality (GrandCentral phone number that redirects incoming calls to all your other phone numbers at once, call screening, web access for voicemail management, and the traditional means of checking your voicemail), Google has added one new feature – voicemail transcription (like you get in Skype).
 

CSS - A useful print stylesheet

rint stylesheets are pretty well supported. In this article I’ll discuss what I think makes a good print stylesheet, and we’ll take a look at how we can improve public familiarity with them.

What makes a good print stylesheet?

A good print stylesheet, first and foremost, hides all the unnecessary elements, such as navigation, search, sidebars and other elements that aren’t directly important for the page being printed. It removes as much of the colours as possible, so that you’re not wasting anyone’s colour ink, and make sure your text is the width of the page (width:auto) so that you’re not wasting anyone’s paper.

There’s one smart trick when making a print-stylesheet. In print, people can’t click on your links, but they might want to visit them anyway. By using this bit of CSS, you place the actual link in parenthesis behind the linked word:

a::after {   content: " (" attr(href) ") ";   font-size: 90%; }

Where the font-size makes it just slightly smaller than the normal text to distinguish it a bit more.

Two very handy CSS properties are page-break-before and page-break-after. With these elements you can control where your site should “break” over into the second page. On this site, I use this CSS:

div.comments {page-break-before:always;} h2, h3 {page-break-after:avoid;}

Comments are always placed on the second page, so that the article is always on it’s own as well. One thing I find pretty ugly is when a page ends with a header, and the following paragraph is on the next page. The second bit of code prevents that.

There are two ways you can add a print stylesheet. One is with a seperate stylesheet, and linking to it with <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="print.css" media=”print” />. The other one, which I use on my own site, is an @media print code block at the bottom of my CSS file:

@media print {   //my print-only css }

Which I think is better, because it saves a http request while still being fairly clear.

Of course, most of this information isn’t new. There is a great A list apart article from 2002(!) that details much of what I’ve written above.

In the eye of the public

So, we’ve known about this since 2002 at least, why do clients still ask for a special print page and a little printer icon for people to click on?

The reason for that is of course pretty clear: the browsers doesn’t tell people that a page is especially adopted for print as well as screen. And so in turn people have no idea of the possibilities.

Print stylesheets arent very useful if people don’t use them.

And I really don’t know how to change that. Do you?

Dirty little secrets of the keyboard revealed

Next time you are eating at your desk, try not to think of multitude of germs lurking on your keyboard — along with some other unpleasant debris.

Nail clippings, chips, pastry crumbs, chewing gum and beard hair are some of the disagreeable detritus that accumulates inside the average office keyboard, according to Claire Burke, director of Keep IT Clean, an IT hardware cleaning company with clients including hotels and the NHS.

Burke told silicon.com, that IT chiefs call her company in so tech staff don't have to negotiate a minefield of grime when they are called on to fix a broken PC.

"If you get IT having to work on other people's computers, it's not fair if you have to scrape something off the keyboard," she said.

Last year researchers for Which Computing tested more than 30 keyboards from a typical London office and found some harbored levels of bacteria that could put their user at high risk of becoming ill. In one case a microbiologist suggested the removal of a keyboard as it had 150 times the recommended limit of bacteria — five times filthier than a toilet seat that was swabbed in the same test.

The main cause of a bug-infested keyboard is users eating lunch at their desk, as the crumbs encourage the growth of millions of bacteria.

And with IT equipment shared with colleagues in call centres or 'hot desk' environments the problem isn't just one for the IT helpdesk workers, either.

The credit crunch is also having an impact on attitudes towards cleaning and replacing kit, Burke said: "The attitude is they would throw the keyboard away and get a new one but you can't do that now."

So what are the least pleasant things that Burke's team has come across?

"Smelly laptops," she said. "When people spend so much on IT equipment why do they let it get so bad?"

"You can always tell if they eat salt and vinegar chips because you can smell it," she added.

Burke's other least favorites include the scum on the bottom of the mouse, the fluff in the keyboard "that comes from nowhere" and the various crumbs that IT equipment attracts, as well as grime wiped on the side of keyboards by users.

This article was originally posted on silicon.com.

New product from Google Voice: Rewiring your phone service

SAN FRANCISCO--Google plans to unveil a service called Google Voice on Thursday that indicates Google wants to do with your telephone communications what companies such as Yahoo have done with e-mail.

Google Voice, the new version of the GrandCentral technology Google acquired in July 2007, has the potential to make the search giant a middleman in an important part of people's lives, telephone communications. With the service, people can pick a new phone number from Google Voice; when others call it, Google can ring all the actual phones a person uses and handle voice mail.

The old version could let people centralize telephone services, screen their calls, and listen to voice mail over the Web. But the new version offers several significant new features, though. Google now uses its speech-to-text technology to transcribe voice mail, making it possible to search for particular words. Gmail's contacts now is used to instruct Google Voice how to treat various callers. And Google Voice now can send and receive SMS text messages and set up conference calls.

Existing GrandCentral users should get the option to upgrade Thursday, and Google plans to offer it to the public after "a number of weeks," said Craig Walker, product manager of real-time communications and head of Google Voice.

As interesting as the service itself, perhaps, is that Google plans to offer it at no cost. Google is in the midst of a profitability push, trying to wring more money from existing sites, adding advertisements to properties such as Google Maps, Finance, and News that previously lacked them, and canceling many projects such as Google Lively that didn't pass financial muster.

With Google Voice, though, the company is showing more of its earlier, more patient approach.

"Our goal is to be able to offer it to people for free," Walker said in an interview at Google's offices here. Asked what the revenue model is for Google Voice, he offered only an indirect answer: "Let's get a bunch of happy users engaged in Google properties and getting their voice mail through this. Google gets value out of having happy Google users."

Money isn't completely absent from the picture. The company does charge for international calls, and it wouldn't rule out advertising in the future.

GrandCentral has appeared largely dormant from the outside since the Google acquisition, leading some to spotlight it as an example of a promising technology that was squelched by an acquisition. But, Walker said, there was plenty of work going on behind the scenes.

"In addition to innovation, there's been a process of getting migrated and integrating with the Google infrastructure," he said.

One big possible difficulty for people could be the issue of changing phone numbers. People's phone numbers can form a piece of their identity, in particular with home phone numbers held for years and number portability making it possible for people to keep their mobile phone numbers even if they change carriers. Even leaving aside the issue of the hassle of changing phone numbers, sharing your Google Voice number means committing your telephony to Google's services.

Another possible hitch is offering phone numbers that match where people actually live or work. Here, Google hopes to have things under control, though there were no numbers in the 415 area code for my test of the service.

"Our goal is to offer numbers to virtually everyone who wants to sign up. There are a finite number of numbers in the U.S., but we haven't reached anywhere near depletion," Walker said. "We hope to have a pretty good footprint (for area code choices) so that people will have really good choices."

Google Voice, hands on
Overall, I found Google Voice to be potentially useful, with the most compelling option the imperfect but still very useful transcription.

The first promise of Google Voice is to simplify your phone communications. You don't have to worry about which number to hand out to people, and if you're sitting with your cell phone next to you home or work phone, you can choose which to answer. If you have the "screen calls" option enabled, Google Voice will tell ask you if you want to accept the call or send the person to voice mail. (Google Voice asks first-time callers to identify themselves.)

In practice, virtualizing your profusion of real-world phone numbers with one that redirects is handy. You can set various preferences--for example, calls from your family members get a custom answering message; calls from your parents don't ring your work number; and calls from your spouse are answered directly when you pick up the phone rather than run through the Google Voice options such as answering the call, sending it to voice mail, or listening in on the voice mail.

But I thought Google Voice's most promising aspect is voice mail transcription.

Today, voice mail is a something of black hole for me. It's a pain to check, and I just tell people to send me an e-mail if they get my voice mail. When I'm on the road or at home, I check my e-mail much more frequently than my voice mail. And e-mail means I have their contact information and a record that they contacted me, all in a handy form that shows up through search.

Transcription brings some of these advantages to voice mail.

Because Google Voice e-mails you the text as soon as it's ready, you can quickly scan it to see if it's important. That's a lot less obtrusive than calling your voice mail system in the middle of a meeting.

Also, reading the text lets you quickly home in on the caller's phone number without having to wait through the whole message. On clever phones such as the Apple iPhone or T-Mobile G1, the phone number is highlighted in the e-mail so you can click it to call back, too.

However, the text-to-speech conversion is imperfect, to say the least--for example, it thought "Steve and Mary" was "Steven Mary." And here's an amusing sample of one transcribed voice mail I left myself: "hey i'm just testing the grand central transcription service to see if it really can do a good tax to speech recognition and that they believe in bed that's little voicemail and a web page because what would not be exciting what time you get in bed a voicemail on the web page."

The Web site uses bolder type for words it's more sure of, so you can make better guesses about the contents.

Walker said it takes roughly 30 seconds to translate a 30-second voice mail, which is pretty good turnaround. My timing test of a rambling, 1:45 voice mail took just almost exactly twice that time to show up translated in my inbox, though the voice version was available over the Google Voice Web site almost immediately.

Shallow Gmail integration
You don't need a Gmail account to use Google Voice--any Google account will do--but if you have one, you can customize the system's behavior for existing groups or individuals.

When a message from an unknown number arrives, you can save it with the caller's name through the Google Voice interface, and it will show up in your Gmail contacts, too. A "contacts" tab at Google Voice borrows heavily on the Gmail contacts tab.

However, Google left me wanting deeper integration. Where are Gmail's filters and labels? Google Voice is a big step toward the long-promised utopia of unified communications, but instead it presents me with a new inbox to check.

When I asked Walker whether Google Voice would be unified with Gmail more thoroughly, he wouldn't say, but indicated it's on Google's to-do list.

"There are a host of things we're working on," Walker said. "We want to get the core telephony from GrandCentral to Google Voice, to get that ironed out first."

Even where there is integration, for example with the Gmail contacts page, there are some shortcomings. For example, I have a Gmail mailing list for "family," and I doubt I'm not the only one. My wife is a member of the list, but Google Voice by default opted to use the settings for its "friends" category. Apparently the reason for the issue is that Google Voice is case-sensitive: it created its own "Family" group, with an uppercase F, that has no members in it.

Changing my existing group to "Family" in Gmail merely created two groups with that name, so to work around the issue I copied all the "family" members to "Family." I deleted the original to avoid the messy annoyance of keeping the two identical groups synchronized.

Tussling with carriers?
Another interesting possibility, given Google's Internet expertise and Google Voice's Web-based interface, would be to offer direct calling using VOIP (voice over Internet Protocol). Google Voice already has the potential to shift some of the customer relationship and valuable services from phone service companies to Google, and offering VOIP service would increase that potential.

Walker wouldn't comment that possibility, though he did point out that Google Voice can work with the Gizmo VoIP service. For the regular public switched telephone network, people still have to spend money with AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile, Vodafone, and others.

"The point was to allow your existing services to work better together," Walker said. "You have to come with your own underlying phones and services for it to work."

This article was originally published on CNET news

New Trend : Social applications showing developers the money

With the buzz surrounding social networking, it may surprise few that developers are flocking to develop applications on these platforms to take advantage of the growing trend.

Chew Choon Keat, Malaysian programmer and founder of web startup, SharedCopy, told ZDNet Asia in an interview that the money in web-app development these days lies in apps riding on giants such as Facebook.

"Web apps that involve building a community of some sort and integrating with Facebook Connect and OpenSocial [receive the highest demand]", said Chew.

Facebook Connect is a single sign-on service enabling users to share content between affiliated sites; while OpenSocial is a set of APIs (application programming interfaces), launched by Google and joined by other networks such as MySpace, that allow developers' apps to run on supporting member sites. Although they are created by different website-owners, both tools were released with an eye on attracting developer interest.

Chris Yeh, head of Yahoo's developer network, said in an interview with ZDNet Asia that many of the large w eb properties have taken an interest in harnessing the collective power of third-party developers. Also, many have come to embrace "open" platforms in a bid to attract developers from competitors' pools.

Yeh said: "Over the past few years, virtually every major web company has opened website properties so that third-party developer applications can be integrated. Web-app development industry standards such as OpenSocial are emerging to make cross-company web app development easier to manage for developers."

In addition to participating in the OpenSocial initiative, Yahoo launched a large project late last year called Open Strategy, in an effort to attract more developers to build on Yahoo's web properties.

The community has grown steadily over the past two years, especially outside the US, according to Yeh. "Most projections put developer growth outside [the country] at two to four times the growth of the US developer market... the primary fuel [for that] is the market trend toward 'open' technologies," he noted.

For users and the platform service providers, the growing community also helps increase the speed to market of new projects and drives innovation within the developer community, said Yeh.

The consumer is key
The developer interest in social platforms stems from their goal to attain consumer attention, with popular social networks providing an easy platform to do so. "At the end of the day, web apps rely on consumer adoption to succeed," Yeh explained.

As a result, the top web apps are primarily social: media sharing, multiplayer games and those that match users' common interests, for example, said Yeh.

Herryanto Siatono, creator of BookJetty.com, told ZDNet Asia in an email that the momentum gathered by social apps has flowed over into the mobile pool — in particular those developed for the iPhone, and probably Android.

He ranked social apps as most popular, followed by business productivity and e-commerce related projects.

However, he said the mobile space is threatening to take developer interest away from Web 2.0 for now. "It seems like interest in Web 2.0 apps is slowing down. I don't really sense much of the vibrancy now," Siatono said. Mobile apps, being faster to get out the door, are attracting developers for being able to bring in "quicker money", he added.

On that note, Yahoo's Yeh said web developers should focus on creating apps that can generate critical mass. "Creating apps that have real value for large numbers of users and good viral characteristics is a significant challenge in the competitive app development world."

Chew thinks developers should not attempt to recreate the services of such large platforms. "Applications aiming to build a community, with a ton of features and integrating with many other sites are the most painful to work on. Other than the scope, these features are usually tell-tale signs of a lack of focus," he said.

Developers should launch small and fast projects, while listening to feedback along the way, added Chew.

This article was originally posted on ZDNet Asia

12 megapixels from Olympus

LAS VEGAS--Olympus has declared an end to the megapixel race.

"Twelve megapixels is, I think, enough for covering most applications most customers need," said Akira Watanabe, manager of Olympus Imaging's SLR planning department, in an interview here at the Photo Marketing Association (PMA). "We have no intention to compete in the megapixel wars for E-System," Olympus' line of SLR cameras, he said.

Instead, Olympus will focus on other characteristics such as dynamic range, color reproduction, and a better ISO range for low-light shooting, he said.

Increasing the number of megapixels on cameras is an easy selling point for camera makers, in part because it's a simple concept for people to understand. Even though having more megapixels can enable larger prints and enlargement of subject matter through cropping, adding megapixels comes with some drawbacks.

For one thing, smaller pixels can mean more noisy speckles at the pixel level and can reduce the dynamic range, so brighter areas wash out and darker areas become swaths of black. For another, images take more room on memory cards, hard drives, and Web servers, and cameras need more powerful image processors to handle them. And yesteryear's cameras already had plenty of pixels for making 8x10-inch prints, a size few people exceed.

Camera and sensor makers have been steadily improving digital cameras to compensate for the drawbacks, though. The space on the sensor that's devoted to electronics rather than light gathering has been reduced. Other improvements have come with the tiny microlenses that help each sensor's pixel to gather more light and with the color filters that determine whether a pixel records red, green, or blue.

Some still need more megapixels
Olympus' view is focused chiefly on mainstream photographers. Studio and commercial photographers taking pictures for magazines certainly have a need for more megapixels, Watanabe said.

"We don't think 20 megapixels is necessary for everybody. If a customer wants more than 12 megapixels, he should go to the full-frame models," Watanabe said.

The sensors in Olympus' SLRs, an element of the Four Thirds camera system also used by Panasonic, are smaller than those in mainstream SLRs from market leaders Canon and Nikon and much smaller than those in full-frame cameras. Those employ sensors the size of a frame of 35mm film, 36x24mm.

The 12-megapixel view isn't a new one at Olympus.

"I personally believed, before starting the E-System, that 12 was enough," Watanabe said. "We interviewed many professional photographers, people in studios, about how many they needed in the future. Before we started, the system, we had a rough idea we'd be at a plateau at 12 megapixels. We gradually increased the pixel count," with the newer Olympus SLRs now reaching that level.

Autofocus future
Watanabe had another bold projection: autofocus will change dramatically in SLRs.

Today's SLRs use a "phase detect" autofocus subsystem in which some light is diverted from the viewfinder to sensors in the bottom of the camera. These sensors enable the rapid autofocus that helps make SLRs much more responsive than compact cameras, which use a "contrast detect" method that analyzes the data from the image sensor itself.

Watanabe, though, believes image sensor-based autofocus soon will outperform phase-detect systems. That's important not just for compact cameras, but also for SLRs that today often have an awkward problem with composing a shot using the camera's LCD: when the sensor is in use to run the display, the phase-detect autofocus subsystem can't be used. That means live view on SLRs today is typically a frustratingly slow process.

"In terms of speed, phase detect is faster. But imager autofocus will soon exceed phase detect," Watanabe said.

And speed isn't of course the only factor. "In terms of accuracy, imager-based autofocus is much more advantageous. It directly focuses on the surface itself," the exact location where the image will eventually be recorded. "Phase detect focuses not on the real surface but on a virtual surface," the focusing subsystem reached via a moving mirror.

Imager-based autofocus doesn't require the full use of the image sensor area, so it doesn't directly increase power consumption concerns, he said. In Olympus's new midrange E-30 SLR, for example, autofocus uses only a few points on the sensor when autofocusing in live view mode.

This article was originally posted on CNET News.

New Asus Eee PC T91 with touch technology and 180 rotating display

At CES 2009, Asus unveiled the new Eee PC T91. The latest Eee model has a touch-sensitive, rotating display that you can spin 180 degrees and fold down, much like a tablet PC. The 8.9-inch display is also touch sensitive and works with a stylus or finger. The 2.1-pound T91 is powered by an Intel Z520 Atom processor and comes with a built-in TV tuner and GPS. The new Eee PC will be available around March 2009, and although pricing hasn’t been confirmed the unit will likely to be around $399. For individuals and business considering netbooks, the Eee PC T91 is one to watch.

I haven’t had a chance to really put the T91 through its paces, but it certainly offers a lot of features for a nice price. For me, the keyboard size and screen resolution are the big questions. If the keyboard is a comfortable size and the screen supports a standard resolution, the Eee PC T91 become my new traveling machine.