Oh no another attempt at 3D web

When I saw an article about Exit Reality planning to make 3D web pages I had flashbacks of some of my first experiences of the web when an £1500 286 computer would crawl along trying to move through a virtual room in netscape navigator. It made web browsing slow and overly complicated. Now it seems that it is being tried again.

Exit Reality’s ambisious goal of making the whole web 3D seemed unlikely but after viewing their video demo it seems they may have pulled it off. Rather than having to use a new web browser/app and being limited to the dozen sites they may have invested time in supporting this feature Exit Reality have managed to render any page in a 3D environment as long as you install a browser plugin. Some sites have more 3D features than others. Exit Reality seem to have focused on social networking sites where the likes of Facebook, Flickr and YouTube all have full 3D environments designed to make the experience even better. Flickr is now a 3D gallery, YouTube a cinema and Facebook/MySpace have your videos on a TV screen and your photos in a frame and wall mounted. If you have a Facebook/MySpace account you can customise the 3D environment for your page adding in furniture and toys of your choice.

This is all well and good and may appeal to the second life generation. However, what interested me is that they are making web browsing a shared experience. You can now not just send a link to a friend for a youTube video you had a laugh at - you can invite them to join you in your own private 3D cinema and watch it together in real time. You can chat an emote while both viewing the same video. This also means I could potentially showcase my portfolio to a potential client in a 3D demo or even show them their own site after work is complete.

Realistically for it to become a useful shared web experience tool it would require widespread adoption of the plugin to the extent of Flash. In most cases speed of browsing will mean that I will want my pages to be viewed in 2D but there is definitely an appeal in viewing your Flickr photos in a gallery or sharing a web page or video with a friend.

Technical issues have made it difficult for me to say how easy/good the actual experience is. Firefox 3 renders the 3D environment but there is no control panel or way to login to either Exit Reality or the websites I visit in 3D. In IE I get the control panel but I am unable to see the 3D environment. I have only tested on my tired old office PC so will take another look on my laptop when I get a free moment.

3D web, exit reality, web browsing, plugin

Firefox 3 and Firefox 2 windows media support

Those of you trying out the Firefox 3 beta or considering it may want access to firefox 2. This is particularly true for developers as you will want to test in both version of the browser and the much loved Firebug plugin is not supported in Firefox 3 yet.

Fortunately there is an excellent guide on getting both Firefox 2 and Firefox 3 running at the same time thanks to Hikikomori’s blog redemption in a blog

The problem I encountered is Windows Media Player video embedded in a page will not play. I tried re-installing the plugin but while this works for firefox 2 it does not for firefox 3.

I then recalled I encountered this same problem when first upgrading to Vista. A fix is to copy the needed dll files into the firefox 3 plugin folder. You can just copy the files over from firefox 2 plugins folder or download only the required ones from dll dump.

Quote from last blog post on this topic:

You can find the missing files on dlldump.com

• npdsplay.dll
• npwmsdrm.dll
• npdrmv2.dll

If this doesn’t solve the problem get more indepth help here: http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?t=206213

The Vista Experience

I’ve had Vista Ultimate installed for about a week now and feel ready to give feedback on the new Microsoft OS.

Installation

Having the full Ultimate 32-bit edition I had 3 install options - 1) Upgrade, 2) Clean install from within windows 3) Clean install booting from CD.

I used the Windows Vista Upgrade Advisor to see if I could expect any hardware/software issues. While my hardware checked out ok there were several apps that were not Vista friendly. Two were flat out incompatible and required removal before an upgrade should be attempted. This was Norton Internet Security 2006 and Nero Burning Rom OEM.

This is where I think some people come unstuck with upgrades, they don’t check the software incompatiblies before attempting an upgrade. However saying that after removing the offending programs and a couple of the apps classed as minor problems my clean install from within windows failed.

I opted for a clean install booting from the Disc.

Drivers/hardware

After a fairly quick install I thought all my hardware had been detected as Windows looked so good. However, closer inspection showed a lot of missing drivers including my graphics, and sound cards. Without drivers the display was limited to 800×600 but still appeared clear and colourful. I still had sound, if only in stereo. Once the correct drivers were downloaded and installed I could get full surround sound, high-resolution graphics and the long awaited Aero enhancements.

Finding how to turn on the Aero enhancements wasn’t obvious but a quick search of the help solved that.

I thought I would have little use of Flip 3D other than showing off. However, as my Logitech mouse has additional buttons I found one of them activated flip 3D. I could then use the scroll wheel to skip through the open apps. Rather than waiting for the one I want to come to the front I could use the mouse to click any of the programs in the deck to go to it. This soon became a very quick and easy way to navigate between programes. I still use Alt-tab too but Flip 3D is defintely more useful than I imagined.

Ultimate Extras

The main reason I got the Ultimate edition was for the Ultimate Extras. So far it’s not earnt it’s hype. There have been no cool updates to speak of. Even the DreamScene and GroupShot extras demoed at CES are absent. I did manage to download GroupShot from the Microsoft research site (which works great) but this is available to all windows users (even xp I believe) not just Vista Ultimate. DreamScene is still unavailable as far as I can see.

Access rights

As I did a clean install of Vista on a different hard drive my previous XP installation was still intact. A problem I had in the past with dual boot systems was not being able to access some files on the alternate installation due to access rights. This is not a problem for Vista. When trying to view my windows XP documents folder I am warned I do not have Access rights, however, I am offered the option to “take over ownership” As long as you are logged in as an administrator on your Vista build you can take over ownership of any folder and then access it anytime. As to what happens to my XP installation when I try restarting that again I can’t say as I haven’t tried yet.

From the viewpoint of Front-end developer

Of course it wouldn’t be a good blog post without looking at Windows Vista from the viewpoint of a front-end developer.

The first change is of course Internet Explorer 7 being built in to the OS. This means if you were hanging on to IE6 for testing purposes you will need to get the stand-alone edition. I haven’t tested installing this on Vista yet but this worked fine on XP.

Firefox installed seemlessly as always but I encountered a problem when trying to view online video. Although Windows Media Player 11 is installed as part of Vista the required dll files required by firefox and other browsers are missing. This means playing streamed windows media is only possible in IE7. This is quiet a sneaky move by Microsoft but easily remedied. Simply download the missing dll files into the firefox plugins folder (usually C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\plugins) or better still in the windows media folder so it can be used by all browsers you may install.

You can find the missing files on dlldump.com

• npdsplay.dll
• npwmsdrm.dll
• npdrmv2.dll

If this doesn’t solve the problem get more indepth help here: http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?t=206213

What about the tools of the trade? The Adobe/Macromedia Apps -
You’ll be pleased to know Dreamweaver 8, Flash 8, Photoshop CS2 and Fireworks 8 all run on Vista. However, there are some compatibility issues. If you use the Windows Aero effects you will find they become disabled when you open Fireworks. Windows Vista will switch to “Windows Vista Basic” mode until you close the program. Flash also has issues. It will not force Vista in to Basic mode but you will probably want to do this manually as whenever you enter or exit a set of grouped items the usually near instant transition effect of entering or exiting the group is slowed to a snails pace. This means a 2-3 second wait every time you edit or exit a grouped object - nightmare.

If found no negative side effects in Dreamweaver 8. Photoshop I’ve only opened to see if it would run and haven’t done any indepth testing yet.

The Vista shadow versioning feature could prove useful. Often I make sequence of pages and use one as a template for the next page. In my absent mindedness I sometimes save over my template with the most recent work - trouble. With Shadow backup each individual file is backed up by windows so that I can get back to previous versions of a file if I save over it. Not actually got it to work yet as none of my files seem to have previous versions yet even when I tried a creating a test file. This works like a charm now.

I use a program called PowerDirector from Cyberlink to edit and export video in web friendly formats or for making home movie DVDs. This cannot be run or re-installed anymore. Tech supports solution is to upgrade to their new Premium edition which is Vista Compatible. I am still considering this. Other Apps not liked by Vista is Norton Internet Security 2007.

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ZDNet uses Microformats!

If you’re wondering “What on Earth are Microformats?” - where have you been? A quick search on Google returns 11.7million results!

Very brief explanation. For designers it means instead of using random/made-up class names for content you want to style, you use names listed in the Microformat specification. This gives the content you are styling more meaing which can then be read by appropriate software. The class now not only allows you to style that content/element as usual, but also means an application that reads Microformats can “understand” what that content is.

The easiest example to explain is with a contact us page. If Microformat classes are used correctly a Microformat application can differentiate a name, an email address, a telephone number etc. For a user this means when wanting to make a note of someone’s contact details rather than opening up your address book and manually copy and pasting each detail you can click your Microformats button, pick the name you want, view the business card and add it straight to your address book. You could even add all contacts on the page at once. This also works if the information is dispersed through the page such as a biography page containing contact information spread out through the paragraphs, microformats can collate this data into one tidy hcard. This is just one application. Imagine the other posibilities - adding events directly to your calender, XFN relationships, enhanced searches etc.

This is mostly theory at the moment as there are very few websites (Flickr, Technorati, d.construct) that feature this new technique and even fewer applications taking advantage of it (tails, greasemonkey, Safari favelets). However, with the stir being generated about this and the backing it’s receiving it won’t be long before it’s as big as RSS. There is already a Firefox extention called Tails that can read microfomats and Tails export allows you to export the business cards or calendar events (Tails Export is currently only compatible with Firefox 1.5 or older). There are also a few GreaseMonkey Scripts and plugins for IE and Safari.

To see the latest news on which websites or applications make use of Microformats check out the official Microformats.org
website. Microformats are actually a more advanced than I’ve explained here, read more at the official site to get the full picture.

This brings me to the topic of this post - Microformats on ZDNet. If you have the Tails Firefox extention or another application that reads Microformats visit the ZDNet.co.uk contact us page to see Microformats at work. To avoid spammers harvesting email addresses individual contact email addresses are not shown, instead the instruction to use firstname.surname@domain.com is given. However, if you are using a Microformats reader the business card generated still presents the correct email address for each contact. The embedded Microformats was developed by James Myers (a CNET Networks Producer) and myself. James Myers has been interviewed on the subject which will appear on the site as a podcast and video shortly.

This is another example of ZDNet being leader in new technologies. For this reason I am very pleased to present ZDNet.co.uk with the very first FFE (From the Front End) Award. Congratulations to the ZDNet design team on the FFE Award for Best use of new technology on a Business Website. You can view all awards presented by FFE on the Awards page. Three more Awards were given out during the Podcast with Reinette “Ray” De Silva which was recorded last week. James Myers also modestly awarded another site an Award for best use of Microformats in his interview. These will be added to the award page when the Podcast goes live.

If you need any help viewing microformats in your Firefox, IE or Safari please post a comment and I’ll try and help out if I can. Please include your browser name and version.

Firefox 2 review

Seems every tech blog in the land has picked up on the hot release of the week - Firefox 2.0. I heard a lot of good things about it while still in Beta and I finally got round to giving it a spin today.

IE7 also saw a new release this week but got a lot less attention/praise (unless you work for Microsoft) as it didn’t offer much extra compared to RC1 which I already had installed. Opera’s latest release has impressed as it’s the first browser to pass the Acid2 test.

So is FF2.0 worth the download. Well if you haven’t got Firefox at all it’s an obvious yes. Once you’ve tried Firefox for a couple of weeks you’ll find it a frustrating experience to try and browse the web with anything less. However, I am sure I’m preaching to the converted so I’ll focus on What’s New in 2.0.
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Extension/Plugin of the month (POTM): September

POTM (Plugin Of The Month) is a new feature that I plan to post every month to promote the plugin/extension that has made the biggest impact on either the way I browse or assisted me in producing web pages.

For the month of September the Extension I’ve been loving most has been Google’s Browser Sync.

What this Firefox extension does is enable you to synchronize your bookmarks, history, cookies, saved passwords and even open tabs with your Google account. This means when you use any computer (with FF and web access) you will be able add this extension and carry on browsing where you left off!

All the tabs you had open when you last had Firefox open, whether on that computer or another one can be restored or you can start a new session. Your bookmarks, history, cookies, passwords, auto complete etc. can all be restored.

I say “can” because everything is optional. You can choose to sync as much or as little as you want and you can ask Google Browser Sync to encrypt all you info (this means the first time you use it on a new PC you will be asked for a password/pin).

A word of warning! If you use this feature in an internet café be sure to logout of Google sync before leaving.

This month so far I’ve been loving WebDeveloper Toolbar. I’ll let you know in next month if it is still my number 1 extension for October.

=Dave Long=