Recent Tech articles 27th June – 3rd July 2011

Its been one of those odd weeks in Tech this week as one giant dominates a lot of the news. At the beginning of the week Google started announced details of Google+ the much awaited social network from the search giant. Despite previous fails in this department, they are not giving up and with new management in the driving seat Google+ released to a limited audience. Rabid early adopters (like me) are still waiting for their invites to the network while others have gained access through backdoors (now closed). Once released, Google set upon changing the face of other sections with Search, Mail and Calendar getting a makeover

As well as releasing a new social network the boffins at Google labs released Swiffy – a Flash to HTML5 convertor aimed mostly at advertisers. It is not a global website changer as a very emphatic commenter let me know.

I heard through the Microsoft Faculty connection of an updated business application named Visual Studio Lightswitch 2011 that will be released fully on July 26. You can find more information on Lightswitch here including a beta download, training information and How-To videos.

The rest is security news:

Finally, Microsoft disables Autorun defaults in Vista and XP and Surprise Surprise! Infections decrease. A patch to change the Autorun defaults were pushed out in February this year and you can see the 3 monthly graphs of decreasing infections here.

In a couple of smaller stories I wrapped up together, Computer users, You are the weakest link is all about the weakest link that can confound almost any security policy: People.

Finally for this week a posting on an update of an existing botnet : Security experts describe new botnet as almost ‘indestructible’

I am as most of you know already a Mac and iPad user. I recently converted a colleague of mine to to the joys of the iPad and spent a few hours trying to get the setup just right for working. During all that Jean-Clause found a lovely webdav tool to allow you to access dropbox using webDAV for free. That allows Pages to save directly back to a Dropbox. See Using DropDav (Limited) with Dropbox and Pages (etc) on iPad if you want to set something similar up yourself.

Google releases Swiffy – Flash to HTML5 convertor

Not content with releasing a new social network on the world, the boffins at Google Labs have released Swiffy, a new web-based tool that allows developers to easily convert Adobe Flash files into HTML5. This isn’t the first tool to do this as Adobe released Wallaby earlier this year to do the same thing. The main difference between the two is that Swiffy is web based while wallaby runs of a local machine. Additionally, Wallaby’s code is designed to be edited and reused, whereas Swiffy’s code is optimized and compressed in such a way that makes editing difficult.

The Swiffy demo pages shows off the power of the tool. In addition to converting basic banner ad animations, click-event interactions can also be converted to HTML5. To be clear, this won’t convert videos, complex animations or games, but the tool meets its desired goal quite adequately.

Google Chrome ad
Google Chrome ad using various SWF features such as vector graphics, embedded fonts and timeline animation.

Symphony Orchestra ad
An example using masks. This shows Swiffy’s graceful degradation when an unsupported feature is encountered (in this example, a drop shadow filter).

Game example 1
A simple AcionScript 2.0 game with support for keyboard and mouse input.

Game example 2
Another simple game supporting mouse and touch input.

Unfortunately Swiffy generated files are also not available everywhere as the more advanced SVG features the Swiffy take advantage of means that the only browsers that support the converted code right now are Webkit-based. That means Safari and Chrome on the desktop and Mobile Safari on iOS will support the converted files.

This web-based conversion tool will be a tool that advertisers with Flash ads will want so they don’t have to recreate these adverts for display on Flash-free devices.