Adobe Ships Tablet Publishing Suite

Adobe is shipping the Enterprise Edition of Adobe Digital Publishing Suite, a turnkey set of hosted software services and viewer technology to allow large publishers to create, distribute, monetize and analyze digital magazines, newspapers, and publications.

With output aimed at Android tablets, including Motorola Xoom and Samsung Galaxy Tab, as well as RIM PlayBook and iOS tablet devices, the Enterprise Edition allows large publishers to implement a custom tablet publishing solution without disrupting existing publish ing processes and infrastructure. Today's news follows the announcement that Adobe Digital Publishing Suite will support both Apple App Store Subscriptions and Google One Pass for magazine and newspaper publishers.
"The publishing industry is energized by the emergence of tablet devices that showcase magazines and publications in new, exciting formats that engage readers and offer advertisers high-impact interactive placements," said David Wadhwani, senior vice president, Creative and Interactive Solutions, Adobe. "By working with some of the biggest names in publishing during an extensive prerelease program, the Enterprise Edition of Adobe Digital Publishing Suite has been battle-tested and we can now look forward to even more great content coming to a device near you."
The Enterprise Edition of Digital Publishing Suite allows publishers worldwide to implement a tailored digital publishing solution built on the foundation of Creative Suite 5 tools that tightly integrate with the Adobe Online Marketing Suite, existing backend editorial publishing platforms and third party subscription systems. A robust set of enterprise-level services allow publishers to cost?effectively create and distribute visually immersive digital content on a broad set of tablet devices, leverage editorial and advertising analytics to optimize their business and take advantage of flexible commerce models. Publishers can distribute digital editions through their own website, content aggregators or leading mobile marketplaces, including the Apple App Store and Android Market.
Aimed at large publishers, the Enterprise Edition of Adobe Digital Publishing Suite has been adopted by leading publishers worldwide -- including Bonnier, Cond Nast, Globo Media Group, Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia and National Geographic -- to bring some of the world's most iconic titles to tablet devices.
"National Geographic is known for its award-winning content spanning more than 100 years," said Drew Onufer, vice president, Interactive and Digital Products, National Geographic. "With Adobe Digital Publishing Suite Enterprise Edition and Adobe's creative software, we are building on a legacy of inspiration and reader loyalty by enabling consumers to enjoy content across a range of tablet devices. With Adobe tools, we can amplify the reach of our content while transforming its presentation in new and engaging ways. We have already published 50 Greatest Photographs for app users and have many more titles for tablet devices in the works. It's an exciting time for National Geographic and for the mobile publishing industry as a whole."
The Enterprise Edition of the Digital Publishing Suite includes a spectrum of hosted enterprise services and features for publishers worldwide. These services include Distribution Service, for the storage and fulfilment of digital issues to a wide variety of Android, iOS and RIM QNX devices, and Analytics Service to analyse and optimise editorial and advertising content. This uses a set of included analytic reports or through an Adobe SiteCatalyst account for more expansive and detailed reporting and analysis
The suite also includes Viewer Builder Service, to preview, test and build publisher branded, signed viewers, Folio Producer Service, which supports upload of content directly from within Adobe InDesign CS5, and E-commerce Service for the sale of content through mobile marketplaces, including the Apple App Store and Android Market, digital retail channels and direct publisher subscriptions.
The Enterprise Edition of Digital Publishing Suite is available immediately, with pricing available through a custom quote

Mozilla urges users to update graphics drivers for Firefox 4

Tells users to download newest Windows graphics drivers for hardware acceleration
Computerworld - Mozilla has urged users to update their graphics cards' drivers if they want to take advantage of Firefox 4's hardware acceleration.
Last Friday, Benoit Jacob, who works on Mozilla's platform engineering team, spelled out why users should verify that their computers, especially PCs powered by Windows, have the latest graphics drivers.
"When we turned these features on by default in nightly builds around September last year, and then in [Firefox 4] Beta 7, crash statistics and bug reports quickly showed that bugs in graphics drivers were often making these features misbehave," Jacob said in a blog post. "We reacted by selectively disabling these new features on buggy drivers, based on the large amounts of information collected by beta testers."
To prevent crashes, Mozilla created a list of graphics drivers that Firefox 4 reads; if a driver is on the "blocklist," the browser disables hardware acceleration.
Last year, Mozilla added hardware acceleration to Firefox 4. The technology shifts browser page rendering and composition chores from the computer's CPU to its graphics processor.
Mozilla followed in Microsoft's acceleration footsteps in August when it rolled out Firefox 4 Beta 4, the first preview which included the technology.
When Microsoft announced its Internet Explorer 9 (IE9) in November 2009, it kick-started the push for hardware acceleration by promising that the new browser would boost page content rendering and composition speeds on Windows Vista and Windows XP.
Unlike IE9, Firefox 4 supports partial hardware acceleration on Windows XP, still the most popular version of Windows. It does that by calling on the Direct3D API, which the old operating system supports, rather than Windows Direct2D and Direct3D APIs, which are available only in Vista and Windows 7.
Jacob said that Windows users must have a "very recent driver" if their machine sports an Intel graphics card; version 257.21 or newer for Nvidia cards; and version 10.6 or newer for AMD's ATI-branded cards.
"Unfortunately, certain computer manufacturers do not allow end users to upgrade drivers on their own," said Jacob on Friday. "Hopefully these manufacturers will eventually give their users these much needed graphics driver updates."
Mozilla has published a more detailed list of the Intel graphics cards and associated drivers supported by Firefox 4's hardware acceleration.
Firefox 4 on Mac OS X relies on OpenGL to accelerate some aspects of page construction and rendering. Mac users must have Mac OS X 10.6.3 or later to support all Firefox 4's acceleration.
Some graphics cards and chipsets used in older Macs, including the ATI Radeon X1000 and older, Nvidia GeForce FX and older, and Intel GMA 950 and older, don't support OpenGL and so won't be able to use the technology. Among the Macs with unsupported graphics are the Mac Mini from mid-2007 (which uses the Intel GMA 950).
Mozilla has ended the Firefox 4 beta cycle, and plans to ship the first "release candidate," or RC build, of the browser to the public shortly, possibly this week.
"Unless serious issues are found during in-house testing or its cycle of beta testing, this will be what we ship to users," Mozilla stated on its Web site. "Historically, we have not shipped the first release candidate."
A final version of Firefox 4 should appear this month.

Microsoft launches IE6 deathwatch

Builds site, touts campaign to drive the 10-year-old browser's share under 1%
Microsoft today launched a deathwatch for its 10-year-old Internet Explorer 6 browser, saying it wanted to "see IE6 gone for good."
According to Microsoft, which cited statistics from Web analytics firm Net Applications, IE6 still has a 12% global usage share, with almost half of that in China, long a stronghold of the aged browser.
Microsoft wants to drive IE6's share under 1%.
"We bring you the next step in our mission to see IE6 gone for good," said Roger Capriotti, the head of IE's marketing, in a blog post Friday. "To demonstrate our commitment to getting rid of IE6, we're launching a Web site."
That site, ie6countdown.com, shows Net Applications' usage share numbers for IE6 in 43 countries, including the U.S., China, Japan, Germany and Russia, as well as the browser's current global share.
The site also sports links that corporate IT departments can tap for advice on how to migrate to newer browsers. In developed countries like the U.S., IE6's stronghold is in business, where upgrading can be difficult because of custom Web applications or intranets designed for the old browser.
Microsoft hasn't made a secret of its campaign to kill IE6. As long ago as August 2009, a company executive said, "Friends don't let friends use IE6." The company has had success in driving down IE6 use: In August 2009, IE6's share topped 25%.
Capriotti tied the launch of the IE6 deathwatch site to the first anniversary of an IE6 "funeral" hosted by Denver, Colo.-based Web design firm Aten Design Group. Microsoft's IE6 sent a bouquet of flowers to the event, with a card that read, "Thanks for the good times, IE6."
According to Net Applications, China boasts the dubious distinction of having the highest percentage of users running IE6: 34.5%.
"In China, IE6 remains the dominant browser," said Vince Vizzaccaro, Net Application's vice president of marketing, in an interview Monday.
Other countries with a higher-than-average IE6 share include South Korea (24.8%), India (12.3%) and Taiwan (10.7%). In the U.S., IE6's share is just 2.9%.
Although Microsoft has touted IE8 and the impending IE9 as replacements for IE6 and 2006's IE7, it's not been able to stop users from abandoning its browser line for rivals like Google's Chrome and Apple's Safari.
In the last 12 months, IE has lost 4.8 percentage points, dropping to a 56.8% share. The losses would have been even greater had Net Applications not revised its weighting methodology last month. The one-time accounting change pushed up IE's share by the largest one-month amount since Net Applications starting tracking browser usage.
During the same period, Chrome has gained 5.3 points, while Safari has increased its share by 1.9 percentage points.
If IE6 continues to lose share at the pace it's established over the last year, the browser should fall under the 1% mark in June 2012.
Microsoft has promised to support IE6 until April 2014.

Yahoo grabs search share from Google

As Google trips slightly, second-place Yahoo is there to pick up its lost share
While Google easily hung on to its first-place spot in the U.S. search engine market last month, Yahoo made a surprising, if slight, advance.
Google, long the heavily dominant player in the search market, captured 65.8% of the market in July, according to comScore, a market research company. However, the search engine giant slipped a little last month, dipping 0.4% from 66.2% in June.
Where did that 0.4% share go? Google can look to Yahoo for that.
The second-place search engine grabbed Google's lost share and took its U.S. search share from 16.7% in June to 17.1% in July.
Microsoft Bing has been steadily in third place since it was released a little more than a year ago, and it retains that spot with an 11% share -- the same amount it had in June.
Bing had better luck between May and June.
A June report from comScore noted that Bing showed more growth than rival Google, compared with the previous month. Bing, which had its first anniversary in late May, saw its search share in the U.S. market inch up from 12.1% in May to 12.7% in June.
In that same May-to-June period, Google lost a little ground, with its search share dipping from 63.7% in May to 62.6% in June.

Search Monkey falls victim to Yahoo-Microsoft search deal

As it starts transitioning to Microsoft's Bing search engine this week, Yahoo has decided to drop Search Monkey, a developer platform designed to let external coders create applications that enhance Yahoo search results.
Search Monkey, launched in May 2008, will be shut down on Oct. 1 when its developer tools, application gallery and related material will be taken offline, Yahoo said Tuesday.

"As a result, third party custom result apps, infobar apps, and data services will no longer appear on Yahoo's search results. For developers who wish to retain their code, please export it using your favorite copy/paste tool before then," wrote Yahoo product manager Natasha Fattedad.

Yahoo plans to start using Bing's back-end search engine for its U.S. and Canada search sites this week, under terms of a 10-year search partnership announced last year. It is asking webmasters to continue using its Site Explorer service while also becoming acquainted with the Bing Webmaster Center. Both are designed to let webmasters communicate their sites' structure to the Yahoo and Bing Web crawlers.
"To keep things simple, we will share site information you provide on Site Explorer with Microsoft during this transition period," Neal Sample, Yahoo's vice president of Social, Open, & Publishing Platforms, wrote in a separate blog post.

Through Search Monkey, results were enhanced on more than 60 percent of Yahoo result pages via images, links and additional information about listings, according to Fattedad. The platform helped users to narrow search results using filters.
Yahoo will still try to improve search results using structured data, but through a different tack, shifting focus to publishers' sites, Sample said.
"Yahoo Search is continuing to shift from a model where developers build lightweight apps to install on Yahoo to one where publishers enhance their own site markup to produce similar results. Yahoo Search results pages will continue to show enhanced result templates from websites' page markup and structured data feeds along with Microsoft's organic listings," Sample wrote.

Yahoo also plans to turn off the APIs (application programming interfaces) for MyBlogLog, a service that lets Web publishers create communities around sites by giving visitors the option of creating personal badges and identifying themselves.
"By the end of the year, these APIs will no longer be available. We encourage you to turn to our well-supported Social APIs. The Yahoo network now relies on this Social platform to power user profiles and social graph, relationships, activity streams, and more," Sample said.
Still under review are Yahoo's geographical, maps and local APIs, some of which will remain, while others will be discontinued by September, according to Sample.
Among the developer programs Yahoo plans to keep are BOSS (Build Your Own Search Service), which lets developers build a custom search engine, and YQL (Yahoo Query Language), a SQL-like language to query and call up structured data on the Internet.
Yahoo and Microsoft announced their search deal in July last year and began the implementation, estimated to take up to two years, in February after getting regulatory clearance in the U.S. and Europe.

The deal calls for Yahoo to rely on Bing for back-end search functions like crawling sites, indexing them and matching results to queries. Microsoft also got licensing rights to integrate some of Yahoo's core search technologies into Bing.
Microsoft will be in charge of self-service sales of pay-per-click text search ads. For the first five years of the deal, Microsoft will get a 12 percent commission of paid clicks on the search sites of Yahoo and of Yahoo Web publisher partners.
In turn, Yahoo will sell premium guaranteed search ads and handle individual relationships with the biggest advertisers, search marketing firms, resellers and their clients.

Microsoft's Bing taps into online coupon fever

Microsoft is responding to the online coupon frenzy by adding results about special deals to its Bing search engine, both on its desktop and mobile versions.
The new feature, provided in partnership with deal aggregator website The Dealmap, lets Bing serve up links to 200,000 coupons and offers from businesses in 14,000 U.S. cities.
The offers come from online coupon providers like Groupon, Living Social and Restaurant.com, Microsoft said on Thursday in a blog post.
The goal is to make it easier for Bing users "to discover, share and search for the best deals in your area -- all from one place," wrote Andy Chu, a Microsoft director of product management.
Online coupon sites have taken off in a big way in the past year, led by Groupon, a daily deals website founded in late 2008 that recently closed a funding round worth almost $1 billion after turning down a reported $6 billion acquisition offer from Google.
Yahoo and Google are developing their own services for deals and coupons.
Announced in November, Yahoo's program is called Local Offers and will provide deals, offers and coupons from local merchants. Yahoo's initial partners include Groupon, LivingSocial, DealOn, Zozi, Tippr, Coupons.com and Valpak.
Meanwhile, Google is testing a program with small businesses focused on pre-paid offers and vouchers, the company said recently.