First some exciting news; Xcerion is proud to have been selected as a Red Herring Global Top 200 finalist after being selected as a 2008 Red Herring Europe 100 winner.
The year is coming to an end and we couldn’t leave 2008 without a few improvements. We have done a lot of improvements under the hood that might not be visible to the every day user at a quick glance.
All system dialogs have got a new transparent purple-blue liquid design, to better match all the new application windows.
Mail
The most notable change is the fact that every icloud user now gets an email account,
. Email from / to anyone can be recieved / sent using this account. You can still register your external email accounts but be sure to set the default account settings for the outgoing emails, since the default accounts email address will be used as sender for emails. We have also added an image blocker for increased security while reading emails and done a lot of minor improvements to increase the user experience.
Welcome
A new application, greeting all new users was added. Showing some of the most used functionality of icloud and helping to configure your account with MSN and email support. From the Welcome application it is also easy to change wallpaper and access help to most applications. If you have not seen the Welcome application yet it is accessible through the desktop Support menu.
Todo
We have released a Todo application though this is an early alpha version. Our intentions are to make high use of icloud’s collaboration features, which will enable you to share single tasks as well as tasks lists with your friends.
iPlay Mini & Dock
The iPlay application got a new friend. The iPlay Mini is a smaller version of iPlay which can be used both as an application or widget.
iPlay and it’s mini counterpart share the same playlist so you could easily create your playlists in iPlay and play them in the widget to get more desktop space. While playing both applications are synchronized and play the same music. We also have created a playlist window to see and edit the current playlist both from iPlay and iPlay Mini. While they still where at it, the development team behind iPlay also threw in iPlay Dock, a special iPlay for use in the widget sidebar that also shows the album art and current artist playing and has shortcuts for opening the playlist, iPlay and iPlay Mini.
Sharing
As you know, you can share files and folders with your friends. Your friends will get references, not copies, to your files in their xios://Friends folder. The Sharepad widget will help you to navigate to the right xios://Friends folder in the file manager. Now, in this release, you can also see what your shared to your friends in your xios://Shared folder. As you might have noticed, we have adopted the open symbol suggested for sharing throughout icloud.
News for Developers
We have improved the XML Virtual Machine that is in the heart of the icloud Cloud OS by looking at the granularity of the process language. With smaller execution units we could nestle operations such as foreach and decision. This will seriously reduce the amount of steps needed in your applications and increase execution speed and readability. A lot of the operations have also become more asynchronous to leave the control back to the user. When logging in to icloud, you might have noticed that it now starts quicker and piece after piece is being loaded.
Some user interface components have also been improved, especially menus for faster rendering even over slower bandwidth. Since icloud is getting users from all over the world, we try to make sure that it should be a compelling user experience regardless of bandwidth and ping time. This is an ongoing refinement and fine-tuning process for icloud.
Foreach Revisited
The loop operation has changed, in the previous release, you wrote what to call but now you need to add operations as children to the foreach operation. You can iterate over numeric intervals, a component selection or an XML node set.
Loop over interval from 1 to 10
<operation name="foreach" value="1..10">
Loop over interval from 4 to –2, note that this will count backwards.
<operation name="foreach" value="4..-2">
Loop from 1 to 10 with steps of 2
<operation name="foreach" value="1..10,2">
New Functions
We have also added a lot of new xidExpression functions. This will simplify string, date and file handling. Goodies like; substring, trim, random, replace, match, capitalize, parsedate, formatdate, adddate, is-running, is-open, is-alias and more could help you to use less steps, operations and aliases. Take a closer look at the documentation found in the start menu: Support > Help > Developer Documentation. There you can find the chapter Functions under References for more information.
Another area of improvement has been on our XML file system, used to power the Cloud Drive and virtual file system found in Document Explorer and the icloud applications. Many applications use the collaborative file system directly as a database, similar to how software like Lotus Notes our Microsoft Exchange works and it has therefore become very important to make it easy for applications to make use of it. Automatic meta data extraction from XML documents is now available and exposed within the file listings, represented as atom-feeds. The file type recognition system in icloud is used to know what data to extract. As a developer, you can define your own file types, either using the Control Panel application or by directly manipulating the #Settings document. Before saving any changes, make a backup of the document, since breaking the XML within it will break your accounts setting file and you will have to restore it to the default settings. Powerful search is also available to search on file meta data, please look at the code for Photos or iPlay for examples.
The XML languages used to build applications are continually refined and improved with every application we build on icloud. Since all the applications you see in icloud, including the desktop is built using these XML languages, we constantly try to improve them to increase our own productivity, the user experience and execution speed. This is something you as a developer also will benefit from and as an end user, you will see all applications in icloud constantly improve when the virtual machine and its capabilities improve.
Last, but not least, all of us at Xcerion and icloud wish you a Happy New Year!
Comments (1)
1. Jan 22, 2009 at 03:32 AM
The 3 main things that I would like to see is to have contacts and calendar sync with Google. I've always been having the google contacts and calendar open just because I've had the account for about 4 years. I can't get the back button on the browser to work so could you fix that? And history would also be nice in the browser.
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XBlog gives you the latest news and updates about Xcerion, but never the less, also about the OS and happenings. It gives you the opportunity to read and respond.
First some exciting news; Xcerion is proud to have been selected as a Red Herring Global Top 200 finalist after being selected as a 2008 Red Herring Europe 100 winner.
As you know, you can share files and folders with your friends. Your friends will get references, not copies, to your files in their xios://Friends folder. The Sharepad widget will help you to navigate to the right xios://Friends folder in the file manager. Now, in this release, you can also see what your shared to your friends in your xios://Shared folder. As you might have noticed, we have adopted the open symbol suggested for sharing throughout icloud.
