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Posts tagged web app
Amazon pulls ahead of the pack; releases cloud-based streaming of your music collection
Mar 30th
Amazon unveiled their new Cloud Drive and Cloud Player products this week, which will allow users to store their files in Amazon’s ‘cloud’ – an online server which can be accessed from any computer. Whilst products like this are nothing new, the Cloud Player function is – it will allow users to stream their music through their web browser from any computer, or to their Android phone using Amazon’s MP3 app. They provide 5GB of storage space free – and only files and music not purchased from Amazon count towards this limit – a fantastic incentive for users to purchase music from the Amazon MP3 store, as they will essentially receive unlimited music storage.
Google and Apple have both been racing to release their own versions of these products but Amazon have seemingly appeared from nowhere with Cloud Player, baffling industry experts. Interestingly, Google and Apple have been having issues coming to licensing agreements with major record labels to ensure users are not on shaky legal ground when uploading their MP3 files to a remote storage location. It appears Amazon have failed to observe this obstacle, so it is possible that we could see litigation arising from this surprise release.
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Microsoft releases Internet Explorer 9 to the masses
Mar 15th
Microsoft have released the final build of their Internet Explorer 9 web browser in an attempt to stem its steady loss of users to alternative browsers like Firefox and Chrome. IE9 features an enhanced user interface with the removal of unnecessary toolbars and theĀ amalgamationĀ of the address and search boxes into one field and the alignment of the address/search bar and tabs into one row. The new browser also offers impressive speed improvements and also great leaps in support for web standards like HTML5. Web standards are a common set of guidelines offered by the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) that browser vendors and web developers are expected to adhere to to ensure a consistent experience across all software. Internet Explorer has been notoriously poor at this in the past, and Microsoft has sought to rectify their previous errors.
The improvement in web standards support will be welcomed with open arms by web designers such as us at Areatrade as it means less extra code is needed to ensure compatibility in all software. Microsoft has recently been calling for the small minority of users still stuck on version 6 of the software to upgrade to a newer version. Many IT departments have More >