Underexposed

Adobe Systems said Monday it's helping to sponsor the SQLite database project, software that figures prominently in at least two of the company's high-profile new projects.

Adobe open-source honcho Dave McAllister said in a blog posting Sunday that Adobe had joined Mozilla and Symbian in joining the SQLite Consortium.

"By supporting the work of the SQLite consortium, Adobe is supporting the continued growth and improvements in SQLite," McAllister said. "Adobe's support of the SQLite Consortium demonstrates Adobe's commitment to open source, and belief that technologies such as SQLite should remain independent and free in the best interests of the community."

Adobe also fired up a new open-source Web site on Sunday.

Adobe now has launched its AIR software, which uses SQLite.

SQLite is used within the company's newly released Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR) software, an operating system-independent foundation layer for Internet applications. Adobe also has said it uses SQLite to power the image database of its raw-photo editing and cataloging software, Photoshop Lightroom.

SQLite Consortium members get a variety of support perks, according to the site, including "the guaranteed, undivided attention of the SQLite developers for 23 staff days per year and for as much additional time above and beyond that amount that the core developers have available."

Adobe Lightroom uses SQLite for cataloging photos.

It should be noted that SQLite isn't open-source software, strictly speaking. Though SQLite's underlying source code is freely available as part of the public domain, that doesn't meet the technical requirements of the Open Source Definition.

However, some of the principles of the movement apply. Outsiders may contribute their own software to the project, for example, though as with many open-source projects, they must explicitly relinquish copyright and turn over rights to their software to the public domain.

Mozilla and Symbian were charter members of the SQLite Consortium, which was launched in December 2007.

Geotagging, in which digital photos are labeled with the location where they were taken, is mostly unfamiliar to photographers today. But new developments are likely going to put the technology on the map.

In interviews at the Photo Marketing Association trade show in Las Vegas recently, several camera executives expressed an interest in geotagging and some companies were demonstrating technology. It's clear that mainstream geotagging is a matter of when, not if.

GE's E1050 is scheduled to ship in September with a built-in GPS receiver, though a PC will be required to make use of the location data.

(Credit: General Electric)

The strongest evidence I encountered is Air Semiconductor, a start-up building a chip designed to let cameras process GPS (Global Positioning System) satellite signals so latitude and longitude data can be attached to digital photos. It remains to be seen how well this works, but this idea is the holy grail of geotagging--no extra hardware or software is required.

Samples of Air Semiconductor's first chip, the Airwave-1, are due to start shipping this summer, with production versions going on sale at the end of this year or early next, said Chief Executive Stephen Graham.

"I think PMA next year is going to be when a number of companies unveil cameras with geotagging built in," said Graham, who flew in from the company's Swindon, U.K., headquarters to meet with camera companies at the photo show.

One can expect Graham to be bullish on his market, but there's independent evidence, too. General Imaging, the licensee of General Electric's new camera product line, plans to begin selling a camera this fall that takes a significant step, if not the full plunge, toward GPS integration. And market analysis firm IMS Research expects about 40 million GPS-enabled digital cameras to ship in 2011, more than a fifth of the total.

"Camera manufacturers need to differentiate in an increasingly competitive market," IMS Research analyst Matia Grossi said in a November report.

Why geotag?
Geotagging offers a new twist on digital photography, but it's got more promise than practicality today.

By adding location data into pictures, photographers will be able to search through photo archives on their computers based on where they took their pictures, not just when.

And geotags provide an easy way to figure out where a particular photo was taken, which could be useful when trying to identify something like a cathedral long after your memory of your trip to Europe two summers ago has receded into a blur. Today, software such as Apple's Mac OS X and Adobe Systems' Photoshop Lightroom can show a map when the user wants to see a photo's location.

Geotagging will be built into cameras, said Steve Haber, senior vice president of Sony Electronics' digital imaging and audio division. "It has to be," he said. "We keep hearing, 'My PC is this black hole for my photos'...People (need) as much metadata on their pictures as possible--date, location, event--which allows for easier search and for eliminating the black hole."

"There's no doubt we'll see cameras with built-in GPS within the next two years, possibly sooner," said Chuck Westfall, technical adviser for the professional products marketing division at Canon, the world's largest camera maker. "The desirability of that feature is quite clear."

The technology that's appearing extends well beyond the home PC. Photographers can share and view geotagged photos at Web sites such as Google's Picasa and Yahoo's Flickr.

Why not geotag?
Today, though, geotagging involves work beyond just taking the photos. A geotagger typically carries a separate GPS navigation device, transferring its location data to a computer along with the camera's photos and using special-purpose software to marry the information.

The process takes a lot of time, USB cables, and forethought.

Why not just build a GPS receiver into the camera? Mainly because new hardware makes cameras bulkier and more expensive, and GPS receivers draw significant battery power.

"At this time we feel there are too many glitchy things--dropouts of communication with the satellites, power consumption," said Richard Pelkowski, digital SLR (single-lens reflex) product manager for Olympus America. "We just have to overcome some limitations."

Nikon and Canon have taken baby steps toward tighter integration. High-end Nikon SLRs such as the D300 and D3 have a port that lets a GPS unit be attached directly, communicating with the camera so the location information can be recorded. A wireless transmitter can augment Canon's higher-end SLRs, including the 40D and 1D Mark III, to provide a GPS port, too.

General Electric's 10-megapixel E1050, which licensee General Imaging discussed at PMA, is a bigger step.

The company's current plans are to sell two versions of the E1050, a $249 model in May and another with a built-in GPS receiver by about September that's expected to cost about $50 to $75 more, a GE representative said.

However, the E1050 can't actually geotag by itself. When a person takes a picture, the receiver briefly powers up and records a brief signal from the GPS satellites. Later, software on a computer processes the data, in part based on GPS satellite data retrieved from a server over the Internet, and tags the photos.

That process is the very one used by Geotate, an NXP Software spinoff that showed off its geotagging technology at PMA. At the show, Geotate product manager Paul Gough specifically pointed me toward the GE cameras, saying, "We'll see our technology--we're hoping before the end of this year." GE, though, declined to confirm the partnership and said it's conceivable GE might eventually use a different supplier's technology.

Air apparent
Air Semiconductor has its own way of working around GPS limitations.

First, the Airwave-1 chip is designed to consume very little power most of the time. As with regular GPS receivers, it takes awhile to find itself--the unpleasant half-minute minimum wait called time to first fix. But then, it goes into a low-power mode, even when the camera is off, that keeps track of its position with a very rough accuracy of about 100 meters, Graham said.

Then, when a person takes a picture, the chip goes into a higher-power mode for substantially less than a second to capture more precise data. The rough location data already present essentially gives the chip a running start on figuring out its location, sidestepping the time-to-first-fix wait, Graham said.

"The power consumption we're taking is completely negligible compared to the power consumption of the (camera) system," he said. The chip consumes 1 milliamp of current when in its low-power mode, compared with about 30 to 100 milliamps for handheld GPS chips and 400 to 500 milliamps for a camera overall.

Graham wouldn't divulge the Airwave-1's power consumption during peak activity, but said it would consume less than one-tenth--and probably less than 100th--of the camera's battery capacity even with heavy use.

The chip isn't designed to work in weak-signal areas such as indoors, a task that consumes a lot of power. Instead, when the satellite signal is lost, the chip tells the camera the last known position.

Graham was previously marketing manager for Renesas' radio-frequency products group, and the other Air Semiconductor co-founder, Chief Technology Officer David Tester, was GPS group leader for Conexant. The 12-employee start-up uses Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. to build its chips.

Adobe CTO Kevin Lynch

(Credit: Adobe Systems)

Adobe Systems brought the chief technology officer title out of retirement Tuesday and applied it to Kevin Lynch.

Lynch, previously chief software architect and senior vice president of Adobe's platform business unit, joined Adobe in 2005 when it acquired Macromedia, where he led product development.

At Adobe, he'll lead work with Adobe's Flash Player, Flex development tools, and Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR). Those products are gaining in importance at the San Jose, Calif.-based company.

"Adobe has transformed itself through several technology waves, from desktop publishing, to multimedia and to the Web," said Adobe's new chief executive, Shantanu Narayen, in a statement. "Kevin's insights and passion for rich Internet applications, and what they signify for the future of software across operating systems and devices, will help enable the next generation of innovation for our customers."

Adobe last had a CTO in early 2001, when John Warnock took the title after stepping down as chief executive, Adobe spokeswoman Katie Juran said.

Creative Suite products such as Photoshop are a step removed from Lynch's purview, though. "The CTO role will include core technology that spans across our businesses, and that could include elements that become features in future versions of our applications. But the main development for those applications will continue to be run by the individual business units," Juran said.

SAN FRANCISCO--One area where Sun Microsystems' Java caught on was in mobile phones, but a leader of the project is working to eventually replace the mobile-specific version of the software.

Sun Vice President James Gosling speaks in May at the JavaOne conference in San Francisco.

(Credit: James Martin/CNET News.com)

Java Standard Edition (SE), geared for desktop computers, will gradually supplant Java Micro Edition (ME) as technology improvements let more computing power be packed into smaller devices, said James Gosling, the Sun vice president often called the father of Java.

"We're trying to converge everything to the Java SE specification. Cell phones and TV set-top boxes are growing up," Gosling said at a Java media event here Wednesday. "That convergence is going to take years."

The prime example of the trend is Sun's own JavaFX Mobile, software Sun got through its SavaJe acquisition and which the company hopes mobile phone makers will embrace. JavaFX Mobile includes almost all of Java SE, though it's missing a few pieces such as CORBA (brace yourself: Common Object Request Broker Architecture) for getting software to work with other programs across a network.

Sun's Java expectation dovetails with recent trends, most notably Apple's iPhone, which architecturally is much more an Apple computer writ small than a mobile phone writ large. In particular, Apple uses a version of its regular Safari Web browser so users will have as much of the desktop Internet experience as possible.

At the same time, Intel is working to bring x86 processors that run PCs into mobile gadgets. It's in cohoots with open-source efforts including Ubuntu Mobile and Mobile Firefox .

The move to Java SE won't happen overnight. Rich Green, Sun's executive vide president of software, said he expects smart phones using various pared-down versions of Java to stay in the market for at least a decade.

But the shift already was under way. "All the work in Java ME had been pushing it closer and closer to Java SE," Gosling said.

Defragmenting mobile Java
Moving to Java SE could help fix one nagging problem with Java ME: fragmentation.

Java ME is a collection of abilities--basic ones and higher-level options layered on top--each defined by a detailed description called a Java specification request. For Java ME, there are a large number of these JSRs for various features. That posed a challenge to Java's original tagline, "write once, run anywhere."

The tagline came about because a program written in Java could in principle run on any computer that had a Java virtual machine. The JVM is a software foundation that lets a generic Java program run on a particular computer. But with the multiplicity of Java ME extensions, there was often little guarantee that a program written for one mobile phone would work on another.

Java SE has a much richer basic set of abilities, so using it instead of Java ME could at least in principle restore some of Java's promise of software portability.

JavaFX mobile is one component of a multipronged effort called JavaFX that Sun announced in May at its JavaOne conference.

"JavaFX is probably the largest and most complex software engineering effort Sun has ever done," Gosling said. Here's a quick tour of the JavaFX components:

Tour de Java FX jargon
Unless you're a serious Java nerd, and maybe even if you are, Sun's latest nomenclature is a crazy hodge-podge of terms. Java SE--OK, that's been around for nearly a decade, we can handle it. Though there was some numbering madness a few years ago, Sun seems to have settled on the current version being Java SE 6. But let's work outward from there.

First comes Java 6 Update N, formerly called the Consumer Java Runtime Environment (JRE). This is an attempt to make Java SE easier on the average computer user, chiefly through improvements to the plug-in that Web browsers use to deal with Web pages using Java.

Among the Update N features: It preloads Java when the computer boots to avoid the excruciating delay when you encounter a Java Web page. It installs faster by loading only a bare-minimum kernel--typically less than 4MB--that gets things started and then updates itself with the full 12MB Java software collection. It takes advantage of Windows' Direct3D graphics abilities. And it includes a more graphically modern user interface that gives a unified look across multiple operating system.

Update N should go into beta testing in December and be available a few months later, said Chet Haase, Sun's Java SE client architect.

Atop Update N comes JavaFX Script. This is a new scripting language geared specifically for fancy user interface actions such as transparency and other effects that are difficult with the prevailing Web browser scripting language, JavaScript (which contrary to what its name may imply isn't based on Java). JavaFX Script is geared toward use more by design types than engineers, Gosling said.

Of course, you can't have a script without something to understand it. Thus there's JavaFX compiler to translate people's code into instructions the computer can execute.

Last is the aforementioned Java FX Mobile. This software is in part a reaction to gripes by Java ME developers who wanted a more unified foundation, Gosling said. Another difference compared to Java ME is that Sun will deliver it as a prewritten binary program; Java ME typically comes as source code that programmers must compile into something useful.

Potshots at the competition
Gosling and Java have been at the vanguard of an idea that in a way is just coming back into vogue: rich Internet applications, which is software that runs in a Web browser but comes with a lot more pizzazz and capability than bland Web pages.

Java caught on as a way to run server software and to run games on mobile phones, but one original promise of Java was turning a Web browser into a foundation for sophisticated software. (If you're having flashbacks to Netscape taking on Microsoft Windows and the resulting federal antitrust case, just breathe deeply for a moment to settle down.)

But much of the rich Internet application action is happening with software such as Ajax, the Adobe Integrated Runtime (nee Apollo) and Microsoft's Silverlight and Google Gears.

Gosling thinks JavaFX has a chance, too, though, listing several advantages he believes it has: a richer user interface, faster performance, a robust and well accepted language and better abilities when a computer is disconnected from a network.

And security, he adds. Adobe's AIR is designed to let programs work like regular PC software, but Gosling thinks the approach unwise. "It's a petri dish for viruses. Security is really hard to implement well."