Underexposed

JPEG XR, an image format created by Microsoft that promises a number of advantages over JPEG, has cleared a key standardization hurdle.

The Joint Photographic Experts Group, which standardized the original and still ubiquitous JPEG format, sent JPEG XR to the "final phases of standardization" after a vote at a January meeting, the group said Thursday. That means the standard's future is more certain.

"The committee expects the JPEG XR International Standard to be published later this year," the group said.

JPEG XR offers a few advantages over JPEG, according to Microsoft. For one thing, as the XR "extended range" abbreviation suggests, it offers greater dynamic range--the span between the brightest brights and darkest darks in a photo.

JPEG uses 8-bit encoding that provides 256 gradations, but JPEG XR can use 16 bits or more for finer distinctions and more editing flexibility. Newer digital SLRs typically record 14 bits data, and the hobbyist practice of combining multiple shots into a single high-dynamic range image also benefits from more bit depth.

Another advantage of JPEG XR is that it uses a more efficient compression algorithm that provides either twice the image quality as JPEG at the same file size, or half the file size for the same quality, according to Microsoft. And unlike JPEG, setting JPEG XR to record at its highest quality level loses no information to compression artifacts.

Last, it's easy with JPEG XR to decode just a portion of an image, making it faster to zoom in on an image, and Microsoft designed the technology to work well baked into camera image processors' circuitry, not just to run in software.

Microsoft hopes JPEG XR will become widely used, but it faces a huge challenge in displacing conventional JPEG. It's taken the first steps, though: Windows Vista supports the format on which JPEG XR is based, called Windows Media Photo and later HD Photo. Microsoft also has released HD Photos support for Photoshop and Mac OS X

(Via Bill Crow)

For a company that's trying to take on the online might of Yahoo and Google, Microsoft has had a decidedly inferior photo-sharing site. Now that's changing, though.

As part of an overhaul of its online properties, the company announced a number of improvements to its Windows Live Photos site.

Among the new features:

• 25GB of storage space and no more 500-shots-per-month limit on uploads.

• A what's new feed to show what photos your contacts are adding, part of the social side of Windows Live.

• A new slide show view.

• Better permissions for controlling how photos are shared.

I found the new site workable but still imperfect.

The most glaring ugliness to me was that the slide show is limited to small versions of the images. That's no problem on an 800x600-pixel screen, but even Flickr, which still hasn't figured out how to dynamically scale images on its regular photo pages, has full-screen slide shows.

Another hitch was that it's apparently impossible to rename your photos. So pick a file name you like before you upload. And you can't change the order of photos shown unless you want to diddle with the photos' "date taken" metadata, which sounds like a bad idea for any number of reasons.

As a fan of keyboard controls, though, I do like the fact that I can use the arrow keys to cycle through photos in an album, though it works only intermittently.

Update 10 a.m. December 5: My bad: it turns out you can change photo titles. Here's Microsoft's description how: "Click on any photo in the browse view of the thumbnails and the page that comes up lists several different options. Listed under More is the ability to move, copy or rename a file."

I still prefer Flickr's method, though: Click on the title, type a new name, then click "save."

Microsoft now lets people using its Live Search Maps service get a more immersive view by integrating the company's Photosynth panoramic viewer technology.

Photosynth stitches multiple images together into a 3D view, and people can in effect gaze around from a virtual vantage point. Areas with Photosynth views can be shown in the "explore collections" view of a map that also lets people see photos and other additions to a map.

I found the feature easy to use--even the Photosynth installation that had given me some headaches when I tried it during its early days. I still don't like the vast swath of empty green wasted space that could have been used to make the imagery even more immersive, though, and so far there aren't a huge number of places with Photosynth photos.

For full instructions on how to use Photosynth on Microsoft's maps, check the Virtual Earth evangelist's blog from Microsoft.

In addition, Microsoft said Wednesday it added 47 terabytes of new aerial imagery on Wednesday showing new views of Spain, Japan, Canada, the United States, Australia, and assorted European countries, according to the Virtual Earth blog.

Microsoft and Nikon have signed a cross-licensing deal that gives each company access to the other's patents.

The deal is one of a growing list from Microsoft, which has been seeking to establish the heft and significance of its intellectual property effort.

Detailed terms of the Nikon deal weren't disclosed, but the companies said Nikon is compensating Microsoft through the alliance.

"The companies believe that this patent cross-licensing agreement will substantially benefit customers of consumer products including digital cameras," the companies said in a statement Wednesday. "Both parties will be able to innovate openly with each others' technologies, enabling new features and products to come to market."

Nikon and Microsoft didn't indicate what new products and features would be enabled through the patent agreement, but they did point to existing cooperative efforts involving wireless cameras and raw image formats.

Raw images are taken directly from a camera's image sensor with little or no in-camera processing; the formats more detailed and flexible than JPEG, but they're also proprietary and specific to each camera model, and they require processing with software to become useful to most consumers. Windows Vista has the ability to display raw images as long as a camera maker supplies the necessary encoding and decoding software plug-in, called a codec.

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif.--Google didn't invent open-source programming or pioneer the mobile-phone software market, but when it comes to its Android project, don't accuse Google of playing follow the leader.

Although the company has long used open-source software within its internal operations, Android is Google's highest-profile attempt so far to use the collaborative programming method to change how computing is done outside the company's walls.

Google is hardly the first company to try using open-source software to shake up the industry. What's notable is Google's willingness to ruffle feathers in the open-source world, including those of potential allies such as Red Hat, with its approach.

Google is bucking some open-source conventions by avoiding the fashionable General Public License (GPL) to govern the software and creating the software internally before involving outsiders. At the same time, though, it's been easing gradually into the mainstream open-source fold.

"Initially their approach was almost like a proprietary product approach," said John Bruggeman, chief marketing officer of Linux seller and Android partner Wind River. "I think they have adjusted all elements of that strategy as they go. It's much more open-source friendly, more developer friendly."

And though Google's path might be somewhat different, the company has a decidedly ordinary open-source destination in mind: building a broad, cooperative community to thwart a Microsoft hegemony.

Andy Rubin, the Google engineering director leading Android, likens today's chaotic hodge-podge of mobile phone software to the early days of personal computers. In mobile phones, though, Microsoft has begun offering integrated software ranging from office applications and a Web browser at the high level down through the operating system kernel at the low level, and that full suite has a powerful appeal to phone manufacturers.

"It's a repeat of what happened in the PC industry. We want to make sure there's an alternative," Rubin said. But Google doesn't want to be the sole gateway to its software. "We wanted to make sure there's not a single source, (so) if a carrier or user or third party encountered a problem, they could fix it themselves."

Android is massive open-source project--or at least it will become one when the first phones start shipping later this year. The recent version 2.6.24 of the Linux kernel has about 8 million lines of code, but about 8.6 million lines of Android's 11 million are open-source, Rubin said.

Android components that will emerge as open-source software include Nuance's speech-recognition software and PacketVideo's music and audio decoder. Google also has been working to obtain hardware specifications to support mobile-phone chips from Qualcomm, Broadcom, and Sirf, he said. "You'll see our stuff being the first Linux on Qualcomm," Rubin said.

Closed first, then open
But that open-source release will be complex. Depending on how it manages the task, Google could face praise or scorn later this year when it unleashes that code upon the world. The hardest part is not just sharing the code, but in integrating outside developers into a project that's been growing within a company's confines.

There's nothing technically wrong with an open-source project that's solely run by a single company, but it's rarely any company's open-source goal. It's not likely to attract outside coders who want to make a name for themselves by adding important new features or corporate allies that might fund their own contributions.

Google's closed start doesn't sit well with Red Hat Chief Technology Officer Brian Stevens, whose company is among the most aggressive advocates of open-source software.

"I think that decreases their chance of success more than it increases it," Stevens said. "It's preventing the participation of many smart developers who want to get involved in the development of the Android platform...The community comes at the early inception of a product, not when you decide you're ready to ship a product."

Mike Schroepfer, Mozilla's vice president of engineering, added that in general, corporate attempts to make open-source projects out of proprietary software are often hampered by an unwillingness to share control.

"People think publishing the source code is the hard part, but the harder thing by far is having open participation in the decision-making--distributing authority outside your four walls," Schroepfer said. "Where some of these really go wrong is when people aren't empowered and their voices don't matter, they're not going to do participate."

Google won't face the challenges of full-on proprietary software going open-source, though, said Redmonk analyst Stephen O'Grady: the open-source move is part of the Android plan, not a development that arrived years later.

The open-source hand-off
Google has its reasons for the closed start.

"We want to get to the point where it's stable enough," Rubin said. Then, after the open-source change, "We want it to be thriving."

The company is working on the hand-off to the outside world. Android already is a project whose development is distributed among the Open Handset Alliance members collectively backing Android, for starts, as well as among multiple international Google offices. "We're learning how to do a large-scale distributed effort," Rubin said.

The company also has a team more 10 strong working on external developer relations for Android, Rubin said. That team that will grow larger once the code is released and absorbs the Google "maintainers" in charge of Android components, such as its Dalvik virtual-machine software for running applications written in Java.

Google's team under open-source project manager Chris DiBona, combined with some from the Android project, will work with outside programmers, Rubin said. "The developers I have on core development of this, when it gets open-sourced, will move over and will be coding for the open-source tree," or code base, he said.

Google also is taking a community-centric approach to defining what Android is. Project maintainers get to accept or reject contributions, as is common in the open-source realm. What's new is that Google will offer a certification test suite that's based on those maintainers' work in order to maintain compatibility among different versions of Android.

"If it passes, then they get to use the Open Handset Alliance Android trademark name," Rubin said. "We're not saying you can't branch. We're saying you don't want to branch."

Licensing choices
Google has been criticized for not working with existing open-source projects. In addition, Sun Microsystems has expressed concern that Google's development of Dalvik could fragment the Java world so that Java software for running Android applications wouldn't work on other Java phones and vice versa.

But Google chose to go it alone with Dalvik and some other projects for one big reason, Rubin said: it wanted to avoid the GNU General Public License (GPL). The pioneering license that serves in effect as the manifesto of the Free Software movement requires that software projects derived from a GPL product also be released under GPL. That concept in effect requires reciprocity: if you use GPL code and distribute the resulting software, you must contribute your changes back to the GPL code base.

Google didn't want to raise that issue, uncharitably referred to as the GPL's "viral" nature, for phone makers that might want to add proprietary features as a way to differentiate, so it chose the less confining Apache License, Rubin said.

"The thing that worries me about GPL is this: suppose Samsung wants to build a phone that's different in features and functionality than (one from) LG. If everything on the phone was GPL, any applications or user interface enhancements that Samsung did, they would have to contribute back," Rubin said. "At the application layer, GPL doesn't work."

Of course, giving back is precisely one of the intents of the license, which Richard Stallman initially wrote to govern a clone of Unix that couldn't be made proprietary; many companies have embraced the GPL, including initial skeptics such as Wind River. And other embedded-computing efforts are using GPL software more widely.

"It's a pretty conservative interpretation," Bruggeman said of Google's GPL stance.

Open-source advocates long have wrestled over whether it's better to permit companies to make code proprietary, as the Apache License permits, or to compel them to keep it open, as the GPL requires. Even though Android uses the Linux kernel, which is governed by the GPL, don't expect Google's position to put an end to this debate.

For that matter, don't expect Rubin's present thoughts to be the final word. The company has shown itself willing to change.

"Here's what I think. No. 1, they're learning as they go," Bruggeman said. "No. 2, they learn really fast."

It looks like Mark Hamburg, an Adobe Systems Photoshop and Lightroom programming guru, will be leading work to give Microsoft Windows a better user interface.

And given the dramatic user interface differences between earlier and later Adobe projects that Hamburg worked on, that raises some very intriguing possibilities.

Microsoft and Adobe Systems confirmed Hamburg's move on Monday, but at the time, Microsoft wouldn't share details beyond saying Hamburg would work on "user experience" for the company. However, Chicago photographer and Photoshop consultant Jeff Schewe, who caught a plane to California to attend Hamburg's going-away party, shared a lot more on his blog.

"He was heavily recruited by Microsoft and given an unbeatable opportunity to work outside his normal digital imaging field," Schewe said. "Mark was invited by (Microsoft Chief Technology Officer) David Vaskevitch to come lead a team working on the future of operating system user experience at Microsoft."

Schewe also quoted Hamburg about the change: "Given that I find the current Windows experience really annoying and yet I keep having to deal with it, this opportunity was a little too interesting to turn down. I can't imagine doing serious imaging anywhere other than Adobe, but I needed to do something other than imaging for a while."

Hamburg's baby: Adobe Photoshop Lightroom
So what does Hamburg's move portend? It's way too soon to say Microsoft will be better able to counter the widespread opinion that Apple's Mac OS X is superior, but Hamburg's Adobe work sheds some light on the new possibilities.

Hamburg joined Adobe to work on version 2.0 of Photoshop in 1990. After Photoshop 7 was released, he turned his attention to lead Shadowland, the project that became Photoshop Lightroom. That software, which is used to edit and catalog photos, is a major break from Photoshop when it comes to user interface.

Where Photoshop has a seemingly endless list of menus, submenus, dialog boxes, and configurable panels, Lightroom adapts to the task at hand.

Central is the photo in the middle, as large as possible. Adjustment panes can be pulled out from all four sides based on various tasks. The software shifts appearance according to modes for managing catalogs, developing an individual photo, showing slideshows, printing, and creating photo galleries for the Web.

Overhauling user interfaces can be tough, though. Short-term pain caused by unfamiliarity can challenge the long-term benefits of a clean-slate design.

Adobe is proceeding cautiously with a Photoshop interface overhaul. And Microsoft has had trouble with its "ribbon," which presents a task-based interface across the top of Microsoft Office 2007 programs. It's been tough for many users to adjust to the ribbon, and Microsoft is trying ways to make it easier to find the commands they want to perform.

Hamburg's goals: "elegance," "personality"
Some possibilities can be gleaned from Hamburg himself. He discussed some of his Lightroom design goals in a 2007 blog posting.

"We wanted Lightroom to seem elegant, to exhibit grace, to show an attention to style beyond the utilitarian aspect that dominated Adobe's products up to that time. We wanted a richer UI experience," Hamburg said.

And Adobe wanted to give Lightroom a deliberate personality--even if that means some feathers are ruffled.

"One of the goals in Lightroom was to consciously think about the product personality we were trying to create with the expectation that a less accidental personality would induce a stronger emotional reaction in users. That stronger reaction can be both positive and negative," he said. "The second part of this goal was to have enough passionate users to outweigh the detractors."

Finally, he said Adobe wanted to balance power and complexity, adding the latter only when it significantly increased the former.

Designing a user interface for a product with as limited a range of abilities as Lightroom is a very different task than a user interface for an entire operating system, though. But even if Windows doesn't directly copy Lightroom, for example, by changing its look to suit the task at hand, I for one would welcome a version of Windows with elegance, personality, and power.

Update 12:11 p.m. PDT: I added a comment from Adobe.

Mark Hamburg, a programmer who worked on Photoshop since version 2.0 and helped lead development of the newer Photoshop Lightroom, has left Adobe Systems for a new job at Microsoft.

Martin Evening, a Lightroom expert and author, reported Hamburg's new job on his blog Friday, saying Hamburg will be involved in user experience work. A Microsoft representative confirmed the new hire but didn't share further details.

Adobe praised Hamburg but said there are plenty of other programmers to carry the torch.

"Adobe has reaped tremendous benefit from the leadership of Mark Hamburg and his active role on both the Photoshop and Lightroom teams," the company said. "However, we are confident that the team he leaves behind are equally as talented and innovative. It is really their hard work and effort that has brought us great success with the launch of Lightroom, and it continues with the current Lightroom 2.0 beta."

Hamburg was named inventor of the year by the Silicon Valley Intellectual Property Law Association in 1999 and entered the National Association of Photoshop Professionals' Hall of Fame in 2003.

Linus Torvalds, leader of the Linux kernel project that's among the best-known open-source threats to Windows, has words of praise for Microsoft's announcement last week that it would share some previously hard-to-get technology with open-source programmers.

"I may make fun of Microsoft occasionally, and yeah, I think they do stupid things at times, but I think this one was a step in the right direction," Torvalds said in an e-mail.

"Could it have been even more? Sure. But give them credit for at least seeming to open up a little, even if it probably was at least partially ."

Torvalds' opinion goes right down the middle of the mixed reactions various people in the open-source software area had to the news.

Some praised Microsoft for making it easier for programmers to get access to technology such as communication protocols and file formats, and to get their software to work better with Microsoft's; others griped about Microsoft's continued desire for open-source companies to obtain patent licenses.

Torvalds isn't in the castigation camp. "Does it mean people should trust and love them? No," he said. "But I also don't see the point in flaming them over what is clearly at least an incremental improvement."

Open-source fans can be a skeptical bunch, but I've seen their collective opinions shift--for example in the gradually diminishing loathing for Sun Microsystems as that company stopped deriding Linux and started moving its portfolio to open-source software.

So it's not a surprise that various representatives had a mixed reaction to Microsoft's move Thursday to share details of its technology with open-source programmers.

The move could make it easier for many projects to work well with Microsoft products and potentially replace them--for example the Thunderbird e-mail software could communicate better with Microsoft Exchange servers and also displace Microsoft Outlook on PCs. But Microsoft also made it clear that a pledge not to sue open-source programmers only applied in "non-commercial" contexts, so open-source fans didn't get everything they want.

And even though Microsoft said it now will share the specific list of patents it says it has on technology it wants to license to others--something open-source fans have sought once Microsoft asserted last year that Linux and other projects violate 235 patents--some see signing licenses as incompatible with open-source license requirements.

For its part, Microsoft is pledging to move beyond its historically adversarial treatment of the open-source realm. "As Microsoft takes this significant step forward into the interconnected world of the future, we aspire to doing so with members of the open source community by our side now and for the long haul," said Bill Hilf, Microsoft's general manager of platform strategy, on his blog. Hilf previously ran Microsoft's Linux lab and was an Linux deployment specialist at IBM.

I surveyed various companies and individuals about the move and received some other thoughts unsolicited. Here are some reactions:

• Jim Zemlin, Linux Foundation executive director: "The world of software development has been marching in a steady direction toward being open and transparent. As Linux's use continues to rise, so does the demand for customers to enable it to interoperate with Microsoft products. This announcement by Microsoft seems to indicate they want to participate in that march. Even if some of the announced details still seem less than ideal for open source developers, at least it's a first step."

• Michael Cunningham, Red Hat's general counsel: "Red Hat regards this most recent announcement with a healthy dose of skepticism. Three commitments by Microsoft would show that it really means what it is announcing today:

"Commit to open standards: Rather than pushing forward its proprietary, Windows-based formats for document processing, OOXML, Microsoft should embrace the existing ISO-approved, cross-platform industry standard for document processing, Open Document Format (ODF) at the International Standards Organization's meeting next week in Geneva...

"Commit to interoperability with open source: Instead of offering a patent license for its protocol information on the basis of licensing arrangements it knows are incompatible with the GPL (General Public License)--the world's most widely used open source software license--Microsoft should extend its Open Specification Promise to all of the interoperability information that it is announcing today will be made available...

"Commit to competition on a level playing field: Microsoft's announcement today appears carefully crafted to foreclose competition from the open-source community. How else can you explain a 'promise not to sue open-source developers' as long as they develop and distribute only 'non-commercial' implementations of interoperable products? This is simply disingenuous."

• Miguel de Icaza, founder of the GNOME project and a Novell programmer working on Mono, an open-source implementation of Microsoft's .Net software: "As a chess move, it is a fascinating one...On the surface it looks very good. (There are) lots of things that we want to interoperate with--Office, SQL Server, SharePoint. Getting the documentation to everyone sounds great, and it seems like they are serious about doing more interoperability work...When the full list for patents becomes available, the question is what will open-source vendors do if they find pieces that have historically infringed: will they choose to license and be the recipients of the community wrath, or will they hold their grounds and risk a lawsuit?"

• Jeremy Allison, a founder of the Samba open-source project: "The devil is in the details. If they can follow through with this, the world will be a better place...It doesn't mean any change for us (Samba) as we already had all these documents, and the promise not to sue is only for 'non-commercial' open source, which is a bit meaningless. At least everyone now gets access to the same info, which I'm very happy about. Hey, should we ask for our money back ? :-)."

• Matt Asay, vice president of business development for Alfresco and a writer for CNET's Blog Network: "The really big news is Microsoft's commitment to open APIs (application programming interfaces) and open protocols...It's great news, and it's big news. My company has been seeking this API and protocol information for months (years, really). But Microsoft's pledge doesn't obviate the need to negotiate patent royalties, if required, with the company."

• Andi Gutmans, a co-founder of Zend: "I have no doubt Microsoft is doing the right thing for their business. I believe Microsoft has finally understood that their closed nature has significantly hindered the growth of their ecosystem...Microsoft has had a strong Microsoft-centric ecosystem, but going down this path they are able to extend their applicable market beyond today's reach...I believe the PHP community can only benefit from this move. With PHP being a heterogeneous solution which works on pretty much any operating system, any database and any Web Server; the more interoperability capabilities it has with all open-source and proprietary solutions the better...Microsoft's all or nothing approach has been an accelerator for the adoption of open-source operating systems. While I am a big fan of Linux, I do believe that this is going to put an increasing amount of pressure on the Linux/Unix backers to deliver innovation and value on top of these systems."

Update 5:32 p.m.: I added commentary from Microsoft's Bill Hilf.