Apple Malaysia opens web store

Fans of Apple’s products will be happy to know that the company has finally opened the Apple Online Store in Malaysia. Not to be confused with the iTunes Music Store (which still isn’t here yet), the Apple Online Store is where you’d go to buy products such as iPods, iMacs, MacBooks as well as the extensive line of related accessories.

Amongst the advantages of the online store is the ability to customise a Mac by, say, adding more memory or a bigger hard disk drive and for iPods, free personal engraving.

Adobe's Flex Builder

The next version of Flex Builder will help Windows developers slap an Adobe-authored front-end on data-centric .NET applications. Adobe Systems today demonstrated Flex Builder client-side code talking to Microsoft's C# language via the Adobe Action Message Format (AMF). "This is AMG with .NET on the back-end," senior technical evangelist Ben Forta told Adobe's MAX conference Tuesday morning.

In a jibe at Microsoft, Adobe's evangelist added: ".Net developers want to build applications with rich internet experiences and they haven't had a viable client technology." This was just a preview, so details were scarce, but Forta said Adobe planned to go further "with more messaging." There's still no date yet for when Gumbo will be released.

By going further on messaging, this made it sound like Gumbo will use AMG to talk to, and connect with, C# and .Net-based back-end services through Adobe's BlazeDS. This already uses AMF to exchange data between an Adobe Flash and AIR applications and a database. The difference in Gumbo is it will introduce something Adobe has called Client Data Management (CDM), to bind user-interface components to operations on the server.

Central to this is a CDM data store that acts as a middle man, by handling user requests for things like creating, updating, and deleting data and then issuing a single call to the client data management's commit() method to handle synchronization of all the changes. Adobe's goal is for Flex to get more widely used in enterprise applications - in things like data dashboards, forms, and content management that are written in PHP, Java, or .NET.

According to Adobe here: "It was sometimes a challenge for developers to connect to these different back-end systems and manage data within a Flex application." It's the latest chapter in the on-going interface battle between Adobe and Microsoft. The latter is peddling its Silverlight browser-based media player as a front-end for presenting business data in .NET servers and services in the form of graphs and charts.

Also demonstrated at MAX was Adobe's Project Alchemy, to run C and C++ code in the Flash Player. Millions of lines of C/C++ code have been authored in - among other things - Microsoft tools over the years. Adobe now wants to make that code accessible to Flash Player and AIR.

Alchemy translates C/C++ into ActionScript 3.0 to play in Flash Player 10 and AIR 1.5. One possible application: Bringing over games authored in C and C++ to Flash. Furthering the "come-to-Flash" message, Alchemy also lets you play Ogg Vorbis and Lib Vorbis that were previously unable to run in the Flash Player or AIR.

Amazon's cloud spreads into content delivery

Amazon's ever-cumulating cloud is today rolling into the business of speedy Internet content delivery. The online bookseller today flipped the beta switch on Amazon CloudFront, a new service that caches high-traffic content on the company's worldwide network of edge locations so it's always near the end-user for low latency goodness.

The service itself isn't novel, with vendors like Akamai and Limelight already firmly entrenched in the content delivery biz. This type of thing even has its own acronym for you to remember (CDN for either Content Delivery Network or Content Distribution Network, depending on who you ask). Store that one away for later.

Amazon's spin on CDN (see, useful already) is offering it on a pay-as-you-go model rather than longterm contracts. That's either good news for small businesses that commonly can't afford such luxuries or a potential money pit, depending on the end-user's love for their web browser's "clear cache" and "reload" buttons.

CloudFront is designed to compliment the rest of Amazon Web Services...er...services, like S3 storage and EC2. Customers store the original versions of content (photos, video, music, applications, etc.) into an Amazon S3 "bucket," call up an API that returns a unique domain name for the content, then link to it on a web site or web application.

Amazon has 14 edge locations around the world where content can be cached at present. Interestingly enough, the list of spots released today also would seem to shed light on the locations of Amazon's data centers, which it doesn't like to share. The locations are:

Pricing depends on where the content is stored. Requests from Europe and US cost $0.17 per GB for the first 10TB transferred out per month. Hong Kong requests cost $0.21 per GB for the first TB per month. Japan requests costs $0.22 per GB for the first TB per month. The price per GB decreases slightly when bandwidth reaches 40TB, 100TB, and 150TB+. Amazon has a CloudFront pricing calendar if you want to get into the nitty-gritty.

"Because our costs vary by location, pricing for data served from edge locations outside the US varies, and is currently slightly higher," said Amazon's Jeff Barr on the AWS blog. "You will also pay the usual S3 price for the 'origin fetch' which takes place when a requested object is transferred from S3 to an edge location, and for storage of the object in S3." CloudFront is available now in beta and is currently being pitched at web developers and businesses.

Belkin switch PC to Mac cable

PC-to-Mac USB file-transfer cables and migration utilities have been out for a while, but Belkin's out today with a new take on the idea it says makes the transition "as seamless as possible." We're guessing that has more to do with the Switch-to-Mac Cable's bundled software than the dongle itself -- Belkin's custom Migration Assistant (not the OS X assistant) automatically transfers your media, files, and internet prefs, leaving you free to try on mock turtlenecks and practice your air of quiet superiority. Should be out soon for $50. Download this document

E-Waste: The Dirty Secret of Recycling Electronics

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