Gauson

A while back, I had published an article “Which CMS is the best?” writing on the different functionalities of which CMS to choose: Drupal or Joomla. In the Open Source CMS Award over the years, Drupal and Joomla have always been featured in the top three positions of Best Open Source PHP CMS category. This year, Drupal was awarded 1^st prize in this category with Joomla being 2^nd runner-up just behind Wordpress.

It may or may not come as a surprise to many that Wordpress has earned the top prize by winning the Overall Best Open Source SMS Award this year. Furthermore it is the first time in the past four years that Wordpress has won the award, securing a place for them in the Hall of Fame category for the award in 2010. This is an incredible achievement for Wordpress as it is now recognized as a full-featured CMS and not just a blogging platform in the market which signifies that it has become a great success amongst users and developers over the past year.

Other categories in the CMS Award included Most Promising Open Source CMS and Best Other Open Source PHP CMS. ImpressCMS won top spot for Most Promising Open Source CMS while Pligg and Pixie shared a tie for 1st runner-up position. Last but not least, winner of the Best Other Open Source PHP CMS was Plone followed by dotCMS and mojoPortal.

Congratulations to all the winners of this year’s CMS Award!!

Just last month, Adobe announced the introduction of their Adobe Flash Player 10.1 software for smartphones, netbooks, smartbooks, PCs and other Internet-connected devices. The Flash software 10.0 brings full Flash including GPU acceleration to smartphones assuring a consistent runtime release allowing for uncompromised web browsing of applications, video and content across various platforms.

The use of Flash technology is nearly universal around the World Wide Web and is used by well-known sites such as Youtube, NVIDIA, Shockwave and many more. However one of the main drawbacks of Flash on smartphones is that it is too resource-intensive and can drain a mobile device’s battery or slow it down.

Recognizing the performance issues, Adobe is utilizing graphical hardware acceleration for the full version of Flash to make it easier for mobile processing demands. Flash 10.1 has a powerful device integration which enables Flash developers to make use of device-specific features such as virtual keyboards, multi-touch gestures as well as accelerometers.

Apple nervous about adobe flash on iPhone
Missing from the line-up is Apple, whose iPhone SDK policies prevent Adobe from running Flash Player on the iPhone. Apple stated Flash is not good enough for its iPhone due to its resource requirements and it also poses a threat to the popular App store as it gives developers the opportunity to bypass Apple’s software development kit and create content with Adobe’s technology instead.

Argument is that iPhone users are becoming less interested in Flash apps on the iPhone as they have plenty of Apple ones to keep them occupied. Additionally, Apple appears to be backing HTML5 for its mobile platform which can provide some Flash-like abilities such as video streaming.

There is also now the Flash Player 10.1 pre-release version available for PCs and netbooks to give developers the chance to assess and give feedback to Adobe regarding compatibility issues and new features. A beta version is expected to be released for Palm WebOS later this year. Public betas for Google Android and Symbian OS are expected to be available early 2010.

Earlier this week, Adobe Labs released its two newest beta test versions of its Flash 10.1 and AIR 2.0 (Adobe Integrated Runtime) technologies. Adobe said the new versions do not just include much-requested features but they also represent a big push into devices beyond the PC, starting with smartphones, and eventually applications that run on every device you use.

Chrome, Google’s much-anticipated operating system, will be available on the market according to the latest buzz on the Internet. Chrome OS, which shares its name with Google’s web browser, was announced last July. The news from the blog TechCrunch cites from an “unnamed source” saying users will be able to download Chrome OS within a week.

It will sit on top of a Linux kernel and will use a new windowing system. It will also have limited driver support therefore Google will only approve installations on a limited number of computers –mostly netbooks – including a number of Eee PCs. The Web will be its application development platform and may become a serious contender to Windows 7 in the netbook computer space.

Previously, Google had fixed the release date stating “The first netbooks running Google Chrome OS will be available for consumers in the second half of 2010.”

However thrilling TechCrunch’s news may sound, this isn’t the first time a rumor like this has been started. Just a month ago, numerous sources in China claimed devices running preview builds of Chrome OS would be out in the market as early as November. This was then followed by a series of premature reports of the OS that all turned out to be false information.

Nevertheless, it will be exciting to see how well Chrome competes with Windows 7 and Snow Leopard from Apple only recently released to consumers. But if there is one thing to be learnt in the world of technology, it is to never leave Google out of the loop.

Just don’t get your hopes too high if you are looking forward to having Google’s Chrome OS on your notebook before the month’s end.