After successful public alpha release in April at the Web2.0 Expo in San Francisco, Dekoh has received good response from several thousand users who have tried Dekoh applications and provided very valuable feedback.

Here are some changes in this Beta release:

1. Use of RSS. In this release Dekoh Photos notifications like friends’ comments and friends’ picture shares comes as a RSS feed on Dekoh Desktop portal. RSS API (generation and consuming) is now available for Dekoh applications. Other Dekoh applications will be generating RSS notifications in the next release. In the picture below you can see 2 sections on the right side “Activity on Dekoh network”, you will get this notification on your desktop when another Dekoh buddy shares pictures for you. “Activity on my desktop” shows a new entry when any of your buddies posts a comment on your shared pictures. Expect more use of RSS to come in future!

2. There is a new look-n-feel for Desktop portal as you can see above

3. Performance and usability improvements in Dekoh Photos and Books. Adding books from a search result is a one click operation now

4. The big new thing in this release is availability of much awaited Dekoh Music. If you are using Itunes to organize your music it automatically imports your music from Itunes (looks for Itunes Music Libray.xml). Others can click on Add to select directories to scan for MP3 files. Dekoh Music lets you stream music from your desktop. You can listen to music on your computer from anywhere. Share albums/playlists to yourself (or your buddies, just email address is enough). Enjoy listening to your music! Soon a Music widget will be available that you can place on your blogs and other social networking sites. No uploading of music it just streams from your desktop.

Want to upgrade to new version?

If you already have Dekoh installation:

1. Click on “Find updates” link on the Desktop portal. It first installs a critical update (a small fix in our version updater to transition to this beta). Once the download is 100% click on “RESTART DEKOH” button.

2. When Dekoh desktop restarts, click on Find updates again. This time it will show you that there is new version of all dekoh components are available (version 0.4.2.2). Click on install on each of them (small trick: click on install on one of the Dekoh applications, it will suggest that it will get you new versions of dependent components “portal and server”. Will save you clicking on these components separately). Once you have downloaded all components. Click on restart dekoh.

Once Dekoh desktop restarts you should be on the new beta version!! the portal UI should look like the above image.

This is a beta version. There maybe some issues in upgrading. Windows vista seems to have some issues. Please help us fix them by posting your problem on Dekoh forums. We are very prompt in answering questions and helping you.

Enjoy using Dekoh beta. It is FREE! Send us your feedback, we would love to hear from you.

Vijay
Dekoh

Technorati: Music, Media, Player, Streaming

However, in building RIA, two things from the web development experience become important:

1. Being cross-platform and not to exclude anyone (as the web does not do it)
2. Refactor and reuse what exists (skills, programming/deployment models, code-base, tools, and more)

With the kind of popularity enjoyed by Java and related open-source products makes us to think that Java-driven RIA may just be the best way to go. RIA platform like Dekoh combine many familiar technologies, products, API, making it easier for web developers to address desktop opportunities with ease.

Those of you who will be at JavaOne in the next few days, are welcome to come and see Dekoh at Pramati Technologies booth #812 (right at the entrance, just after Intel).

Dekoh Desktop the platform for RIA applications, a suite of personal media applications, and Dekoh Network are now available for early access users.

Dekoh consists of three elements:

1. Dekoh Desktop: the developer platform; the core runtime engine that runs on Windows, Linux or Mac OS.
2. Dekoh Applications: the initial set of applications that can make the platform sufficiently interesting for end users to install and try, and
3. Dekoh Network: the sharing platform for end users to create personal networks in the typical web2.0 style right on their desktop.

Dekoh Desktop is a small footprint download that can be installed on user’s desktop in a single click. Dekoh Desktop includes a personal web server on which applications written using open standards like JSP, Ajax, DHTML, Flash can be deployed and accessed through a web browser. Applications deployed on Dekoh Desktop are automatically enabled for web 2.0 functions like tagging, sharing, commenting, rating, etc.

Dekoh has released a suite of applications that provide very useful functionality for organizing and sharing personal media. These applications demonstrate the power of the platform and various options available for developers (AJAX-Flash-Java). Dekoh will continue to enhance these applications through future releases and should be treated as additional products and not samples for the platform.

Dekoh Network allows secure and controlled sharing of applications or content on the desktop. A user can share application/content on his or her desktop with a buddy, who can go to userID.dekoh.net and access it using a web browser. The key thing to note is that the user is not required to upload anything to Dekoh website. Instead, the shared content and applications remain on the desktop and are served from there.

Jay Pullur, CEO of Pramati says, “Dekoh brings the best appeal to a wider developer community of Java™, AJAX, DHTML and Flash. Writing desktop applications using the same web standards, tools, libraries, code base is exciting for developers”.

Dekoh software will be free and open sourced. It will available at http://www.dekoh.com.

Contact:
Vijay Pullur
San Jose, CA
Tel - (408) 435 2700
Fax - (408) 435 2703
Email - vijay(at)dekoh.com
Web - www.dekoh.com

1. Dekoh Desktop: Desktop RIA platform.
2. Dekoh Applications: Dekoh ships applications that run on Dekoh Desktop.
3. Dekoh Network: Enables secure sharing of Dekoh Desktop applications and content on the web. Viewers don’t need to install Dekoh software.

Adobe Apollo and Dekoh Desktop are both RIA platforms on the desktop. Apollo does not have an equivalent of Dekoh Applications and Dekoh Network. Hence, I compare Dekoh Desktop with Apollo in this article.

Installation and OS support

Dekoh and Apollo both are cross operating-system runtime that help developing and running RIA on desktop.

User Interface

Applications can leverage these technologies for rendering UI.

Programming API

Applications can use these technologies for writing application logic.

General

All data regarding Apollo has been gathered through Apollo Developer FAQ and publicly available presentations/videos.

1. Smell tags where you can

Tagging is certainly an extra bit of work and we tend not to do it, unless we are very disciplined type. So, the interface for tagging should appear at carefully chosen places in the user interface of the application. User needs to be suggested with tags, where possible. Example, tags for photo, can be derived from its file name or folder name. Tags can also be derived from metadata stored media files, such as EXIF/IPTC/XMP in JPEG photos, ID3 in MP3 music, and so on.

2. Don’t get selfish making tags proprietary application data

Since tagging takes time and effort, it is very natural for user to expect that this tagging effort is not lost. It is even better if the same tags can be read by other applications (non Dekoh) as well. Dekoh saves tags in a standards based (EXIF/IPTC/ID3) way into the media files. Your tag information always stays in the file and should be readable by all other applications.

3. Tag Cloud should provide different mechanisms to visualize, than just plain vanilla font-size variation.

Tag Cloud can be used for navigation, an alternative to search. User may not remember the exact tags associated with the object. So we provided various ways to view tags to select, sort and filter the tags that should show up in the tag cloud:
- Show tags used: Last month, Last week, Last 24 hours, or All time
- Show how many tags: 25, 50, 100 or All
- Show tags based on usage: Most used, Least used, Newest, or Oldest
- Sorting order: A-z or Z-a
- Show with frequency of occurrence
- Show as: Cloud or list (sometimes it is simply easy to locate in a list)
- And a few styling options: remove coloring, remove varying text size, change to new style sheet

4. Provide powerful management of tags

Tagging could pretty much become useless, unless tags are managed well. Users want to change misspelt tags, too many similar tags (say plurals) and infrequently used or less useful tags (dead wood). We had to provide easy ways for users to add, rename, merge and delete tags, so that they can manage their tags well. I guess some people have called this as Tag Gardening; I like that.

See the live Demo of Tag widget. This is pure javascript library and you can use it in your applications. Read more and Download including source here. We would love to hear your experience. Post a comment on this blog or send an email feedback@dekoh.com.

Vijay

Pramati Technologies today announces its plan to launch Dekoh a new platform for applications that bring an integrated experience of the web and the desktop.

So far Desktop applications and web applications were built and deployed as silos. Desktop applications are usually written OS specific and offer richer user interface. Web applications are accessed through web browsers. They require Internet connectivity and user data uploaded or saved on websites. Collaborating and sharing data is easy in web applications.

Dekoh brings the unique benefits of desktop and web together. Dekoh platform consists of Dekoh Desktop and Dekoh Network.

Dekoh Desktop is a small footprint download that can be installed on user’s desktop in a single click. Dekoh Desktop includes a web server on which applications written using open standards like JSP, Ajax, DHTML, Flash can be deployed and accessed thru a web browser. Applications deployed on Dekoh Desktop are automatically enabled for web 2.0 functions like tagging, sharing, commenting, rating, etc.

Dekoh Network allows controlled sharing of applications or content on the web. A user can share application/content on his or her desktop with a buddy, who can go to userID.dekoh.net and access it. The key thing to note is that the user is not required to upload different kind of content to different websites. Instead, the shared content and applications remain on the desktop and are served from there.

Jay Pullur, CEO of Pramati says, “Dekoh bridges the big divide between Desktop and the Web. Using browser-based applications seamlessly when offline or online is a compelling value. Writing desktop applications using the same web standards like Java™, AJAX, DHTML, Flash, and PHP is exciting for developers”.

Initial release of Dekoh will include the platform and media applications for Photos and Music. An alpha release of Dekoh is expected in a few weeks. A public beta is expected in April of this year. Dekoh software will be free and open sourced. It will available at http://www.dekoh.com.

Contact:
Vijay Pullur
San Jose, CA
Tel - (408) 435 2700
Fax - (408) 435 2703
Email - vijay(at)dekoh.com
Web - www.dekoh.com