Yesterday
at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference (eTech), Microsoft's Live Labs
unveiled a new mobile technology, called Deepfish which is designed to offer
mobile users quick and convenient Web browsing that more closely resembles the
experience of browsing the Web on desktop computers. Deepfish is a lightweight
client application that leverages a powerful server side technology for delivery
of content such as web pages to a Windows Mobile device. Content is displayed in
a familiar desktop format that requires no additional work by the content or
site author. Sounds familiar? Yes, indeed it seems to work similar to
Bitstream's ThunderHawk solution which is also a client/server combination.
Anyway, with Deepfish Microsoft's Live Labs wants to reach the following goals:
- A familiar look and feel of web pages on mobile as seen on desktop
- Bandwidth optimized rendering for faster content delivery
- Address bar web navigation
- Intuitive zooming, panning and cue map for quick navigation and browsing
- Support for simple link navigation and form submission
As a technology preview, Deepfish is early in its development cycle (still a few
releases from beta quality) and as a result, some features are not implemented
or are only partially implemented yet. Currently, the technology preview does
not support ActiveX controls, AJAX, cookies, Javascript and HTTP POST.
While the Deepfish technology preview was available on a limited basis for
public download until tonight, the Deepfish has already reached the maximum of
planned downloads and isalready closed to new participants since the initial
limit was reached pretty fast (keep in mind, that Deepfish isn't just an
application which runs on your Windows Mobile smartphone but also includes a
server component).
It's not yet known how Microsoft will continue with the Deepfish technology
preview. We might see it released as a stand-alone product, maybe we will see
parts of the developed technology in other products later or it might fade away
as fast as it appeared. Time will tell.
Anyway, if you wasn't lucky enough to participate in the Beta, there is a
video available at Channel 10 which is worth to watch.
Cheers ~ Arne
