Archive for September, 2011

File Under: HTML5, Multimedia
Sep
21
2011

Adobe Hopes Impressive 3-D Graphics Can Save Flash 11

By

Adobe has announced Flash Player 11, a significant update for the company’s beleaguered browser plugin. Flash Player 11 will give Flash developers access to an impressive set of hardware-accelerated 3-D graphics tools.

Alongside Flash 11 Adobe has also announced version 3 of the Flash-based runtime, Adobe Air.

Flash Player 11 and Air 3 are scheduled for release in early October. Adobe hasn’t set an exact date, but the company’s annual Max conference, which runs October 1-5, seems a safe bet.

Adobe’s Flash browser plugin has taken a beating in the last few years, losing many of its traditional web roles like video or animations to the new features in HTML5. Additionally, the mobile world has not been kind to Flash. You won’t find the plugin on any Apple products, nor will it be part of the upcoming Windows 8 Metro platform.

While there are no doubt many Webmonkey readers who would like to see Flash disappear forever, Adobe continues to push Flash in directions which, so far, HTML5 can’t compete.

For this release that means the world of online 3-D graphics rendering. Flash 11 isn’t trying to compete with HTML5 or even reclaim its former strongholds like video (though for streaming DRM video it remains the only real choice). Instead Adobe is going after the burgeoning online gaming market with an impressive new 3-D rendering API.

The new Stage 3D rendering in Flash 11, nicknamed Molehill, is a very low level API for fully hardware accelerated 2-D and 3-D graphics. Adobe claims that Molehill can “efficiently animate millions of objects on screen, smoothly rendered at 60 frames per second.” The end result, according to Adobe, is “console-quality games” in the browser.

Indeed the videos Adobe has released showing off the new Molehill-based graphics are impressive.

Of course one day WebGL may well mean that Flash 11′s 3-D performance is possible without the Flash plugin. Unfortunately Internet Explorer still lacks WebGL support and WebGL’s performance varies considerably from browser to browser. For now Flash 11 looks to have the edge in 3-D graphics, whether or not that will last remains to be seen.

3-D Graphics aren’t the only thing new in this release, Flash 11 is now a 64-bit application on Windows, OS X and Linux. Adobe has also announced the release of Air 3.0 with improved tools for installing Air and converting Air apps to native iOS and Android applications.

If you hate Flash the latest release probably isn’t going to change your mind. Nor is it likely to convince Apple or Microsoft that Flash should be apart of their OSes. But if you’re a game developer who’d like to build console-quality games on the web, Flash 11 is your friend.

See Also:

Tags: ,
File Under: Social
Sep
20
2011

Google+ Adds 9 New Features, Opens to the World

By

Look out Facebook, here comes Google+. After three months as an invite-only service, Google+ has thrown open its door to the world and rolled out a slew of new features. The announcement comes just days before Facebook’s annual f8 developer conference and seems clearly aimed as a shot across the social network giant’s bow. Let the social wars begin.

Of course Facebook has already weathered at least one of Google’s attempts at a social network, the now marginalized Buzz (two if you include Wave). But this time around Google has done more than roll out a Facebook clone. As part of Google’s attempt to carve a unique spot for Plus, the company is rolling out several new features, including mobile support for the Google+ video chat feature known as “Hangouts.”

One part Skype, one part Apple FaceTime, Google+ Hangouts now allow users to video chat with up to ten people. The new mobile support for Hangouts means that you can chat on the go and start up hangouts from any device that supports Google+.

In addition to the mobile support, Hangouts have some new features like screensharing, so you can show off your vacation photos while you’re chatting, or tap your inner artist with the sketchpad feature, which allows collaborative drawing and doodling. There’s also support for Google Docs if you’d like to write or edit documents during your video chat.

To go along with the new features, Google has released a new Hangouts API for building applications on the new Hangouts platform. The API builds on the early preview version of the Google+ API released last week.

There’s also a new broadcasting features for Google+ Hangouts, dubbed “Hangouts on Air.” Hangouts on Air expands Google+ Hangouts beyond just video chat to video broadcasting, which, though limited at the moment, might eventually let anyone broadcast to a large audience without the infrastructure overhead.

The new On Air feature works just like regular Hangouts, start a hangout, and you’ll see a new option to broadcast and record your session. Once you’ve started your hangout up to nine people can join your hangout (just like regular hangouts), but now anyone can watch your live broadcast.

For now Google is limiting the number of broadcasters that can use the new On Air feature, which means that, while the On Air feature has potential to be more than yet another celebrity mouthpiece, at the moment that’s exactly what it is. The first On Air hangout will be with will.i.am on September 21 (details can be had on will.i.am’s Google+ profile).

Far more useful for those who are already heavy Google+ users are the new search tools, which bring search to Google+.

Google also has a slew of Android-specific improvements available in the updated Google+ app for Android. Similar improvements are coming soon to an iOS device near you.

While Google still refers to many of the new features as experimental (read: beta) clearly the new open door policy means that Google thinks its social network is ready to take on its rivals, Facebook and Twitter. With a slew of interesting chat features that go well beyond what Twitter or Facebook offer, Google+ at least now has something different, something it can claim as its own. Whether that translates into mainstream success or means Google+ will go the way of Wave and Buzz remains to be seen.

See Also:

Tags:
File Under: Web Apps
Sep
19
2011

Last Call for Delicious Bookmarks

By

Attention Delicious bookmarking fans, time is running out to transition your bookmarks to the updated, launching-soon Delicious website.

Current Delicious users have until September 23, 2011 to transfer their data and accept the new terms of service. If you don’t move your data by then your bookmarks will disappear forever.

After years of languishing at Yahoo, Delicious, the original king of online bookmarking, was purchased by AVOS, a new company from YouTube creators Chad Hurley and Steven Chen.

The transfer of ownership means that existing users need to agree to the new terms of service before Delicious can relaunch. You can read over the new terms on the AVOS website. If you prefer not to be part of the new Delicious, but would still like to grab your bookmarks before they go poof, you can do so using Delicious’ export tools.

See Also:

Tags:
File Under: Browsers
Sep
19
2011

Chrome 14 Adds Better Audio, ‘Native Client’ Support

By

Google has bumped Chrome 14 from the beta channel into the mainstream. Chrome 14 includes some improvements for Mac OS X users, support for the Web Audio API and Google’s “Native Client” tools are now enabled by default.

If you’d like to try out Chrome 14, head on over to the downloads page.

The biggest news in this release is that Google has enabled its Native Client framework.

Native Client is a set of open source tools that allow Chrome to run compiled C and C++ code the same way the browser currently runs JavaScript or other common web programming languages. Native Code offers both a security sandbox and a set of interfaces that provide C and C++ bindings to the capabilities of HTML5. That means web application developers will be able to tap into desktop libraries to create faster, more powerful web apps.

Despite the potential appeal of Native Client, so far it has not been adopted by other web browsers. Google has created an API for other browsers to tap into, but the lack of standardization seems to have kept any of Chrome’s rivals from jumping on board. However, despite the lack of browser support, Native Client will likely remain important for Google, particularly as part of the company’s Chrome OS platform.

Native Client has been available in previous releases of the Chrome browser, but it required starting Chrome with special flags to turn on Native Client. The latest release enables it by default, but unfortunately Native Client currently only works on apps from Google’s Chrome Web Store. The Chrome blog reports that Google plans to remove that limitation in future releases.

Chrome’s Web Audio API support has been improved in this release. New tools allow developers to add audio effects like 3D sound mixing. Google has some sample code available at Chromium’s Web Audio API demo page (be sure to check out the slightly creepy GAL 9000 experiment).

Fans of Apple’s new OS X Lion also get some love in this release. Chrome 14 offers better integration with OS X Lion, including support for Lion’s fullscreen functionality and the new, minimalist scrollbars.

See Also:

Tags:
File Under: Social
Sep
16
2011

Google Rolls Out a Developer API for Google+

By

Today Google launched the beginnings of an API for the company’s Google+ social network.

APIs allow outside developers to connect with and build applications on top of web services like Facebook, Twitter and now Google+. In fact much of the success of Twitter and Facebook is a result of both services’ developer APIs. If Google+ is to have any hope of catching its competitors it needs a strong API.

Unfortunately what Google has unveiled so far isn’t much of an API. The current version of the Google+ API limits developers to read-only access of public posts. If you were hoping to see apps that tracked your circles or allowed you to post from a desktop app the new API will leave you wanting.

As it stands, the Google+ API is little more than an easier, officially-sanctioned way to screen scrape public Google+ posts.

Google is aware of the APIs shortcomings, calling it a “first step,” and plans to expand the Google+ API in the future. Presumably the first order of business will be adding write-access so that outside apps can interact with Google+ rather than simply consuming Google+ posts.

Of course if you’ve been trying to add Google+ support to your app without these APIs, you can throw away your HTML parsers and enjoy RESTful methods that return JSON to a properly authenticated app (the authentication is handled by OAuth 2). Google has also released a set of client libraries for Python, Ruby, PHP and other popular languages.

It’s limited at the moment, but if you’d like to get started now, so you know what’s going on when the full-featured version arrives, head on over to the Google+ Platform Blog which has a short tutorial and plenty of sample code to get you rolling.

See Also:

File Under: Browsers, HTML5, Multimedia
Sep
16
2011

Metro-style Internet Explorer 10 Ditches Flash, Plugins

By

Windows 8 will have two versions of Internet Explorer 10: a conventional browser that lives on the legacy desktop, and a new Metro-style, touch-friendly browser that lives in the Metro world. The second of these, the Metro browser, will not support any plugins. Whether Flash, Silverlight, or some custom business app, sites that need plugins will only be accessible in the non-touch, desktop-based browser.

Should one ever come across a page that needs a plugin, the Metro browser has a button to go to that page within the desktop browser. This yanks you out of the Metro experience and places you on the traditional desktop.

The rationale is a familiar one: plugin-based content shortens battery life, and comes with security, reliability, and privacy problems. Sites that currently depend on the capabilities provided by Flash or Silverlight should switch to HTML5.

Microsoft has been vigorously promoting HTML5 for the last year and a half as the best way of providing rich interactivity on the Web. HTML5 potentially has reach far beyond that of Flash, since it can target both conventional browsers and closed ecosystems (such as iOS) alike. However, until now, Microsoft’s messaging has been tempered somewhat: use HTML5 when you can, but if you can’t—if you need support for DRM-protected media streaming, for example—then it’s reasonable to switch to an alternative, plugin-based technology.

With Windows 8, however, those reasonable decisions to use Flash or Silverlight will now be heavily penalized. Technically, there’s nothing wrong with the desktop browser, of course; the rendering engine and performance will be identical between both Metro and desktop. But the experience will be substantially inferior. The desktop browser isn’t designed for touch inputs, meaning that users will either have to switch to a mouse and keyboard, or fumble around with an interface that wasn’t built for fingers. The switch to the desktop browser also appears to discard things like back button history and current page state.

This puts the Metro browser in a peculiar position. Microsoft has positioned tablets as merely a different kind of PC. That, the company argues, affords capabilities and features not possible on iPad-style devices. But PCs have browser plugins—more generally, they have the ability to use the right technology for the job. If Metro doesn’t include that flexibility, that could be seen as diminishing the “PCness” of the platform.

HTML5 still isn’t a total replacement for plugin technologies, either. The gap is certainly narrowing: Web Sockets, Web Workers, built-in support for webcams and microphones, and more, are all coming to HTML5 browsers (or are available already), and these features will obviate the need for plugins for many applications. But certain corners are likely to remain; DRM-protected video, for example, might forever be impossible in HTML5, and while many people find DRM distasteful, many broadcasters feel they have little choice but to use it.

The solution to this conundrum on the iOS platform has been the app: companies like Netflix and the BBC have applications to watch video on these devices. The result is that in the desire to push an open, plugin-free Web, companies are being forced to migrate away from the Web entirely. Silverlight developers, at least, will have an easy migration path available to them: the new Metro development environment, used for producing native Metro applications, borrows heavily from Silverlight, and making the switch from an in-browser plugin-based application to a standalone Metro application should be relatively easier. Flash developers will have to wait to see what tools Adobe delivers.

HTML5 design and developer tools also remain weak, though this situation is improving with the creation of products like Adobe Edge.

With Microsoft’s promotion of HTML5, and the precedent set by iOS, the decision to get rid of plugins in the Metro browser is perhaps unsurprising. But it’s not clear that this will truly help Windows 8; the awkward user experience penalizes users who, for no fault of their own, need to use plugins, and detracts from Windows 8′s PC claims. A switch to a more HTML5-powered Web will happen regardless—does Microsoft really need to force the issue like this?

This article originally appeared on Ars Technica, Wired’s sister site for in-depth technology news.

Tags: , , ,
File Under: HTML, HTML5, Web Basics
Sep
15
2011

Google Adds Pagination Tools to its Bag of Indexing Tricks

By

The Google Webmaster blog has posted an overview of how to use the often overlooked HTML link elements rel=”next” and rel=”prev” to let Google’s spiders know that something on your site is part of a paginated series.

What’s a “paginated series”? As the Webmaster blog writes:

Throughout the web, a paginated series of content may take many shapes—it can be an article divided into several component pages, or a product category with items spread across several pages, or a forum thread divided into a sequence of URLs.

The first example, article pagination, is generally not a good idea, particularly if you’re trying to make reader-friendly website. However, the other two use cases, for example a blog’s category archives or a long forum thread, make Google’s rel=”next” and rel=”prev” support much more useful.

If you’d like to add rel=”next” and rel=”prev” to your site it’s not hard to do. All you need to to is add the link rel tag to the <head> section of your paginated content. For example suppose your blog had paginated category archives. On page two of the archive the head tags would look something like this:

If you’re using WordPress you may have noticed that it outputs a number of link rel tags, including rel=”start”, rel=”index” and others, all of which have been dropped from the HTML5 spec. WordPress also plans to drop support for its extraneous rel tags when version 3.3 arrives. However, while most link rel tags have been purged, rel=”next” and rel=”prev” remain part of HTML5.

For more details, including how to handle the “view all” page option some websites use, head over to the Google Webmaster blog.

See Also:

File Under: Browsers, Mobile
Sep
14
2011

Test Drive Firefox for Android Today

By

Firefox on the smaller screen

Mozilla has released an early preview build of its coming Firefox for Tablets web browser. Currently in development for Android 3.0, the Mozilla Mobile Team hasn’t hinted at a release date yet, but interested developers can start playing with a rough build in the Fennec Nightly channel.

To try out Firefox for Tablets head over to Mozilla’s Nightly Builds website and download the Mobile release for Android.

The Nightly channel is the starting point for new features in Firefox’s new rapid release cycle, so be aware that this is very rough, pre-alpha software designed for testing.

So far Firefox for Tablets is looking like a slightly tweaked version of its smaller sibling, Firefox for phones. Writing about the coming tablet build of Firefox earlier this year Ian Barlow, Mozilla’s mobile user experience designer, called Firefox for Tablets “an evolution of its phone based predecessor, with some added enhancements that take advantage of a tablet’s larger screen size.”

The new rough builds in the nightly channel look very close to the mockups Barlow posted earlier. The primary visual difference from the smaller screen version of Firefox for Mobile is the new persistent tab bar to the left of the screen (when in landscape mode). Rotate the tablet around to portrait mode and the tab bar disappears up into a menu item at the top of the screen, leaving more room for actual web content.

If you’ve been missing a tablet-optimized Firefox on that new fire sale TouchPad you picked up, this early preview of Firefox for Tablets should give you something to look forward to, though it will still be some time before Firefox for Tablets is ready for prime time.

See Also:

Tags:
File Under: HTML5
Sep
13
2011

Mozilla Hacks Blog Offers HTML5 Geolocation Primer

By

The Mozilla Hacks blog has posted a nice screencast overview of the HTML5 Geolocation API. The video is designed to help anyone competing in Mozilla’s September developer derby (which involves building something with the Geolocation API), but it also makes a great overview for anyone wanting to get started with Geolocation.

The HTML5 Geolocation API enables web developers to discover a user’s location via the browser (with the user’s permission of course). There’s no need to install any apps or do anything else at all, provided your user has a modern web browser. Despite pretty good browser support for the HTML5 Geolocation API, geolocation tools have become associated with native mobile apps, not web apps. Mozilla’s September developer derby is hoping to inspire web developers to change that.

For those that don’t have a browser capable of using the Geolocation API there are a number of JavaScript based polyfills developers can use to fill in the gaps in browser support. Check out the Mozilla Hacks blog for some links to the Geolocation polyfills, as well as the sample code shown in the movie below.

See Also:

Tags:
File Under: Mobile, Visual Design, Web Basics
Sep
13
2011

The Boston Globe Embraces Responsive Design

By

The BostonGlobe.com on mobile, tablet and laptop screens

Responsive design is no longer something confined to the portfolio websites of the designers and developers who pioneered the idea. Using CSS media queries to adapt a website’s layout to varying screen sizes is fast becoming a standard part of web development.

Today’s case in point is the newly launched BostonGlobe.com, which uses the adaptive layouts, font resizing and image scaling of responsive design to deliver an elegant, readable website no matter what screen size you’re using.

The Globe’s new website is attracting more attention for the fact that it will soon be behind a paywall (it’s free until the end of September), but for web developers the much bigger news is that one of the larger news sites on the web is embracing responsive design.

It’s not an iOS app; it’s not in the Chrome Web Store. No, the new BostonGlobe.com is just a good old fashioned website, but one that looks good no matter what you’re viewing it on thanks to its use of responsive design. Depending on the size of your screen — whether you happen to be browsing from a phone, a tablet or a desktop monitor — BostonGlobe.com will adjust its content to fit the pixels available. It will reflow its text columns according to screen size and also scale its masthead logo, the section menus, images, videos and even the weather graphic in the masthead.

Of course it makes sense that the BostonGlobe.com is a flagship example of what’s possible with responsive design given that developer Ethan Marcotte, who coined the term responsive design, was one of the architects behind the new Globe website. If you’d like to know a bit more about how the site was created, including some of the challenges any responsive site faces, head over to Marcotte’s blog and read his write up on the new site.

Also part of the team that helped build the site are the design firm Upstatement and the Filament Group, which helped pioneer the concept of “responsive” or “adaptive” images. That is, serving smaller images to mobile browsers and then using JavaScript to serve larger images to desktop browsers. Be sure to check out our earlier coverage of adaptive images.

While the Globe may have had the cash and cachet to hire big names in the field, that doesn’t mean you need an extensive team to create a responsive website. We won’t lie to you, building a good responsive website is more difficult than just slapping up a fixed width design. But, provided it fits with the goals of your site, it’s much easier than many of the alternatives, which often require building and maintaining two entirely separate websites.

If you’d like to know more about how the Globe team built the site there’s a video on the Globe’s other website, Boston.com, which gives a behind the scenes look at how the responsive design works. At around 1:22 you’ll see a shot of the design being tested on multiple devices simultaneously. The tool that makes that possible is Shim, a node.js app that enables simultaneous, synced web surfing across devices and browsers. You can check it out over at GitHub.

See Also:

Tags: ,
« OLDER POSTS