Archive for the ‘Multimedia’ Category

File Under: Mobile, Multimedia
Jun
29
2012

Adobe: No Flash for You, Android 4.1

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No Flashing the Jelly Bean. Image: Google

The bells tolling the death of Adobe Flash got a bit louder this week.

To go along with the arrival of Google’s new Android 4.1 “Jelly Bean” update, Adobe has announced that it will not be developing a certified version of Flash for Android 4.1. Worse for Flash fans, Adobe says it will soon be pulling Flash Player from the Google Play Store.

The move shouldn’t be a huge surprise. Adobe already announced last year that it would cease development of its mobile Flash Player. Still, if you were hoping Google might give Flash a bit of a reprieve by including support in the latest version of Android, well, we’ve got bad news for you.

Beginning Aug. 15, Adobe plans to start limiting access to Flash in the Google Play Store to mobile devices that already have Flash installed. In other words, if your Android phone shipped with Flash installed — what Adobe refers to as a “certified version” of mobile Flash — then you can keep getting updates through the Google Play Store. If you’re planning to buy a new phone running Android 4.1, you won’t be installing Flash after the fact.

The reasoning behind the move is that any devices that don’t have Flash Player installed out of the box are, in Adobe’s words, “increasingly likely to be incompatible with Flash Player and will no longer be able to install it from the Google Play Store.”

There is a way around the new limitations if you’re a developer who needs access to Flash (or, presumably, a user who doesn’t mind hacking your phone): Flash Player for Android will remain available in Adobe’s archive of released Flash Player versions. Also, little birds flying around Google I/O this week tell us that the Flash plugin actually does seem to work with Android 4.1. If you’d like to try it for yourself, better hurry up and grab it while you can.

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File Under: HTML5, JavaScript, Multimedia
Jun
19
2012

JavaScript Decoder Brings High-Quality Audio to the Web

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Image: Webmonkey

HTML5′s native audio and video tools promise to eventually make it possible to create sophisticated audio and video editing apps that run in the browser. Unfortunately much of that promise has thus far been marred by a battle over audio and video codecs. Right now what works in one browser on one operating system will not necessarily work on another.

Until the codec battle plays itself out, developers looking to build native HTML audio apps are in a bit of a bind. One way around the problem is to bypass the browser and provide your own decoder.

That’s exactly what the developers at Official.fm Labs have been hard at work doing. The latest impressive release is FLAC.js, a FLAC audio decoder written in pure JavaScript. FLAC.js joins the group’s earlier efforts, which include decoders for MP3, AAC and ALAC.

Used in conjunction with the nascent Web Audio API, the new FLAC decoder means you could serve up high-quality, lossless audio to browsers that support HTML5 audio. But beyond just playback the Web Audio API opens the door to a whole new range of audio applications in the browser — think GarageBand on the web or DJ applications.

To that end Official.fm Labs has been working a framework it calls Aurora.js (CoffeeScript) to help make it easier to build audio applications for the web.

If you’d like to experiment with Aurora.js or check out the new FLAC decoder, head on over to Official.fm’s GitHub account where you’ll find all the code available under an MIT license.

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File Under: Multimedia
Jun
11
2012

Flash, Firefox Play Together in New Security ‘Sandbox’

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Flash logoAdobe has released Flash Player 11.3, which offers several new features aimed to make the widely used browser plugin more secure — including a new security “sandbox” for Firefox on Windows.

To grab the latest version of Flash, head to Adobe’s Flash Player download page.

The big news in this release is the new sandbox security settings for Firefox on Windows, which first showed up in the beta release earlier this year. Flash’s near ubiquity make it a popular target for web-based attacks, but the new sandboxing means that even when such attacks succeed the damage is limited and won’t spill over into the rest of the browser or even the operating system.

Adobe and Google have previously worked together to add the same sandboxing feature to the Chrome browsers.

Mac users finally get an (optional) background updater with Flash 11.3. It works just like the updater that’s been available in Windows for some time — provided you allow automatic updates, the new updater will check with Adobe’s servers every 24 hours. If an update is available, the background updater can download and install it without interrupting your browsing session.

This release of Flash for OS X is also the first to support Apple’s Gatekeeper feature coming later this year in OS X 10.8. Gatekeeper checks a developer’s unique Apple Developer ID to verify that an application is not known malware. Flash 11.3 for OS X is the first release signed with an Apple Developer ID certificate, ensuring there will be no problems installing it on OS X 10.8.

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File Under: Multimedia, UI/UX, Visual Design
Jun
6
2012

Cure the High-Res Blurs With SVG and Icon Fonts

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The high-res future is coming fast. Photo: Ariel Zambelich/Wired.com

The rise of high-resolution displays means that web developers need resolution-independent graphics. The good-old PNG icons we’ve been relying on just aren’t going to cut it for much longer.

It’s true that a slightly blurry icon or logo on the iPad probably isn’t going to ruin a site by driving visitors away in droves, but it is a problem, and one that will only become more obvious as higher-resolution screens proliferate.

At the moment there are essentially two ways to swap out your PNG icons for something a bit crisper: icon-fonts or SVG graphics. Naturally, neither is perfect — the last time something worked perfectly on the web Tim Berners-Lee and friends were the web’s only users — so it’s worth looking into the advantages and drawbacks of each.

That’s exactly what UIX designer Simon Uray recently did, breaking down the good and the bad of both icon fonts and SVG images. Give Uray’s post a read for the finer details on both, but here’s the short story: icon fonts are probably your best bet at the moment, though you’ll have to live with the fact that some icons are a tiny bit blurry on traditional displays.

Since at the moment the vast majority of screens on the web are not high resolution, adopting icon fonts over the PNGs you’re using now might be a case of premature optimization.

As Uray writes, “sorry, if you’re looking for a silver bullet, I’m afraid it doesn’t exist.” To that we might add “yet.” But SVG support in browsers (one of the chief problems with SVG is that it isn’t as widely supported as icon fonts) continues to improve. There’s also always the option to use them all. “Maybe best,” writes Uray, “is to use PNG served in many different sizes for your high fidelity, multi-color logo and other graphics… SVG icons for your navigation that stays the same size, but also look sharp on Retina displays [and] Responsive inline SVG for bars and charts and an icon font for all your different button sizes.” The best of all worlds.

For more on icon fonts, be sure to check out Chris Coyers interactive write up on how to use icon fonts.

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File Under: Multimedia, Web Basics, Web Services
May
29
2012

The ‘Internet Underground Music Archive’ Rides Again

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Quick, install Shockwave! Screenshot: The IUMA homepage in 1996.

The origins of the online music revolution are back, thanks to internet archivist extraordinaire Jason Scott. Scott, who works for the internet preservation group Archive.org, has resurrected the Internet Underground Music Archive, or IUMA as the kids called it back in 1992, when they were uploading songs via Gopher.

Started at the University of California at Santa Cruz by Jeff Patterson, Jon Luini and Rob Lord, the IUMA’s goal was to create an online music archive for unsigned musicians and bands. The idea was simple: Bands uploaded files and sent them out to fans over Usenet or e-mail. And just like that, the internet music revolution was born.

The IUMA site eventually came to host thousands of bands and hundreds of thousands of songs, many in MP2 and other long-since-abandoned audio formats.

Like so many other sites of that era, IUMA was eventually sold off during the dot-com boom years to a series of clueless owners who let the site die a slow death of neglect until it was shut down completely in 2006 (hmm, why does that sound so familiar?). Fortunately John Gilmore — perhaps best known for helping to start the Electronic Frontier Foundation — had the foresight to grab a copy of the site shortly before it disappeared.

Now Scott has used Gilmore’s tape archives to resurrect the IUMA site. As Scott says, “you are in for a treat and a hell of a lot of modern musical history just got saved.” The rescued archive doesn’t have everything that ever appeared on IUMA, but it does resurrect some 25,000 bands and artists and over 680,000 tracks of music. That’s 243 days worth of music for those of you more accustomed to iTunes than IUMA.

Scott says this resurrected version of IUMA should be “considered 1.0” and has promised to make sure the original data is “stored safely away so the next set of folks can try better techniques to get it back.”

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