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Google TV gets a major update with new Netflix, movable Dual View, Android remote app support
The first update for the Google TV platform since its release is now available on Logitech and Sony devices, and takes major strides towards addressing issues we pointed out in our review. The antiquated Netflix app is now sporting a new HTML5 based UI that resembles the one seen on the PlayStation 3, while Dual View has addressed one of our biggest complaints by allowing users to move and resize the video window at will. Another major upgrade is support for an Android remote app arriving today with iPhone version "coming soon." The last major update should be appreciated by Kevin Bacon stalkers enthusiasts with a new info page for movies that pulls in plenty of relevant information and availability online and from the listings all on one page. Our Sony Google TV had the 218 MB update downloaded and ready to install when we turned it on that also promised a few other updates on top of Google's as seen above. We'll check back in a moment to see how things are working -- no word from Google yet on any progress breaking down the walls networks have put up around their streaming content -- peep the updated Dual View and a video of the new remote control app after the break. Update: The Google TV Remote for Android is now available in the Market, click this link from your Android device to download or snag the QR code after the break.
Chrome Web Store, HTML5 and the iPad: symbiosis at its best
It's all coming together, folks. It doesn't take much of a gander at the Chrome Web Store to notice a trend: some of the flashiest, most mature "apps" are actually just in-browser versions of iPad apps. And you know what else? Most of these "apps" actually run fine in Safari on the iPad. We're not sure how long Google gave developers to port their experiences over, but it seems like most of the best work had already been done in the form of HTML5 apps that were merely wrapped in app form for App Store delivery. Google's just taking things to the next logical step. Continue after the break as we expand this thesis paragraph into a number of supporting blocks of text, a few jazzy pictorial examples, and a stunning closer.
Flash working poorly on your Google Cr-48? Adobe's working on it
Yep, that Flash error up there is one of many we got today on our Cr-48s. On top of that, as you may have read in our in-depth preview, we've been experiencing incredibly sluggish Flash performance, including choppy playback of YouTube and Hulu videos. It's certainly not a good situation, but Adobe's aware of it and promising that hope is on the way. Adobe's Senior Director of Engineer Paul Betlem has put up a post regarding the matter on the company's very own Flash Player blog, and says that " In terms of Chrome notebooks specifically... video performance in particular is the primary area for improvement." He also goes on to promise that the updates will be seamless as the Flash plug-ins are integrated directly into the self-updating operating system. That sure sounds good to us, but in the meantime, we'll be waiting for these Flash errors and stuttering 480p videos to disappear -- or, you know, for HTML 5 to take over.
Sour's 'Mirror' browser-based music video is absolutely wild
Is Japanese band Sour's "Mirror" music video the single best thing we've ever seen in a browser? It probably is. Load it up in Safari or Chrome and make sure you connect your Facebook, Twitter, and webcam -- we tried it out and it's totally fine. In fact, it's more than fine. It's stunning. Why can't HTML5 and Flash always play this nicely together?
Jolicloud 1.1 now available to download
You've already seen it on the Jolibook, but now anyone with a netbook or suitable computer can get their hands on the Jolicloud 1.1 operating system, which promises a number of improvements over version 1.0. Chief among those is the brand new HTML5 desktop, along with a simplified login process using Facebook Connect, a generally spiffed up UI, and a slew of other tweaks that promise better performance and battery life compared to the previous version. Hit up the link below to try it out for yourself, or revisit our Jolibook review for an in-depth look at the upstart OS.
Pitchfork gets a custom iPod touch page-topper ad
Apple has developed a custom ad for indie music review site Pitchfork. You can go over and see it right now in any WebKit-based browser (so Safari or Chrome) -- an iPod touch pops up in front of the menu bars, and everything gets swept away in the games being played. This ad is notable for a few reasons. First of all, Pitchfork, unlike some of Apple's other custom ad targets, is a completely online publication, so Apple is now targeting blog readers as well as traditional newspaper readers. Pitchfork is also known for a certain very indie (some might say hipster) audience, and clearly Apple thinks the iPod touch will "play" with that audience. And finally, 'tis the season -- the iPod touch is on fire lately, and Apple's spending the ad dollars to make sure it stays that way. Excellent ad, of course, just a little strange to see it on the top of a hip music review site. We'll keep eyes out for any other interesting Apple ads this holiday season. [via Macgasm]
MOG hits the Chrome Web Store, cools our Flash fever with a nice cool HTML5 washcloth
We've long been proponents of subscription music, but it's always a rocky relationship: Rhapsody's excellent selection but bad app and terrible web player (you call that a bitrate?), Zune's beautiful UI but Windows-only-ness, and Spotify's continued inability to work in the US. Eventually, this particular writer drifted over to MOG, which was initially a $5 a month web-only service, best known for its high bitrate and decent selection, with a more recent move to Android and iPhone apps (including offline play) for a still-palatable $10 a month price. Unfortunately, all this time we've had to put up with the indignities of a pop-up, window-based Flash player for our main MOG experience, which crashes any browser on a Mac at least once a day -- like most Flash things on the Mac. Which brings us to today: MOG is a featured app on Google's new Chrome Web Store, and once "installed" it offers an all-new luscious, speedy, HTML5 UI for MOG. Better yet, the web app also works in Safari at mog.com/chrome. Under the hood there's still a "headless" Flash playback element for DRM purposes, but everything else is a vast improvement. The only thing that could make us happier would be some sort of exfm-style Chrome extension for adding music we discover on the web to MOG playlists. You know, as long as we're getting lifelong dreams granted like this, might as well go for broke.
Netflix ported WebKit to the PS3 to enable HTML5 goodies, a dynamically updatable UI
Netflix caused a lot of head scratching in October when it started rolling out its new, disc-free Netflix experience for the PS3. Namely, different people were getting a different UI, and there didn't seem to be any rhyme or reason to the differentiation. Well, it turns out Netflix was flexing a bit of its HTML5 muscle, rapidly testing different experiences to see which ones worked best for users, all without having to push out app updates or back-end changes to accommodate its indecision. Apparently, Netflix's engineers actually ported WebKit to the PS3 to make all this possible, and hopefully it's a sign of things to come in the HTML5 iPhone, iPad, and Android apps -- which could probably use some serious sprucing, or even a bit of scattered rapid prototyping just to relieve the monotony. It's also seems to be good news for other PS3 apps which can lean on the framework -- presumably VUDU's own HTML5-based UI took advantage of this when it landed on the PS3 in November. What we'd really love is if Sony and Google are secretly in cahoots to bring the entirety of Chrome and its couch-friendly Google TV UI with it. Hey, we can dream, right?
HTML5 prettifies fan-made Tron trailer... in real time! (video)
What can HTML5 do for you? Quite a lot, as it happens. A chap by the name of Franz Enzenhofer has put together a real-time effects mixer for a fan-made Tron trailer, which combines HTML5 with a dash of JavaScript and a sprinkling of CSS to demonstrate the awesome potency of open web standards. You can recolor, reposition, rotate, stretch, or skew the video, all while it plays. We've got the unaltered trailer, made earlier this year as a sort of homage to the 1982 picture, for you after the break, but you'll want to hit the source link to start post-processing it with the finest browser-based video editor yet.
New HTML5 and web standards support in iOS 4.2
Mobile Web Programming has a detailed writeup of the new HTML5 and W3C future standards support included in yesterday's iOS 4.2 release. These new APIs haven't been fully documented yet by Apple, but these changes have been uncovered as part of Mobile Web Programming's own independent research. They include new standards like Accelerometer and Gyroscope support in the DeviceOrientation API, the WebSockets API that's part of HTML5, and information on how to invoke printing dialog in mobile Safari. Some of the new functionality includes expansion of the DeviceOrientation API to include the accelerometer and gyroscope on devices that have them, so web apps can react to the device being moved around. WebSockets is a new HTML5 standard that allows developers to build even more responsive web apps (by allowing JavaScript to create raw TCP socket connections to HTTP servers), and now comes to mobile Safari for the first time. Not only is Mobile Web Programming's information detailed and informative, the comments to the post are also fairly illuminating. There's a lot more going on in yesterday's iOS 4.2 release than a casual user might suspect, and there's a lot of great news in this release for web developers. If you have any interest in the spinning cogs and gears that make the mobile web work, it's definitely worth your time to check out this writeup. These additions help buttress the idea that Apple is committed to supporting the ongoing growth of HTML5 web standards and the importance of those open standards.
Safari tip: Force HTML5 video to open instead of Flash
As more people get fed up with the poor performance and security flaws of Adobe's Flash Player, they are uninstalling the Flash plug-in from their computers. The problem is that even if a site offers up HTML5 video as an alternative to Flash, trying to get to it from Safari on a Mac will pop up the little blue LEGO block. Mac users can now take advantage of the fact that Mobile Safari in iOS doesn't support Flash in any way, by changing the desktop user agent. A browser feature that was first widely used to get websites to serve up non-standard HTML optimized for Internet Explorer, Mac Safari 5 users can change their user agent settings by enabling the Developer menu through Preferences > Advanced. From the Developer menu, the user agent can be changed so that the browser looks like Mobile Safari 3.2.2 on the iPad, which will force sites to feed HTML5 video streams if they are available. There are, of course, some caveats. Unlike some other browsers, changing the Safari user agent only persists for the current browser window instance. Additional browser windows or restarting the browser gets you back to the original agent. John Gruber of Daring Fireball, who originally figured all of this out, provides a Terminal command that will permanently change the user agent, but since that can break other functionality, the temporary route is recommended. For sites that only serve Flash video, users can still go Flash-free in Safari by opening the site in Google Chrome, which features its own built-in Flash player. [via Mac OS X Hints]
Tim Berners-Lee entreats us to keep the net neutral, standards open, and speech free
We've always thought pretty highly of this Tim Berners-Lee fella, and now we've got a whole essay penned by him to show you why that is. In a six-page treatise on the current state of the web, Tim discusses why universality of access is so important to our freedom of speech and other democratic liberties, why open standards will always prevail over closed ecosystems (with a special critique of Apple's iTunes and concordant appification of the web), and also why it's necessary to distinguish between the web and the internet. Oh, and he also manages to squeeze in one of the most succinct explanations of net neutrality and its growing importance in our massively interconnected world. Hit the source for the full shot of enlightenment. [Image courtesy of Paul Clarke]
Google TV team starts pointing out what the devices actually can do
When you consider how much of the recent press about the Google TV can't do -- play Hulu or stream video from most network websites -- it looks like the current focus over on the official Google TV blog is to highlight what it can do right now. First up is a "Best of Google TV" post that points out several Google TV optimized sites and team picks of favorite sites, while another post highlights ten things to try on your unit. Overall it's a pretty good list to check out if you're sitting there with Logitech or Sony-branded keyboard in hand wondering "now what? you'll be able to feel happy about your purchase in just a few clicks.
SlideRocket brings web presentations to iPhone and iPad with HTML5
Since the dawn of time, traveling professionals have sought easier ways to present on the go. Pico projectors! Netbooks! Converting presentations to video to show them on iPhones! Then there was Keynote on the iPad, and it was good. Not great, however: presenters with libraries of PPT content have had to convert them over, and keeping your decks up to date with the latest and greatest from the sales department is a drag. Wouldn't it be better and easier if there was a nice cloud-based solution that played well with Mobile Safari? Enter SlideRocket's new HTML5 player; the freemium web service now supports playing back (not editing) presentations on iPhone, iPad and iPod touch with full-screen video, a handful of good-looking builds and transitions, and all the analytics and version control you want. While the normal SlideRocket player requires Flash or AIR to show content, this one works fine without them. Click on to learn more about SlideRocket's capabilities, and see a video demo of the HTML5 playback in action.
Skyfire browser earns $1 million in first weekend
Apparently there is a market for Flash on the iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch, judging by the success that the third party browser Skyfire (US$2.99) had in its first weekend in the App Store. The Skyfire browser enables Flash video playback by converting Flash content to HTML5, which is playable on the iPhone. Using adaptive streaming technology, users can view full Flash pages on their phones, and have up to eight different browser windows open at the same time. While it sold so quickly at first that they couldn't keep their servers running smoothly, Skyfire ended up selling more than 300,000 copies of the browser in the first weekend alone, grossing over a million dollars. After Apple takes their cut of the sales, that leaves them with somewhere in the neighborhood of $630,000, quickly quieting those who asked how they would make any money with the new browser. With HTML5 here to stay (for a while, at least) and Flash currently a non-player in the iPhone market, it looks like the Skyfire browser found a rather large piece of its target market during the first weekend alone. After all the animosity between Adobe and Apple, though, it's hard to think that even a number like this will help them find common ground. You can watch a video of Skyfire in action after the break.
Game Boy emulator being developed in JavaScript by a very smart person
Sure, it's one thing to build a Game Boy emulator out of what is typically viewed as a limited-purpose language for enhancing website interactivity for the usual emulator-building reasons: you like video games, you're trying to impress the ladies. But just to prove a point? Imran Nazar is building a Game Boy emulator out of JavaScript to show how far the language has come, particularly with the fancy new stuff HTML5's <canvas> tag allows for, and to see if it would be possible to fully emulate a Game Boy from the CPU up. Sure, HTML5 has already proven useful for straight games, but an entire architecture? Turns out, it's pretty possible, and Imran has an excellent multi-part tutorial for how he's doing it. Right now there's a nearly playable version of Tetris, and pretty soon we'll all be playing Zelda in our web browsers and that time when we tried to build an HTML table from scratch to show a few of our favorite animated GIFs on our GeoCities page will only be a distant memory...
Adobe CTO defends Flash against battery life criticism
In response to Ars Technica's recent finding that running Adobe's Flash Player on the new MacBook Air cut battery life by up to a third, Adobe's CTO, Kevin Lynch, has come out in in defense of his company's plugin during an interview with Fast Company. "It's a false argument to make," he claims. "When you're displaying content, any technology will use more power to display, versus not displaying content. If you used HTML5, for example, to display advertisements, that would use as much or more processing power than what Flash uses." That's a nice theory, but that's not what Ars Technica's battery life results show. Given that multiple advertising services now fall back on HTML5 or a static ad in order to serve ads to devices which either don't have Flash installed or don't support it, it's unlikely that Ars Technica's testers were "missing out" on much content. Note that Ars Technica's tests didn't involve video playback at all, only some light web browsing; the only differentiating factor in their battery life results was whether website ads were running via Flash Player or not. The argument isn't sounding so "false" anymore. Lynch also bemoaned Apple's stance on Flash, claiming the company is "inciting" and "condoning" attacks on the plugin. "We don't think it's good for the web to have aspects closed off -- a blockade of certain types of expression. There's a decade of content out there that you just can't view on Apple's device, and I think that's not only hurtful to Adobe, but hurtful to everyone that created that content." My translation: "Apple shouldn't be the gatekeeper of the Web's video content. Adobe should." [via iPodnn]
Skyfire for iPhone hands-on (video)
Although Skyfire for iPhone is almost exactly like its Android counterpart, it's still not available for download in the App Store due to server issues, so we thought you might want to see how it works. We've seen improvements on the Flash-to-HTML5 conversion servers in the past day or so, which makes watching videos a breeze. The app itself serves as a fully functional browser with the usual features you'd hope to find: bookmarking, a dedicated search bar, custom homepage, and even private browsing. Pages render rather quickly, although scrolling and pinching to zoom is a little rough around the edges. As for actually watching Flash videos, it couldn't be easier -- once you've navigated to a page embedded with a video, a popup window will appear and you're good to go. Sadly, though, the browser lacks the ability to scrub videos. But hey, if you've been waiting three-plus years to play flash videos on your 3.5-inch display, Skyfire might (or might not) be the solution to your burning desire. Be sure to check out the browser in action after the break!
W3C tests HTML5 browser compatibility, crowns IE9 the champ
The World Wide Web Consortium -- you know, the team responsible for certifying and standardizing HTML5 -- has put together its first table of official conformance test results, giving us an idea of how well prepared each of the most popular browsers is for the oncoming web standards revolution. The data show Internet Explorer 9 as the most adroit performer (again), though Chrome, Firefox, Opera, and Safari don't seem to be too far behind in their HTML5 compliance, either. Of course, these checks don't cover the entire spec, which in itself isn't even finalized yet, but they provide us with a glimpse into a brave new world where Microsoft actually cares about coders keen on maximizing interoperability by adhering to web-wide standards. Good stuff. Check out the full results at the source link below. [Thanks, Mehran]
Report: HTML5 web video usage doubled in 5 months
MeFeedia released a report today that isn't going to make Adobe happy. HTML5 video on the web is on a substantial rise, going from just 10% of web videos in January of this year to 54% of total web videos this October. Just five months ago in May, HTML5 usage was at 26%. MeFeedia found that while Flash is still the dominant player of choice on desktop PCs, mobile devices like the iPad, iPhone, and Android phones are what are driving HTML5 adoption. Steve Jobs penned his Thoughts on Flash letter back in April in which he wrote that Flash is a dying technology and the future of web video was in HTML5. From the latest adoption rates of HTML5 for web video, it looks like he was right.
