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Adobe outs experimental Flash-to-HTML5 conversion tool, calls it Wallaby
Ah, if only we could flip a big happy switch and convert all the web's Flash content into (functional) HTML5 code. It's a dream shared by many and, funnily enough, the company pushing to make it a reality is none other than Adobe itself, the owner and proprietor of Flash. Its Labs research team has just released an experimental new dev tool, dubbed Wallaby, that's targeted at taking Flash-encoded artwork and animations and turning them into a more compatible mix of HTML, CSS and JavaScript. Of course, the intent here is not some magnanimous move to free us from the shackles of Flash -- Adobe openly admits that the initial goal for the new tool will be to help convert animated banner ads so that they work on the iOS platform -- but hey, even bad tools can be used for good sometimes, right?
iPad 2 and iOS 4.3 JavaScript benchmarks show big performance gains
Some of the first speed tests coming in show that hardware and software improvements in the iPad 2 are giving it decent performance gains over its predecessor -- and over rival devices. CNET UK decided to spend its brief hands-on time with the iPad 2 by running the SunSpider JavaScript Benchmark, which CNET calls "an increasingly important indication of overall performance. The better a phone or tablet is at dealing with JavaScript, the faster more complicated websites such as Facebook will run, which means your whole experience with the device will feel faster." CNET found initially that the iPad 2 is up to four times faster than the original iPad, but not all this speed improvement is down to the upgraded hardware. The speed advantage dropped to a 1.5x boost when CNET updated the original iPad's OS to a beta version of iOS 4.3 that it happened to have lying around. This could be good news for anyone who wants an original iPad just for web surfing. Heavy discounting to clear stock means you can pick one up for $100 less than this time last week, a bargain if you don't want the cameras and other goodies that the iPad 2 brings. The other good news is the boasting rights this will give you over owners of rival Android hardware; iPad 2 cleaned the clocks of the Galaxy Tab (3x faster) and the Google Nexus S smartphone (also 3x faster). Since it will also be getting the iOS 4.3 update, the iPhone 4 will be 2.5x faster. Thanks Nik!
New York subway schedule turned into a beautiful, musical visualization (video)
HTML5, JavaScript and a tiny pinch of Flash. Those are your ingredients for building one of the neatest, simplest websites we've come across in a long time. Conductor, as its maker Alexander Chen dubs it, is a visualization built on New York's publicly available subway schedule API. It shows the progress of the Big Apple's underground carriers throughout the day and garnishes the experience with a delightful musical trick every time two lines cross. You can see it on video after the break or just hit the source link and experience it for yourself.
Quickly enable or disable JavaScript in Safari
By using "Disable JavaScript" on Safari's Develop menu, you can eliminate annoyances from some websites, without the frustration of disabling JavaScript altogether. I'll even show you how to make a custom keyboard shortcut for it, so your fingers never even have to leave the keyboard. The initial setup will take a few minutes, but it will be worth it when you realize the power you will wield in your fingers when you're done. JavaScript by itself is neither good nor evil. JavaScript is driving a car. Most people who drive cars are good folks just trying to get from Point A to Point B as easily and quickly as possible. Some people, however, are maniacs, some are drunk drivers and some are just not very good at it. The same is true for JavaScript. Most of the time you don't even notice JavaScript, but it's working in the background to help you and the website work together. Have you ever typed something into a field and the website immediately recognized a problem? That was JavaScript. Unfortunately the analogs of "maniacs" and "drunk drivers" of the JavaScript world all seem to work in marketing. Pop-up windows? Pop-over windows? Ads that suddenly appear or slide over what you were trying to read? Also JavaScript. Those green-double-underline links or other links that show you ads when you hover over them? JavaScript. My favorite is when I'm at a page that won't let me copy text or even right click, thinking this is some sort of "protection." The ironic part is that many of these sites (such as for music lyrics) are posting content they don't own in the first place, and then they try to use JavaScript to block you from using it. On some sites you use Safari's Reader feature, but that doesn't always work. Fortunately, you have more tools at your disposal. Read on for more on taming JavaScript.
Apple iAds Producer helps you produce iAds for iOS devices
We know how it is, you want to be a hotshot developer, but all that coding sounds like daunting work. Never mind, Apple's got your back with its new iAds producer, which automates all the HTML5 and CSS3 stuff into the background and leaves you to focus on the crucial task of picking out templates and components for your perfect iAd. To be fair to this new dev tool, it does more than merely dumb down the design process. It also includes "sophisticated" JavaScript editing and debugging, a built-in simulator for testing your creation, and a project validator that checks your code for common errors. Hit the source link to give it a try.
Apple's iAd Producer released: In-app ad development kit
Apple has made another tool available for developers who are considering using iAd as a way of making revenue from their iOS apps. iAd Producer is a free ad creation toolkit that became available today on the Apple Developer website, and it is designed to streamline the creation of compelling animated interactive ads for iOS apps. The Mac OS X-based tools, which are available to any members of the iOS Developer Program, include a visual designer, page templates, a library of pre-built components that can be used to add common user interface elements without writing code, pre-built animation and effects and an asset manager that holds images, movies and SVG fonts in one library. For advanced developers, iAd Producer adds JavaScript editing, debugging and optimization tools. If your company is an iAd customer, you can even test your code over the carrier network using Apple's test servers. iAds are starting to appear in a number of apps, primarily in the iPhone / iPod touch world. The first iPad iAd, for Tron Legacy, just appeared -- more iPad-specific ads are expected to arrive in 2011, and the new ad development kit can only speed up the rate of adoption of iAd. [via 9to5 Mac]
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.
Kinect hacks let you control a web browser and Windows 7 using only The Force (updated)
Hacking the Xbox 360 Kinect is all about baby steps on the way to what could ultimately amount to some pretty useful homebrew. Here's a good example cooked up by some kids at the MIT Media Lab Fluid Interfaces Group attempting to redefine the human-machine interactive experience. DepthJS is a system that makes Javascript talk to Microsoft's Kinect in order to navigate web pages, among other things. Remember, it's not that making wild, arm-waving gestures is the best way to navigate a web site, it's just a demonstration that you can. Let's hope that the hacking community picks up the work and evolves it into a multitouch remote control plugin for our home theater PCs. Boxee, maybe you can lend a hand? Update: If you're willing to step outside of the developer-friendly borders of open-source software then you'll want to check out Evoluce's gesture solution based on the company's Multitouch Input Management (MIM) driver for Kinect. The most impressive part is its support for simultaneous multitouch and multiuser control of applications (including those using Flash and Java) running on a Windows 7 PC. Evoluce promises to release software "soon" to bridge Kinect and Windows 7. Until then be sure to check both of the impressive videos after the break. [Thanks, Leakcim13]
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...
Blast the internet with 'Asteroids' applet
Andy writes to tell us his buddy has completed work on the new American Eagle site. No, we aren't directing you to seasonal Zelda jammies (would you wear those?) -- the update includes a "hidden" Asteroids mode! Just add "?mode=asteroids" to the end of any page url to crack this Easter egg open.
The story behind the Twitter worm
When we heard about this malicious JavaScript code that hit Twitter yesterday, we were kind of relieved: perhaps it was nature's way of ridding us of celebrity micro-bloggers. But as the day went on, it seemed that even if this were the case, a sordid tale was emerging: apparently the whole thing began with a Norwegian programmer named Magnus Holm, who had experimented with a flaw in Twitter's website that let users execute code on a mouseover. His version of the code simply replicated itself: "The purpose was simply to see if it was possible to create a worm," he told The New York Times, adding that he was surprised it had spread as quickly as it did. "Because it was very easy to delete the Tweet that contained the worm, I expected that everyone would just delete it the moment they realized that they've been 'infected.'" But soon enough, folks were updating the code for malicious purposes, including redirects to spam sites and, perhaps worst of all, Rickrolling. By 8:30 AM President Obama's Press Secretary Robert Gibbs had inadvertently sent the thing out to his followers, and by 10:00 AM (when Twitter had patched the hole) an estimated 200,000-plus users had been hit. Fortunately, it looks like things are back to normal, which reminds us: @justinbieber hasn't tweeted for over twenty-four hours. We hope he's OK!
'Rainbow tweets' start hammering Twitter after onMouseOver exploit discovered
Oh dear. Some wise guys have discovered a JavaScript exploit in Twitter's web interface, which uses an onMouseOver instruction to hijack your own tweeting voice and force you to say things you don't want to say. Simply put, hovering on some of these colorful new tweets can result in you tweeting out the spammiest spam you ever did tweet. So, as with Tetris, be wary of those blocks of color, they are the harbingers of doom. And until the Twitter crew wrap their brains around sealing this vulnerability off, we'd recommend just using any of the cornucopia of Twitter apps floating about in the webosphere. [Thanks to everyone who sent this in] Update: The Twitgineers are already dealing with the issue and are rolling out a patch that should span the entire Twitterverse before too long.
Opera gets serious about TV widget content, releases CDK
Norwegian software company Opera first waded into the TV app game when they released an SDK for widgets back in 2008. Now they've taken another serious step by releasing the Opera Devices Content Development Kit to help HTML, CSS, XML, and Javascript savvy developers create content using technologies they're already versed in. For those who don't live and breathe in The Matrix, Opera's hope is to lower the barriers of entry for bringing online content into the living room, since the software eliminates the need for physical devices to test on. It also supports W3C, HbbTV (Hybrid Broadcast Broadband TV), OIPF, and CEA-2014 specifications -- meaning it's capable of running on a wide range of hardware from variety of manufacturers. For more details read the PR after the break or watch Opera's video from 2009 on the subject, which unfortunately isn't on par with its previous potato boiling jabs at Google. Still, learning about "Oprah's" new widgets makes it definitely worth a watch.
Firefox Tab Candy groups your tabs, but that's just for starters (video)
Although Firefox already has a strong selection of tab management helpers like TooManyTabs, which gives you extra rows and memory-preserving options, or Tree Style Tab, which shifts things to a tree-based vertical menu, Mozilla has rolled up its scaly sleeves and decided to rethink the whole thing. Tab Candy starts off much like Safari's TabExposé, by showing you all the tabs you currently have open in thumbnail form, but from there it allows you to organize them into separate groups (with sub-groups promised for the future), which then act in very much the same way as opening a new Firefox window. Yes, it's folders within the browser, and it's all based on good old fashioned HTML, CSS and JavaScript, so no pesky additional downloads will be required once this Alpha-stage code gets added to Firefox's official release. If you want to give it an early spin, hit the source link below, but don't neglect the video after the break to see what else Mozilla is thinking of cooking up with Tab Candy.
Android 2.2 (Froyo) versus iOS 4: the browser showdown (video)
A little while back Google boldly claimed that Froyo would have the world's fastest mobile browser, but the lack of final software back then meant we'd had to tie up our itchy hands until now. And boy, it sure looks like it was worth the wait -- Ars Technica's JavaScript benchmarks show that not only is Froyo's browser almost three times faster than its Éclair counterpart, but it also beats iOS 4's Safari by at least two-fold. That said, numbers alone don't always reflect real-life performance -- especially with Froyo supporting iPhone's much-missed Flash -- so we went ahead and conducted our own browser speed test. Read on for our videos and results after the jump. Update: for those who were concerned about the battery affecting the Nexus One's performance, we did use Android System Info to verify that the CPU was still clocked at 1GHz. We were also able to reproduce the same results with a full battery. Either way, it's still a win for Android.
Apple puts HTML5 where its mouth is
Looking for even more HTML5 samples to see what all the fuss is about? Good, 'cause Apple just went live with its HTML5 showcase page. Naturally, it took a veiled jab at Flash in the process: "Standards aren't add-ons to the web. They are the web." Samples include video, typography, photo galleries, transitions, audio, 360 degree object manipulation, and VR implementations including the source code so devs can tinker around for themselves. Now hit up the source for a taste. Update: Apple's offering a developer link that lets you play with the demos in Google's Chrome browser.
Smokescreen makes Flash content visible on iPhone and iPad (video)
Mind you, it's just a preview release, but Chris Smoak's Smokescreen does exactly what it promises: enable Flash content to play on Apple's iPod touch, iPhone, and iPad. Kind of. Here's how Smokescreen gets around using a Flash plugin as described by Simon Willison: "It runs entirely in the browser, reads in SWF binaries, unzips them (in native JS), extracts images and embedded audio and turns them in to base64 encoded data:uris, then stitches the vector graphics back together as animated SVG." While it works fine with simple animated banner ads (uh, huzzah!?), we found that Smokescreened Flash content like video and games was impossibly slow when tested on our iPhone 3G. Still, it's a start for this soon to be open sourced Flash player written in JavaScript. Check the video after the break for a demonstration or give it a go for yourselves by browsing over to the appropriate source link below.
Google claims Froyo has the world's fastest mobile browser
You heard it here first, folks. Google has just come out with the strident claim that the web browser in Android 2.2, aka Froyo, is the world's fastest for mobile devices. Having implemented the V8 JavaScript Engine that's already made an appearance in its desktop Chrome browser, Google's reporting JavaScript performance that's somewhere in the vicinity of two to three times better than what you can get from previous Android versions. We'll give this geek cabal some style points for the double equals sign up top, but will certainly be putting its bold assertion to the test in the very near future.
Symbian^3 web app development tools come out of beta, aim for standardized simplicity
Has the Nokia N8 made a Symbian^3 believer out of you? If so, you'll be glad to know the beta tag has been peeled off the web application development tools for the platform, which -- according to Executive Director Lee Williams -- provide "an ideal entry point" for coders of all skill levels. This is because the primary languages spoken are HTML, CSS and JavaScript, familiar to almost anyone who's tried to create for the web, and with just a little extra JavaScript exercise, you're promised access to the phone's contacts, camera, accelerometer, and location. It sounds all kinds of refreshing, but the usefulness of this tool set and the entire environment will be determined by what people produce with it -- and to that end we've provided you with a link to the downloads page (Windows, Mac and Linux users are all being served) where you can get your Symbian dev career started in earnest.
