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Google makes it easier to read offline in Chrome on Android
While apps like Pocket and Instapaper can help you read web pages on the go without a network connection, Google's Chrome browser added the ability right into its Android app last December. Today, the company has tweaked the feature to make it a bit easier to download pages for offline viewing.
Google brings fast-loading articles to your phone
If you perform a Google search on a mobile device today, you might notice some pages are a little snappier than they used to be. That's because the search giant today switched on its Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) Project, allowing you to load news stories and other web pages up to four times faster than before.
Vevo's website redesign simplifies the video watch page, adds artist pages
Chances are you've enjoyed Vevo's music video catalogue in one form or another, and purists who prefer .com access are being rewarded today with a fresh website design. The "video watch page" was previously littered with related clips, a playlist and other distractions, which have now been dispatched for greater focus on the tune at hand. Much of this has been moved to "artist pages", a new pop-up hub (pictured above) which is full of extra info on your chosen act. Head over to Vevo to see the enhancements for yourself, and with impending OUYA support, you might want to consider it your primary dispensary for that daily dose of Biebzilla.
Grooveshark circles back again, swaps app for HTML5
It's hard to keep up with whether Grooveshark is in the Google Play store, or out again, but now it doesn't matter. The music streaming service has decided to ditch its yo-yoing app, and instead opt for a flashy new HTML5 website for all devices. It's gone live in the US with an international launch "in the coming months", although this London-based editor didn't have any trouble using it. If you've been missing your favorites list, then jump over to Grooveshark.com and get listening -- after all, you might see it disappear again soon if a fresh lawsuit from EMI has any impact.
Google bots learning to read webpages like humans, one step closer to knowing everything
Google just launched its Knowledge Graph, a tool intended to deliver more accurate information by analyzing the way users search. Of course, with a desire to provide better search results comes a need for improved site-reading capabilities. JavaScript and AJAX have traditionally put a wrench in Google bots' journey through a webpage, but it looks like the search engine has developed some smarter specimens. While digging through Apache logs, a developer spotted evidence that bots now execute the JavaScript they encounter -- and rather than just mining for URLS, the crawlers seem to be mimicking how users click on objects to activate them. That means bots can dig deeper into the web, accessing databases and other content that wasn't previously indexable. Looks like Google is one step closer to success on its quest to know everything.
HTML5: seriously, it's not just for video
In a way, HTML5 has been reduced to a buzzword. You hear a lot of noise about how great it is for video, and how the web standard is an alternative to Flash content, but you don't see a whole lot of examples of that. We thought we'd take a moment and round up some of the cooler, more exciting instances of HTML5 online -- sites and experiments that go way beyond just playing someone's home movies. We're talking 8-bit gaming, some really crazy video effects, and a handful of incredibly interesting ways designers are maximizing the potential of the everyone's favorite new toy. Check out the links below, and prepare to readjust your expectations of HTML5. Note: Your best experiences for the links below will be in Chrome or Safari. You can get some of this working in Firefox, but as Chris Ziegler just remarked, "It's mega slow." These will absolutely blow your mind. Mr.doob's Chrome experiments -- Ball Pool and Google Gravity. Here's a roundup of experiments from Ben Joffe, including a rudimentary 3D shooter, a 3D functions plotter, and an HTML5 color picker. Some of my personal favorites, KesieV's Akihabara game room. The Legend of Sadness is where it's at. Exploding, real-time video. WPilot -- a multiplayer shooter. Like Asteroids meets Quake. A giant, color-cycling canvas. Weirdly addictive to play with. 3D molecules. 'Nuff said. Mega Man intro. In HTML5. If you guys have suggestions or examples you'd like to show off, let us know in comments!
Symbian S60 HTML Editor: one less reason to own a PC
Okay, so it's not like you're going to want to build entire websites from scratch using this application, but it's still nice to have in a pinch. The S60 HTML Editor requires only an S60-based smartphone, Python and the appuifw2 extension module; from there, users can indulge in simple HTML editing for tweaks on the run. Before you laugh it off, how do you know this post wasn't hand-coded using this very program? Huh? You're right, it wasn't.[Via IntoMobile]
PMOG beta opens up for passively multiplayer fun
PMOG, the "passively multiplayer MMO," has been seeing some action around the virtual Massively office lately -- the game is basically a Firefox extension that sits in your browser, and lets you deploy mines, leave goodies, and create quests out of the actual webpages that you visit, and since we visit lots of pages around here, we're some pretty good players.And now, after a showing at SXSW this week (which we should hear about soon), PMOG has opened its doors to the beta -- if you haven't started playing yet, you can sign up on their main page. In fact, here's an even better deal: I'm working on an achievement in game for inviting people, so you want an invite, leave a comment below, and I'll send you one myself.It remains to be seen how the folks behind PMOG are going to fund this thing, but while it's in beta, things are ad-free and passively fun. The virtual landscape is still a little empty (most geek sites are pretty much plotted out, but some of the farther reaches of the net are completely quiet), but the more people that get in the beta, the more fun this game promises to be.
World Wide WoW: East vs West, which WoW sites are better?
Westerners and Easterners, for whatever reason, often have very different sorts of websites, and the World of Warcraft websites for different regions of the world reflect this. The game itself may be the same anywhere in the world, but the people who play it are different, and it's interesting to note some of these differences to see what we can learn from them about the people. Westerners (Americans and Europeans, to be exact) get a blog-like format, featuring columns and an expansive vertical menu going down the left side. Western WoW pages of various countries tend to be more or less the same, just in different languages. Easterners (namely Chinese, Taiwanese and Koreans), get quite a different experience. One of the first things you notice on the front page is that lots of information on the WoW sites is presented interactively, with images taking up the main space, and words and news items being pushed into the background. Words are kept to a minimum, and are presented in square-like sections, rather than columns, with a friendly flash menu stretching across the top of the page. Their pages all seem tailor-designed for each of the three Asian regions, and no two are exactly alike. Are westerners getting shafted with lower-quality websites for their World of Warcraft needs? Or are the Easterners' glitzy sites making up for something Westerners may take for granted? Continue reading for a closer look, with a gallery of illustrative screenshots.%Gallery-5015%
