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RIM posts job listing for 'WebKit Developer,' gets one step closer to a real browser
Needed some more evidence that future BlackBerrys may be getting a much needed improvement in the browser department? You got it. Following up on the news that Research In Motion has acquired Torch Mobile (developers of the WebKit-based Iris browser), the Candian phonemaker is now looking to fill the position of "WebKit Developer," according to a job listing. The posting calls for a number of skills which would come in handy whilst creating a next-gen browser for the BlackBerry OS, clearly calling for someone with hands-on experience coding... WebKit style. Look, if you love Canada and hate the BlackBerry browser, here's your chance to make the world a better place. What are you waiting for? [Thanks, Daniel M]
iPhone 3GS bested by Android Archos 5 tablet in browsing benchmarks
We've already seen the iPhone 3GS handily win an ARM Cortex A8-powered browsing bakeoff against the Palm Pre, but now that a few more devices have hit the scene with the processor it's time for another round, don't you think? Pocketables certainly does, and they've pitted the 3GS against a pretty eclectic group of devices, including the Sharp NetWalker Android "smartbook," the Archos 5 IMT, and the Archos 5 Android PMP. That's two Android devices, one funky proprietary OS, and the iPhone, all running different browsers on different variants of the same chip design, so there are obviously a lot of variables at play here, but the results are still interesting: the 800MHz Android Archos 5's WebKit browser was just a tick faster than the 600MHz iPhone 3GS, turning in an average page-load time of 9.0 seconds as opposed to 9.6, while the 800MHz NetWalker and 600MHz Archos 5 IMT trailed at 10.3 and 11.6 seconds. All we're taking away from that is that WebKit-based mobile browsers still seem to be the speed champs, but we're sure you have a different opinion.
Lighthouse SQ7 MID brings voice recognition to Facebook, Twitter
If you're savvy enough to want to use the Facebook Mobile app, we're guessing you're savvy enough to get it up and running on your phone or portable -- so buying an additional device for responding to friend requests seems a little silly. Hopefully, AdelaVoice (a company that develops voice-enabled apps for the Internet and social networks) has more plans for its Lighthouse SQ7 than what we see here. Based on the Linux-powered SmartQ7 Internet tablet, the heart of this bad boy is a UI that allows you access to Facebook, Twitter, the web, and an image slideshow. But that ain't all! Taking advantage of Webkit's integrated voice recognition, this thing will let you input text through the mic -- perfect for posting to Facebook or tweeting sans stylus. Perhaps for some people these features might be a big deal, but we've been asking around -- and we have yet to find anyone who'll 'fess up. We have to admit, though -- what this thing does do, it seems to do pretty well. Tell you what, AdelaVoice -- add JDate and Classmates.com and we'll give the thing another shot, okay? Video after the break. [Via Best Tablet Review]
Inside the new iTunes LP format
With the release of iTunes 9 came iTunes LP. Our own Dave Caolo gave iTunes LP a glowing review, but if you're wondering just how Apple worked their magic with the new format, web developer Jay Robinson has picked it apart thoroughly. As it turns out, simply replacing the ".itlp" extension with ".zip" reveals the contents of the package, which are actually HTML, CSS, and a little JavaScript. The Flash-like interfaces really use no Flash, but instead rely on the proposed CSS3 animation properties. If you're a web developer like yours truly (or a few other TUAW bloggers), you'll definitely want to check out Jay's analysis of the format. We've also been informed by a loyal tipster that if you take that unzipped folder of content and put it in your Sites directory (with Web sharing turned on, naturally), you might try browsing to it from your iPhone or iPod touch and seeing what shows up in Mobile Safari. Fascinating.
WebKit going 3D with WebGL
There will be a day in the not-too-distant future when playing 3D games in your browser -- without extra plugins like Flash or Unity -- will be a reality. The WebGL project, which has quickly made the blogging rounds this morning, combines aspects of HTML 5, JavaScript, and the OpenGL 3D drawing engine in an effort to create 3D graphics that appear right in your browser. Thus far, it's only beginning to show up in WebKit (the engine powering Safari and Google Chrome), but the glimpses as seen in the video above really show the power in these browsers. [Via Download Squad]
RIM buys Torch Mobile, BlackBerrys might finally get a decent browser
The default BlackBerry browser has long been laughably sad, but it looks like things are about to get better: RIM's just acquired Torch Mobile, the developers behind the Iris mobile browser. If you'll recall, Iris is a well-received WebKit-based browser for Windows Mobile that offers tabbed browsing, touch, and a skinnable UI -- and we hear it does a pretty good job rendering pages as well. Of course, since it's Windows Mobile-only at the moment it'll be a while before BlackBerry fans actually see any results from this acquisition, but it's nice to see RIM taking some big steps to address what's become a major shortfall with the platform -- and hey, maybe that extra time is what it'll take to add the promised full Flash and Silverlight support to the system. Yep, lots of solid potential here -- now if only RIM would build in proper IMAP support, we'd be all set. [Via MobileTechWorld, thanks Ike]
Linden Lab's Tom Hale announces Second Life support for media plug-ins
As a part of his keynote presentation today at this year's Second Life Community Convention, Linden Lab's Tom Hale has unveiled a new plug-in framework for the Second Life viewer. The Second Life viewer has hitherto been restricted to rendering media content that was supported either by its browser component or by the use of Apple's Quicktime. Quicktime is certainly quite workable, but only provides a subset of the extensive range of potentially viewable media that's out there. The introduction of the LLMedia API looks to change all that, by allowing a straightforward plug-in system to extend the viewer's ability to render various arbitrary kinds of parcel media.
Google Wave dev preview hands-on and impressions
After an impressive debut at Google I/O, the company's newest experiment and collaborative chat client has been making its way into the hands of developers in the lead-up to a torrent of new testers on September 30th. We had a chance to stop by Google's San Francisco office last week for a guided tour of the latest build of Wave with creators Lars and Jens Rasmussen, and have since then spent the better part of our free time working through the ins and outs of the new communication platform. Does it live up to the hype, even in this bug-infested interim build? Read on to find out.
3D animations coming to Safari
Charles Ying over at satine.org has put together an impressive demo using Safari's forthcoming CSS 3D transform features. There is a YouTube video of the demo (you can watch it in the 2nd half of this post), as a nightly build of WebKit or the Snow Leopard version of Safari is required to render it.The demo, titled Snow Stack, displays a wall of photos in three dimensions and allows you to navigate across the wall using your arrow keys. The wall of photos seems to go on into infinity while it dynamically loads the photos from Flickr as you travel across it. The animation style is similar to the browser plug-in Cooliris (formerly known as PicLens), but it was written entirely in HTML and CSS, with some JavaScript to pull in the photos from Flickr. The animations are so amazingly smooth animations it's hard to believe that only CSS was used to create them. Surprisingly, Safari on iPhone has supported CSS 3D transforms for sometime now, but the animations have yet to make an official debut on the desktop.If you are running Leopard and want to see the demo running on your Mac you will need to download the nightly build of WebKit to render it in all of its 3D splendor. If you have a pre-release copy of Snow Leopard installed you can simply use the built-in version of Safari to view it. Until Apple releases a public build of Safari with these features those are your only options. A post today on the Surfin' Safari blog over at WebKit features another demo of CSS 3D transforms called Poster Circle. I've posted a video to YouTube of this demo in action.Some of the options developers will be able to use with the new CSS 3D tranforms include: scaling, perspective, rotation, and standard 3D positioning. Apple has submitted a specification detailing these features to the W3C. Hopefully as time progresses other browser vendors will implement the spec as well. In the meantime Safari users will have these beauties all to themselves.
From Firefox to Safari (and back again)
I realize I may not be your average browser user. As a web developer, a browser to me is two parts daily use, two parts testing, and one part challenge. Since 2005, I've been using Firefox in some form or fashion as both my primary browser and as a testing vehicle. I had recently started a JavaScript-intensive project, and I appreciated Safari 4's lightning-fast JavaScript execution speeds. In Firefox, I rely mostly on add-ons like Web Developer and Firebug to help me analyze and test for mistakes in websites I build in Firefox. They work great, but enabling them slows the browser down. That's why I was excited for the updated Web Inspector that comes as part of Safari 4. (Yes, Safari 3 first came with Web Inspector, it couldn't hold a candle to Firebug's Swiss Army knife of an add-on for Firefox.) Testing was easy, and Safari 4's Web Inspector's many improvements made me think I could migrate to Safari full-time. Read on to see how it went.
Samsung's Omnia family hands-on, Samsung Jet and Pixon 12 come along for the ride
Samsung just pulled a bit of a "Samsung" and completely blew out its Omnia lineup. We just got some face time with the new Omnia II, Omnia Pro, Omnia Lite and the Omnia-inspired Jet, along with the Pixon 12 -- which runs the same in-house Samsung OS as the Jet, but packs a 12 megapixel camera. It's hard not to notice the stunning AMOLED screens on these phones, especially up against the dull-by-comparison Omnia Lite with its petty LCD. Unfortunately, while the build quality is good and the specs are certainly all there, all the phones were fairly slow in regular operation. The Jet and Pixon were passable (and the Jet certainly ought to be, with an 800MHz "application processor"), but we can't imagine anybody finding any pleasure in the molasses Windows Mobile 6.1 experiences on the Omnia trio. The Jet has a fun little 3D UI "cube" gimmick, which involves the pointless spinning of a cube to access different media apps, but most of what we saw was pretty standard TouchWiz. We did like the speed of Pixon's camera, which does a Pre-style trick of sending photo processing duties to the background so you can snap another photo with little delay in between -- it's also pretty good at auto focus and color accuracy for a phone, but we won't be trading in our regular point and shoot in the near term. None of the phones we looked at had network access, so we weren't able to test out the WebKit browsers, but it sounds like a major win for the Jet and Pixon. Let's just work on that Omnia responsiveness a bit, yeah Samsung? Perhaps Windows Mobile 6.5 (the Omnia II and Omnia Pro are 6.5-ready) will help.
Samsung Jet packs an 800MHz processor, AMOLED display, featurephone OS
Samsung's busy launching a bunch of handsets across even more timezones right now, and in addition to all the Omnia updates, there's also the Jet, which is an interesting hybrid: it's got an 800MHz processor, five megapixel camera, 3.1-inch AMOLED screen, WebKit-based Dolfin browser and a host of media features including DivX support, but it's running TouchWiz 2.0, so it's not a proper smartphone. Yeah, it's weird, but we're sort of into it -- we'll see what's it's like in person.
Iris Browser escapes beta at MWC, now ready for WinMo devices
While most of the mobile browser attention these days seemed focused on Fennec and Opera Mini, there's another game in town, too. Torch Mobile has just announced that its long-awaited WebKit-based Iris Browser has finally reached version 1.1.0, and it's now ready for use on Windows Mobile 5 and 6 platforms. Torch Mobile's making some pretty bold promises about this here software, claiming that its "advanced WebKit-based engine easily renders virtually any site on the web the same as if viewed on a PC." Of course, you know what a phrase like this means, right? You better get to downloading in order to see if it's legit. Go on, get!
Livin' on the edge with optimized, beta Firefox builds
Do you feel the need... the need for speed? With more and more of our computing lives taking place via our web browsers, eking out even a slight performance improvement for Firefox or Safari (or a similar reduction of resource demands; I'm looking at you, Flash Player) can improve the user experience noticeably. One way to improve browser performance, if you've got the chops and the time, is to compile the open-source browser of choice yourself, with all the tweaks for the specific processor platform you're using.Web guru Neil Bruce Lee has offered the performance-hungry Firefox user the choice of G5 and Intel optimized versions of the 3.0 release; now, for those who want to live completely on the far side, Chris Latko has rolled out an Intel-optimized build of the beta Firefox 3.1 (Shiretoko) browser. With the architecture-specific tweaks Latko made, along with the inclusion of the TraceMonkey Javascript native compiler, this is the screaming-est version of Firefox ever to grace an Intel Mac screen... but be wary, it's going to be less stable than an official release, and many of your favorite plugins may not work (best to disable them all in the 3.0x version, then enable one at a time in the beta build to make sure they play nicely).Don't roll the Firefox way? There's a bleeding-edge choice for you too: WebKit nightly builds, based on the most current code that goes into future versions of Safari. Again, you should see a boost in speed and possibly a corresponding decrease in stability, so tread with caution.If you're running an optimized browser build, share your experiences with us below.Thanks Chris![Hat tip: Mac.Blorge]
CSS Animation to replace need for Flash in MobileSafari? Not likely
New nightly builds of Safari's bleeding-edge doppelgänger, WebKit, are getting some new support for CSS animations -- support that's already available in MobileSafari. The animations, which include a falling leaves effect, a way to simply animate objects sliding across the screen, and a "pulse" effect (described as "the new <blink>") are all supported by WebKit. The WebKit blog shows code examples about how to use these behaviors in your own sites. MacRumors's Arnold Kim suggests that Apple may be looking to obviate the need for Flash on the iPhone and iPod touch through the implementation of web tools like CSS Animation. I would argue that while CSS is powerful, getting Flash on the iPhone is about one thing and one thing only: Games.
Farewell, iPhone-optimized iGoogle
One shining year -- that's how long the iPhone-optimized iGoogle search page hung around, and now we must tell it goodbye. Introduced in January 2008, the customized iGoogle UI for Mobile Safari provided a single-column view and easier navigation for iPhone users. As Christina noted earlier today on Download Squad, the sleek UI has been replaced with the unified mobile format for iGoogle that renders similarly on most mobile browsers, including Google's own Webkit-based Android browser (which previously had benefited from the Webkit-tweaked front page for the iPhone).The unification of the mobile iGoogle interface may simply be an effort by Google to level the playing field instead of having the iPhone as a most-favored-device, or it might be part and parcel of the big G's shaving down on costs by eliminating offerings like Jaiku, Dodgeball and Google Notebook. Either way, if you're mourning the loss of your custom iGoogle look, let us know below.
Linden Lab and Torch Mobile: Replacing the Second Life Web-browser
In development discussions surrounding the Second Life viewer's Web-support and internal Web-browser, WebKit has been a frequent discussion item. WebKit was originally derived (by Apple) from the Konqueror browser's KHTML software library and now functions as the core of Apple's Safari Web-browser. A number of companies have extended and adapted WebKit over time. A primary sticking point with adoption into the Second Life viewer, however, involved the terms of WebKit's software license. Now that the licensing barrier has been overcome, work on integrating QtWebKit into the viewer is proceeding apace, as Linden Lab works in conjunction with Torch Mobile (makers of the Iris Browser) to finalize the integration, and sort out a few lingering issues.
Third-party apps enhance web browsing for iPhone, iPod touch
Earlier this week, there was a sudden influx of web browsing applications in the App Store. Mac Rumors points out that some of them, most notably Edge Browser [App Store link], have very old release dates even though they only showed up in the store recently (Edge Browser's release date is listed as Oct. 13, '08). It's important to note that these aren't true third party browsers, but enhancements to Mobile Safari. What's interesting is that Apple has previously rejected applications for "duplicating functionality" of some of their own software. Specifically, Podcaster was rejected because it "...duplicates the functionality of the Podcast section of iTunes," while MailWrangler was denied for duplicating "...the functionality of the built-in iPhone application Mail without providing sufficient differentiation or added functionality." Perhaps Apple is now loosening the reigns a bit. Applications like Edge Browser, Incognito [App Store link], QuickSurf [App Store link] and WebMate: Tabbed Browser [App Store link] offer web browsing functionality in one form or another. For example, Incognito allows for history-free browsing, QuickSurf speeds things up by omitting most images and WebMate queues up all links for later viewing.Sure, they aren't full fledged, third party browsers, but it's baby steps we're after.[Via MacDailyNews]
WebKit adds some Sparkle
Sparkle, Andy Matuschak's software update framework for Cocoa applications, is no stranger to TUAW. Now, it's found its way into WebKit, the developmental version of Safari. This feature, often requested on the WebKit mailing lists, allows WebKit to update itself with the click of a button. Sparkle has become a standard for Mac applications. I tend to shudder a little bit every time an application has the smarts to tell me there's an update, but then sends me to a web page to download it. Not because I'm lazy, just because I know there's a better way. There are several variations cropping up, including one from Google. I haven't worked with the newcomers, but I can testify that Sparkle is so utterly simple to implement that developers who fail to do so should be scolded repeatedly until they capitulate (see WebKit). A hearty thanks, though, to the WebKit team, from all of us who surf the bleeding edge of browser development. Thanks to Chris Pirillo for the tip!
WebKit-based Iris browser for Windows Mobile hits beta v2
We know how it goes -- once you get your Windows Mobile setup situated how you like it, making tweaks is a rare, rare occurrence. To that end, you probably passed on the highly dangerous first beta of the WebKit-based Iris browser. At long last, the entirely more stable beta v2 has emerged for those courageous enough to give it a go, and the designers are promising that the over 100 fixes and improvements make it "incredibly fast" and almost life-altering. If you're not keen on waiting for the next iteration of Internet Explorer Mobile, and if you're somehow not pleased with Opera Mini or Mobile Firefox, roll the dice with this one and see how things turn out.[Via the::unwired]