Internet Archive
Internet users throughout the world, and particularly in the United States, have long been chastened to hear of South Korea's legendary broadband penetration. The urbanized, technologically-advanced nation has been famous for rolling out ultra high speed network for the majority of its citizens, and many of us have looked on with envy. However, it turns out it's not all good news. An OSNews reader gives us the skinny from the trenches in Korea.
Earlier this week, Apple launched a HTML5 Showcase page, displaying several uses for HTML5 and related technologies. However, it turns out that
Apple is using trickery to block out browsers other than Safari, with the end result that browsers with better support for web standards than Safari can't access the demos.
Unless you've been under a rock, you're probably familiar with the fact that Flash doesn't run on any mobile Apple device. Moreover, it looks like Apple is never going to let Flash onto the iPhone/iPod/iPad empire. Rather than just whinge about the fact, the ad network company RevShock decided to do something about it by creating
Smokescreen, an open source product that converts Flash to HTML5 & Javascript. While mainly designed for ads, and still very much in the testing stages, the demos certainly look very promising, and it ticks all the boxes for those who want everything to be open and free.
If there's one thing several people are really, really good at, it's ruining the web. The latest attempt is something quite insipid, something that had me scratching my head a few times before I realised what was going on. When copying and pasting text from certain websites, content would be added to your clipboard without you knowing about it - something like "Read more at". John Gruber finds this just as insipid as I do,
and investigated a little further - while also coming up with a way to block this nonsense. Seriously - this is right up there with those in-text underline ad things.
Lightspark, the project that aims to create an LLVM-based Free Flash payer,
has reached beta status. "JIT compilation of ActionScript to native x86 bytecode using LLVM; hardware accelerated rendering using OpenGL Shaders (GLSL); very good and robust support for current-generation ActionScript 3; a new, clean codebase exploiting multithreading and optimized for modern hardware. Designed from scratch after the official Flash documentation was released."
Despite its recent feud with Apple over HTML5 and Flash, Adobe will
add HTML5 and CSS3 support to its Dreamweaver HTML authoring tool. With the Adobe HTML5 Pack extension for Dreamweaver CS5, developers leveraging HTML5 and CSS3 gain such capabilities as code-hinting, in which the tool helps finish lines of code based on what already has been entered on the keyboard. HTML5 Pack extension also features WebKit engine updates and improvements to support video and audio in the Dreamweaver Live View capability for previewing designs. Also, HTML5 starter layouts are featured.
Submitted by Nitrodist
2010-05-19
Internet
If there's one subject that's really hot right now on the web, it's privacy. There's the whole Facebook saga, and especially the company's CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, seems somewhat averse to the concept of privacy. We also have a much smaller issue with the Chrome web browser, where someone found out zoom settings are stored somewhere, even when in incognito mode. It turned out to be a feature (sort of) but it does highlight how important the concept of privacy on the web has become.
Guest post by Long Time Reader
2010-05-16
Internet
FreeBSD developer Robert Watson has
announced an Apache GCD MPM that uses Apple's
Grand Central Dispatch concurrent programming framework, and cites 1/4 the number of lines of code for threaded MPMs to accomplish the same goals. Currently, the MPM is being
distributed on Mac OS X Forge, and runs on FreeBSD and Mac OS X. Apache developer Paul Querna has
proposed merging it to the Apache trunk. There are also ongoing efforts to port libdispatch to Solaris and Linux, so hopefully it will work there soon as well!
Mozilla, sticking to its ideals of the open web, decided long ago that support for the patent-encumbered H264 codec would not be included in any of its products. Not only is H264 wholly incompatible with the open web and Free software, it is also incredibly expensive. Mozilla could use one of the open source implementations, but those are not licensed, and the MPEG-LA has been quite clear in that it will sue those who encode or decode H264 content without a license. Software patents, however, are only valid in some parts of the world, so an enterprising developer has
started a project that was sure to come eventually:
Firefox builds with H264 support.
It annoys me that Flash is required for most video sites. Especially when Flash isn't available on a lot of devices or at least not the latest, required version. Whenever I try to use my Internet Tablet to watch shows on sites like Hulu, Veoh, Crackle, Joost, etc., I can't, because they require a newer version of Flash, and I'm stuck with what I have. Thankfully not every site uses the latest version. At least not yet anyways.
"A few months back, four geeky college students, living on pizza in a computer lab downtown on Mercer Street, decided to build a social network that wouldn't force people to surrender their privacy to a big business. It would take three or four months to write the code, and they would need a few thousand dollars each to live on. They gave themselves 39 days to raise $10,000, using an online site,
Kickstarter, that helps creative people find support." They call the project
Diaspora and
have managed to raise $100K in just 20 days.
Adobe has gone on the offensive - big time. The company has started a rather massive advertisement campaign on the web as well as in print in various large US newspapers, in answer to Apple's battle with Flash and Adobe. In the meantime, Adobe received support from an unexpected corner - Andy Gryc, product marketing manager at QNX, has written
a lengthy blog post supporting Adobe.
A lot of articles lately have been focused on why Apple and Microsoft are the bad guys by supporting H.264 and not Theora. Well, yes, they are bad guys, but there really is not much point whining to them. It will in all likelihood fall on deaf ears, simply because they are acting in their own best interests--as MPEG stakeholders and commercial, DRM-encouraging, royalty-loving, proprietary-operating-system-hawking corporations. But that could all change--if the HTML5 spec didn't allow H.264.
Another blow for Flash. As Adobe is stating that they will make the best tools for HTML5, another major website using Flash has announced they're switching over to HTML5. Scribd, which provides in-browser access to all sorts of documents and e-books uploaded by users,
will ditch its Flash-based website in favour of a brand-new HTML5 version.
H264 or no, the rest of the world pretty much continues to spin, which also means new iterations of the programs central to this whole debate: browsers. While
Google released an ambitious new Chrome beta release, Microsoft
shipped the second platform preview release for Internet Explorer 9.
So, the deal with HTC isn't the only partnership Microsoft entered into today. The Joomla! project has announced that Microsoft has signed the Joomla! Contributor Agreement, meaning the Redmond company is now a contributor to this GPL project. Microsoft code has already found its way into the upcoming Joomla! 1.6 release, and closer cooperation between Joomla! and Microsoft will follow.
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The controversial Digital Economy Bill has been passed into law during the wash-up period, which sees outstanding legislation rushed through before a general election. The most controversial aspects of the bill - which could see persistent illegal file-sharers disconnected from the web and copyright holders given the power to block access to websites hosting illegal content - survived the process."
It almost got lost in all the iPhone OS 4.0 stuff, but Apple
made a major contribution to the WebKit project yesterday. It's called WebKit 2, and it adds multiprocess browsing to the WebKit API; it may look similar to what Chromium does, but the difference is that Chromium's process boundary is not actually part of WebKit.
Websites for over a decade have been transitioning to the Model-View-Controller paradigm, separating data from formatting and user interaction in their code bases. Unfortunately, this has meant not only the end of ugly early 90's vintage Geocities pages, but also of the era of digital, or more specifically computeral craftsmanship. The future of computers will depend on those artists, scholars, and programmers who can reunify content with format and remake programming as an art.
"Apple CEO Steve Jobs reportedly told the Wall Street Journal it would be 'trivial' for the newspaper to ditch Adobe's Flash software in preparation for the iPad.
Media-industry types who disagree have been emailing us. 'Oh, sure, just use Javascript: well guess what, we don't have a bunch of code junkies in our newsroom. We do have some great designers who've picked up Flash and enough Actionscript to be very effective.'"
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