Hasta La Gadget!

Interested to know how you were gonna fill up that Chrome OS app page? Google just announced its new online web app store at I/O. So far they’ve shown off Dark Room for image editing, a pretty slick version of TweetDeck, and yes, like every other platform known to man, there’s Plants. vs. Zombies and Lego Star Wars. Paid-for software will be offered — Dark Room is $4.99, if you want to go ahead and put that money aside. No word on a launch date, but we’ll keep pushing for more. We were just shown a demo of Sports Illustrated‘s interactive magazine, and we gotta say, it’s mighty impressive — embedded video, fully searchable, and some pretty clever tricks with geolocation that frankly exceed most anything we’ve seen on the iPad thus far. The web store — for Chrome and Chrome OS — will hit the dev channel “soon.”

Google unveils Chrome web store, Sports Illustrated app impresses originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 19 May 2010 13:00:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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The folks at HardMac have received an image purporting to reveal protective skins for the next-generation iPhone. The shape of the skin and the round holes for buttons come in line with the characteristics of the prototype iPhone leaked by Gizmodo last month.

Third-party cases have provided clues about unreleased Apple hardware a number of times in the past — sometimes they were legitimate, and sometimes they weren’t. Former Wired.com news editor Leander Kahney explained that the third-party accessory industry has historically been a leaky boat because the people who create the plastics that come with the iPhone are likely connected to the companies making third-party protective cases. (They are all in the plastics industry, after all.)

This time around, however, it could be the case that third-party manufacturers are confident that the prototypes leaked by Gizmodo and a Vietnamese website are the near-final product. MacRumors’ Arnold Kim did a quick search and found additional cases for an “iPhone 4G.”

Via HardMac

See Also:

• iPhone Finder Regrets His ‘Mistake’
• Roommate’s Tip Led Cops to iPhone Finder
• Gizmodo Gets Hands On New 4G iPhone
• Gizmodo Dissects Unreleased Apple iPhone
• Apple May Have Traced iPhone to Finder’s Address

We join forces with Internet superstar Molly Wood to discuss some new MacBook updates (which were officially announced the day after we taped this broadcast). Other topics include the late, great Ronnie James …

Originally posted at Digital City Podcast

Google’s plan to open-source the VP8 video codec it acquired when it purchased a company called On2 hasn’t exactly been a secret, and the company’s finally made it official today as part of a new format called WebM. The WebM container is based on Matroska, with VP8 video and Ogg Vorbis audio streams packed inside — Google says the format is efficient enough to support playback on lower-power devices like netbooks, tablets, and handhelds, while the encoding profiles are simple enough to limit complexity when you’re trying to create WebM files. WebM is open-sourced and licensed royalty-free under a BSD-style license, so all those H.264 patent licensing concerns shouldn’t be an issue — and as you’d expect, Mozilla is supporting WebM right off the bat, with support in Firefox nightly builds as of today. Chromium nightlies will also support WebM as of today, with Chrome early access builds getting support on May 24 — and Opera is listed as “coming soon.”

Google’s also going to be supporting the format as an option for YouTube playback, so that should drive adoption in a big way — if you’re running these latest Firefox or Chromium nightlies you can actually try it out now. The big question, of course, is whether Apple and Microsoft will roll WebM support into Safari and IE and onto their mobile platforms. We’ll see — Google definitely has the ability to push a format into the mainstream.

Update: Industry support announced at I/O — including Adobe, who’ll be rolling VP8 support into Flash Player. Take note of the hardware partners, though: AMD, ARM, Broadcom, Freescale, NVIDIA, Qualcomm, and TI, among others. Missing in action? Intel.

Update 2: The always-reliable Mary Jo Foley at ZDNet says she’s heard Microsoft will be supporting WebM in IE9. That’s a big deal if it’s true, but we’ll have to wait for confirmation — IE9 isn’t due out for a year, so a lot can change in the meantime. Fingers crossed.

Update 3: Microsoft’s made an official statement on its blog — while the company is “all in” with HTML5, IE9 will only come with H.264 installed be default due to technical and IP concerns. HTML5 / VP8 playback will be supported, but users will have to download and install the codec separately, which doesn’t bode well for widespread adoption. Here’s the money quote:

In its HTML5 support, IE9 will support playback of H.264 video as well as VP8 video when the user has installed a VP8 codec on Windows.

[Thanks, Sean]

Continue reading Google launches open WebM web video format based on VP8 (update: hardware partners and Microsoft statement)

Google launches open WebM web video format based on VP8 (update: hardware partners and Microsoft statement) originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 19 May 2010 12:22:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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