Hasta La Gadget!

As much as we’d thought that blinking text had already gone the way of our first Angelfire fanpage, it’s only now that the much-loathed HTML tag has met its maker. Firefox 23 has officially axed support for the tag, joining the ranks of Chrome, Safari and Opera in a group of would-be assassins. Like many bad decisions, blinking was conceived after a long night of drinking, with Netscape’s founding engineer Lou Montulli lamenting the limitations of Lynx in a bar. While Lynx couldn’t run a huge majority of HTML extensions that he and his team were spit-balling, it transpired that blinking text would, and the rest is a history that we’d rather put behind us. It’s just a shame that Mozilla can’t erase our youthful indiscretion so easily.

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Via: PCWorld

Source: Mozilla

Blink(1), a Kickstarter favorite that launched a year ago is coming back for more. The indicator light, which plugs into your USB and simply blinks on command, is now selling for a pledge of $25 and sports updated features including USB 3.0 support, dual-sided LEDs, and improved design.

I haven’t seen an example of a Kickstarter project launching a second version so soon or with such competence but here you go: the new Blink(1) will now support more machines – Chromebooks included – and improved IFTTT. It also features dual LEDs so on one side of the device you can show a status indicator and, on another, get input from another program. Think of it as a multi-tasking blinkenlight clad in a handsome metal and plastic case.

I have the original Blink(1) and, sadly, I’ve yet to decide what I want to do with it. However, I would definitely also buy this one in order to also vacillate and eventually lose it in my pile of detritus on my desk. However, you can use it as an open source indicator system, an alert system for alarms and sensors, or simply use it to let you know how hot it is outside or whether or not someone delivered a package on time. It’s especially useful if you’re running, say, a server farm and want to immediately pinpoint bum machines or stopped jobs.

The team is looking for $28,000 and is already at $9,000. They plan to ship in October. This new blink is also completely open source and you can build your own or even print out your own enclosures. It’s a fun little device at a nice price and, if you’re not lazy like me, you’ll probably find it quite useful.

Blink for Windows Phone 8 updated by Microsoft,

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Google let us all know that it would strip out unneeded WebKit code to make its Blink web engine scream, but it never said exactly what kind of pace we could expect. The answer, it turns out, is “breakneck.” The company’s Alex Komoroske told Google I/O attendees that the Open Web Platform team has already yanked 8.8 million lines of programming from Blink in about a month, with 4.5 million of them scrubbed almost immediately. Removing so much cruft has reportedly improved not just the upcoming engine, but the engineers — they’re far more productive, Komoroske says. The team has already had time to explore new rendering techniques and garner code contribution requests from the likes of Adobe, Intel and even Microsoft. Although we don’t yet know if all the trimming will be noticeable to end users by the time Blink reaches polished Chrome and Chrome OS releases, it’s safe to say that some developers won’t recognize what they see.

Filed under: Internet, Software, Google

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Source: TechCrunch

Word that Google had decided to fork WebKit and build its own rendering engine is still echoing through the spidery halls of the internet. The true ramifications aren’t entirely clear yet, but Opera has pledged to embrace Blink and WebKit is already talking about removing Chrome-specific code from its repositories. This doesn’t necessarily indicate a seismic shift in the industry, but it certainly suggests that we won’t be looking at a world so thoroughly dominated by the direct descendant of KHTML. At least at first, the new entrant won’t actually deviate much from WebKit. Primarily the focus will be on stripping away unnecessary code and files to streamline the rendering engine specifically for Chrome. Obviously, this won’t prevent other developers from using Blink, since the project is open source. But Google has been pretty up front about the rationale behind the fork — the multi-process architecture favored by Chromium-based projects is quite different than that used in other WebKit browsers. This has, to put it in the plainest terms possible, kinda gummed up the works.

Blink is about 10 weeks away from landing in the stable version of Chrome (it’s expected to be turned on by default in version 28), but it’s already available as part of the Canary build. We downloaded the experimental browser and spent some time with it in an effort to identify what, if anything, was different. Keep reading after the break to find out just what Google has bought by shedding some of WebKit’s baggage.

Filed under: Internet, Software, Google

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