Hasta La Gadget!

You could call WebKit the glue that binds the modern web: the rendering engine powers Apple’s Safari, Google’s Chrome, and many mobile browsers past and present. Things are about to unstick a little. Google believes that Chromium’s multi-process approach has added too much complexity for both the browser and WebKit itself, so it’s creating a separate, simpler fork named Blink. Although the new engine will be much the same as WebKit at the start, it’s expected to differ over time as Google strips out unnecessary code and tweaks the underlying platform. We’d also expect it to spread, as the company has confirmed to us that both Chrome and Chrome OS will be using Blink in the future. We’re safely distant from the Bad Old Days of wildly incompatible web engines, but the shift may prove a mixed blessing — it could lead to more advancements on the web, but it also gives developers that much more code to support.

Update: The Next Web has confirmed that Opera, which recently ditched its Presto engine for Webkit, will indeed be using Blink as it’s already hitching its proverbial wagon to Chromium.

Filed under: Internet, Software, Google

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Source: Chromium Blog

It’s no secret that Microsoft and Nokia are aiming to make Windows Phone the OS of choice when it comes to mobile photography, whether through optical image stabilization or the Lens app lineup. The latest camera augmentation code to come down the pike is Blink, an app built by Microsoft Research that brings a special burst mode to WP8 devices. Blink works by snapping a series of 16 shots each time you take a photo, and lets you choose which picture’s worth keeping. It’s an an excellent tool for those looking to take action photos, but there’s a catch — the pictures taken by Blink are of less-than-impressive quality, with a max resolution of 800 x 488. That said, if such an imaging safety net sounds good to you, there’s a video showing it off in action after the break, and you can grab the app at the source below.

Update: It seems that the images Blink produced on our Samsung ATIV Odyssey are not representative of the app’s true capabilities. One of the app’s creators reached out to tell us that Blink is set to output images that are 1280 x 720, and the glitch we unwittingly discovered is being investigated.

Filed under: Cellphones, Software, Mobile, Microsoft

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Via: All About Windows Phone

Source: Windows Phone Store

A blink lasts just 1/10 of a second. So what happens when we set our camera shutters to the same length? We see the world that may have been when our eyes were closed. More »

You know how some smartphones do come with a tiny LED somewhere in front, where it will light up in different colors to indicate different notifications? Well, it seems that this particular idea has been ported over to the far less mobile desktop environment, although notebooks, too, will be able to work with the Blink USB LED visual indicator. Basically, this particular peripheral can be specially programmed to inform you of different events which happen on your computer, ranging from incoming email to new tweets as well as Facebook status updates. Finished downloading a file but do not know it? Blink will get the job done for you.

Bear in mind that this is a Kickstarter project, and it has far surpassed its original funding goal of $29,000. It is estimated that the retail price for Blink will be $30 thereabouts, where it will play nice on Mac OS X, Windows, and Linux platforms. The thing is this – on a desktop, I am not too worried, but it sure as heck takes up a precious USB port on a notebook.

By Ubergizmo. Related articles: Memory on Hand Band is fashionable and functional, LandingZone dock for the MacBook Air adds more ports,