Hasta La Gadget!

It’s all coming together, folks. It doesn’t take much of a gander at the Chrome Web Store to notice a trend: some of the flashiest, most mature “apps” are actually just in-browser versions of iPad apps. And you know what else? Most of these “apps” actually run fine in Safari on the iPad. We’re not sure how long Google gave developers to port their experiences over, but it seems like most of the best work had already been done in the form of HTML5 apps that were merely wrapped in app form for App Store delivery. Google’s just taking things to the next logical step. Continue after the break as we expand this thesis paragraph into a number of supporting blocks of text, a few jazzy pictorial examples, and a stunning closer.

Continue reading Chrome Web Store, HTML5 and the iPad: symbiosis at its best

Chrome Web Store, HTML5 and the iPad: symbiosis at its best originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 10 Dec 2010 18:29:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Is Japanese band Sour’s “Mirror” music video the single best thing we’ve ever seen in a browser? It probably is. Load it up in Safari or Chrome and make sure you connect your Facebook, Twitter, and webcam — we tried it out and it’s totally fine. In fact, it’s more than fine. It’s stunning. Why can’t HTML5 and Flash always play this nicely together?

Sour’s ‘Mirror’ browser-based music video is absolutely wild originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 09 Dec 2010 19:22:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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We’ve long been proponents of subscription music, but it’s always a rocky relationship: Rhapsody‘s excellent selection but bad app and terrible web player (you call that a bitrate?), Zune‘s beautiful UI but Windows-only-ness, and Spotify‘s continued inability to work in the US. Eventually, this particular writer drifted over to MOG, which was initially a $5 a month web-only service, best known for its high bitrate and decent selection, with a more recent move to Android and iPhone apps (including offline play) for a still-palatable $10 a month price. Unfortunately, all this time we’ve had to put up with the indignities of a pop-up, window-based Flash player for our main MOG experience, which crashes any browser on a Mac at least once a day — like most Flash things on the Mac. Which brings us to today: MOG is a featured app on Google’s new Chrome Web Store, and once “installed” it offers an all-new luscious, speedy, HTML5 UI for MOG. Better yet, the web app also works in Safari at mog.com/chrome. Under the hood there’s still a “headless” Flash playback element for DRM purposes, but everything else is a vast improvement. The only thing that could make us happier would be some sort of exfm-style Chrome extension for adding music we discover on the web to MOG playlists. You know, as long as we’re getting lifelong dreams granted like this, might as well go for broke.

MOG hits the Chrome Web Store, cools our Flash fever with a nice cool HTML5 washcloth originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 07 Dec 2010 18:48:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Netflix caused a lot of head scratching in October when it started rolling out its new, disc-free Netflix experience for the PS3. Namely, different people were getting a different UI, and there didn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason to the differentiation. Well, it turns out Netflix was flexing a bit of its HTML5 muscle, rapidly testing different experiences to see which ones worked best for users, all without having to push out app updates or back-end changes to accommodate its indecision. Apparently, Netflix’s engineers actually ported WebKit to the PS3 to make all this possible, and hopefully it’s a sign of things to come in the HTML5 iPhone, iPad, and Android apps — which could probably use some serious sprucing, or even a bit of scattered rapid prototyping just to relieve the monotony. It’s also seems to be good news for other PS3 apps which can lean on the framework — presumably VUDU’s own HTML5-based UI took advantage of this when it landed on the PS3 in November. What we’d really love is if Sony and Google are secretly in cahoots to bring the entirety of Chrome and its couch-friendly Google TV UI with it. Hey, we can dream, right?

Netflix ported WebKit to the PS3 to enable HTML5 goodies, a dynamically updatable UI originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 07 Dec 2010 04:39:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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RIM has released a video pitching the upcoming PlayBook tablet against the current iPad, and it’s pretty impressive. Clearly the tests were chosen to favor RIM’s own device, but even so, it beats the iPad handily in each one.

Loading a regular webpage, for example, sees the PlayBook finished with everything, rendering and all, while the iPad still ticks along. Next, it’s on to Flash, which the iPad doesn’t do at all. Smartly, RIM chose to use a non-video serving site (in this case Adidas) as most video providers offer iPad-compatible streams as an alternative to Adobe’s proprietary plugin. Even so, the animation on the Flash site stutters noticeably (this is probably Flash’s fault, not the PlayBook’s).

Then we move to Javascript and HTML5, and while the example shown clearly favors the PlayBook, there are plenty of sites where the iPad works great.

Still, the raw rendering speed of the PlayBook’s browser is obvious, and the Flash support will make it useful for browsing restaurant websites on the go (why do all restaurant sites use Flash?). RIM must be proud. It must also be aware that the PlayBook won’t be out until next year, when it will be up against the iPad 2, not the current iPad.

BlackBerry PlayBook and iPad Comparison: Web Fidelity [Blackberry YouTube Channel]

See Also:

• RIM Unveils Tethered Tablet, the BlackBerry PlayBook
• Tablet Wars: How the BlackBerry PlayBook Measures Up
• Blackberry Boss: Playbook will Cost 'Under $500′
• Video: Adobe Air, Flash Demonstrated on RIM PlayBook Tablet …
• Browser App to Deliver Flash to iPad, iPhone, iPod Touch