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Safari 5: Extensions, Reader, HTML5, Bing. Oh, and it’s fast.

Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Apple, Internet, Software,

Safari 5 features

Apparently, the release of Safari 5 wasn’t big enough to be mentioned in the this morning, but nevertheless, the company has launched a fully-updated version of its browser. So, what’s new? Quite a bit, actually. First, Safari 5 is much faster—it runs Javascript 25% faster than Safari 4, is twice as fast as Firefox on the Mac, and is even 3% faster than Chrome. So yeah, it’s fast. There’s also a new feature called Safari Reader. If you hit a web page that has an article on it, you can hit the Reader icon, and the article will be overlaid over the site in a very readable fashion. Another biggie is the addition of a bunch of extra HTML5 features. As we know, Apple is all about supporting HTML5 as a platform, and they are putting their money where their mouth is by having Safari 5 be the browser with the most HTML5 support at the moment. Oh, and for those of you who want more choice in your search bar, Safari 5 offers Bing as a search option, built-in, alongside Google and Yahoo! Search.

You can download Safari 5 now.

Read More | Safari 5

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SXSW 2010: Fun with HTML5 video

Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Editorial, Features, Internet,

RealAudio and ultimately Real Video was the original, old school audio and video compression used on the Internet during the early Web 1.0 days.  No doubt that Web 2.0’s rise in popularity was caused in part by YouTube and the ability for its users to easily send video up to a server and have it transcoded and streamed on the fly - without the need for expensive programs like the RealMedia server set.

YouTube leveraged the Adobe Flash technology, which in its infancy, would show only cartoon like video, then incorporated codec, or software decoding support for television like motion video.  This has been the standard for video distribution on the Internet, but requires support for software, and only lately has incorporated decoding within hardware.  Notably the iPad and iPhone are two such media devices that do not have flash media decoding support due to a long feud between Apple CEO Steve Jobs and Adobe.  Jobs calls flash a CPU hog, and a claims it would cut battery life on his devices from 10’s of hours to just an hour if it was supported. Instead, he and many others hope to see HTML5 take a rise to prominence.

In this session, Christopher Blizzard, director of developer relations with Mozilla, and Michael Dale, lead developer of the MetaVid project and WikiMedia foundation, go in depth on what HTML5 has to offer as it pertains to video on the web.

Click to continue reading SXSW 2010: Fun with HTML5 video


HP shows off Slate running Flash and Air

Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Handhelds, Videos,

At , Microsoft gave us a sneak peek at the Windows 7-based slate tablet device. We didn’t get much info at all, but more has trickled out since then. However, now HP is taking an obvious jab at Apple and the , having released the video above that shows off the slate tablet running Flash and Adobe Air, right on the device. Of course, the highlight here comes near the end, when the person playing with the HP Slate pulls up Hulu and begins watching content right on the device, something that the iPad can’t do just yet (although we are hearing that Hulu is working hard to become iPad-compatible.) Hey, one thing the iPad has on the Slate? It has a solid launch date that is just a little over 3 weeks away.

Read More | AppleInsider

Hulu coming to the iPad?

Hulu iPadWhen Apple introduced the world to the original iPhone, YouTube wasn’t part of the equation, but in the weeks leading up to launch, Steve Jobs revealed that YouTube would in fact have a dedicated app built right in to the iPhone and that the company had started the task of re-encoding their videos to H.264 format, which plays nice with the device. Fast-forward to today, and we are hearing similar rumblings as it pertains to Hulu and the .

The biggest complaint we are hearing about the iPad is that it lacks Flash support, which means that a device that seems to be perfect for watching videos on Hulu, has no way to actually accomplish that task. However, it seems that Hulu is already hard at work on an iPad-compatable version of the site. Now, we don’t know if this is actually going to be a Hulu app, similar to what YouTube has on the iPhone, or if Hulu is simply switching up it’s Flash player and adding support for HTML5. The nice thing here is that Hulu has been using H.264 compression in their videos since the beginning, so the only real change that needs to be made to be iPad-compatable is to allow videos to be played outside of the Flash player, and HTML5 solves that perfectly.

At this point, we wouldn’t be surprised if a week or two prior to the launch of the iPad, Apple let’s us know that USA-based iPads will ship with Hulu supported from day one.

Read More | TechCrunch

YouTube launches opt-in HTML5 video player

Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Internet, Software,

YouTube has just launched a new experimental HTML5 video player, which would replace their Flash player for supported videos. Flash has long been seen (with good reason) as a resource hog, so switching to the HTML5 browser should show a dramatic performance increase. One user reported a resource drop of over 50% when using the HTML5 player when compared to the Flash version. You can get in on the action, as long as you are using either Google Chrome or Safari 4.0 or above (although we’ve heard that it also works with recent versions of Firefox.) The only catch here is that videos with ads, annotations, and captions will still play in the older Flash player, and you won’t get fullscreen support. Of course you can try it out, and if you don’t like it, you can just turn it off.

Read More | YouTube HTML5 Video Player

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