“Apple this week posted a new section on its website, showing off the abilities of HTML5 in a standards based browser such as Safari, including interactive videos and photos,” Sam Oliver reports for AppleInsider.

“Using the Safari browser, users can pan around a 360-degree view of the entrance to Apple’s iconic Fifth Avenue store in New York City, watch an embedded trailer for the forthcoming film ‘Tron’ and manipulate scale and perspective, or flip through a gallery of photos,” Oliver reports. “‘Every new Apple mobiledevice and every new Mac — along with the latest version of Apple’s Safari web browser — supports web standards including HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript,’ the website reads. ‘These web standards are open, reliable, highly secure, and efficient. They allow web designers and developers to create advanced graphics, typography, animations, and transitions. Standards aren’t add-ons to the web. They are the web. And you can start using them today.’”

Oliver reports, “Seven different sections of content highlight the capabilities of HTML5, CSS3 and JavaScript.”

Full article here

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WFMU, a listener-supported, non-commercial radio station headquartered in Jersey City, New Jersey, broadcasting at 91.1 (and at 90.1 as WMFU) MHz FM, offering a free-form format, has begun testing live streaming audio in HTML5.

WFMU’s test page states:

This demo of our live mp3 stream seems to work well on Chrome (Mac/PC) and Safari (Mac). No flash is being used.

Firefox, which does not support mp3 natively, streams our ogg stream but it’s not quite there yet. Firefox users will need to hit the pause/play buttons to let the stream buffer a bit and then it should play fine. IE, you’re hopless [sic].

WFMU is the longest-running free-form radio station in the United States.

Mac Safari or Chrome browser users, try out their HTML test here.

“The desktop version of Safari should ‘soon’ get full HTML5 support, Apple CEO Steve Jobs reportedly claims in a new e-mail,” MacNN reports.

“The browser, available for Mac and Windows, is still lacking many of the components of the HTML5 specification, including drag-and-drop, geolocation and inline SVG,” MacNN reports. “Several of these have been added to the latest beta of Google Chrome, rendering Safari outdated.”

MacNN reports, “The last major desktop version of Safari, Safari 4, was released on June 8th last year; this could suggest that Apple will time an update for this year’s WWDC, scheduled to begin on June 7th.”

Full article, with links to Jobs’ email, here.

Source: MacDailyNews

“I’ve been doing a bit of experimenting with the Canvas and Video tags in HTML5 lately, and found some cool features hiding in plain sight. [One API] lets you take the contents of specific HTML elements and draw them into a canvas, and the 3rd element in that list is just begging to be abused. Copying video into a canvas element means opening up the ability to manipulate or process video frames at runtime,” Sean Christmann reports for Craftymind. “Two concepts instantly came to mind that seemed like fun to try.”

• Blowing apart fragments of video: Click around the video frame to blow up that part of the video, the exploded pieces will continue to play the video inside them. After a while they retract back to their original place.

• 3D Video: This demo in particular runs really well inside webkit based browsers, but not so much in Firefox. Firefox doesn’t appear to have any hardware acceleration for Ogg decoding so I had to drop the video size in half in order to run at acceptable framerates. Even still, Firefox chokes pretty badly on my Macbook Pro. *Update* – I’ve changed the ogg video to be 640 x 360, prepare to see firefox weep.

Full article here.

Source: MacDailyNews

“Flash powers almost all the video on the web nowadays, so it’s obviously good enough. But is there a better way? YouTube, and now Vimeo, who’re both giddily jumping into bed with HTML, sure seem to think so,” John Herrman reports for Gizmodo.

“Vimeo’s new HTML5 system is just like YouTube’s, in both execution and technical details, in that it’ll only work with a few browsers—Safari and Chrome, for now—and that it’s compatible with most, but not all, of the company’s video libraries. It’s something that most people won’t bother to try at this point, and if they do, they’re probably be underwhelmed, since HTML5 video playback is almost indistinguishable from Flash video playback,” Herrman reports. “But it’s primed to be something that everyone ends up using, and that would be a Very Good Thing. Flash video performs terribly on Mac OS X and Linux, and on the few mobile devices that do support it, playback is uniformly terrible.”

“HTML5 allows certain types of video to be rendered in the browser natively, like JPEGs or GIFs are now,” Herrman reports. “It’s an objectively simpler, more efficient solution, and disregarding the massive infrastructure built up around Flash video, it would be the obvious choice.”

Herrman reports, “Luckily, YouTube accounts for a hefty chunk of said architecture, their catalog is rendered in HTML5-friendly h.264 format already—that’s how you watch in on the iPhone and Android, by the way—and with help from smaller sites like Vimeo, they could actually get the ball rolling on, you know, murdering Flash video.”

Full article here.

Source: MacDailyNews