Showing posts with label HTML5. Show all posts
Showing posts with label HTML5. Show all posts

Thursday, September 09, 2010

A couple of techie bits...

First, as a follow-up to my post about how much I loathe Flash, here is an amazing interactive video for Arcade Fire's We Used To Wait.

You must use Safari, Chrome or one of the many other WebKit-based browsers, but do so and you'll see "birds" that follow your mouse and the formation of which also follows the music; you'll see the video use satellite pictures of your home town; be able to write a postcard, and then see the video interact with more satellite pictures. It's utterly, utterly enthralling.

And it's entirely built in HTML5 technologies—no Flash at all.

Obviously, it's pretty processor intensive and only works on the latest and greatest browsers, but as an indication of the capabilities of HTML5 (and CSS3) it is simply stunning. The Chrome Experiments website has some more beautiful examples of interactive HTML5 projects, some of which are really amazing.

And things, as they say, will only get better.

Second, in a bid to annoy the hell out of Dizzy, here is a Techcrunch article summing up the problems with the openness of Android...
In the post, I posed a question: if it’s not the iPhone/AT&T; deal, why do you choose Android? Nearly 1,000 people responded, and a large percentage focused on the same idea: the idea of “openness.”

You’ll forgive me, but I have to say it: what a load of crap.
...

In theory, I’m right there with you. The thought of a truly open mobile operating system is very appealing. The problem is that in practice, that’s just simply not the reality of the situation. Maybe if Google had their way, the system would be truly open. But they don’t. Sadly, they have to deal with a very big roadblock: the carriers.

The result of this unfortunate situation is that the so-called open system is quickly revealing itself to be anything but. Further, we’re starting to see that in some cases the carriers may actually be able to exploit this “openness” to create a closed system that may leave you crying for Apple’s closed system — at least their’s looks good and behaves as expected.
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But who cares whether it’s great or it’s crap — isn’t the point of “open” supposed to be that the consumer can choose what they want on their own devices? Instead, open is proving to mean that the carriers can choose what they want to do with Android.

This has become more and more obvious as each new Android model is released, and it is going to become an increasing irritation. And whether Google can do anything about it—indeed, whether they want to—is unclear...