Jan26

SublimeVideo HTML5 player

Posted at 7:26 PM • No Comments
SublimeVideo is a beautiful HTML5 video player that will be made publically available soon. It will allow you to embed any video into any webpage without the need for Flash, and will work in any good, modern web browser.

The player itself looks to take a lot of design cues from Apple’s QuickTime player, and is already fairly feature rich. It has the ability to expand video to full-window (browsers do not currently support full screen), has floating controls, buffer from scrub point and live re-sizing. Firefox support, volume controls and Flash fall-back (for IE users) is also planned.

I can’t wait to see more players like this one in the wild. This is a wonderful start and will be free for non-commercial use. See what it’s like in action here.
Jan26

The Era of Location-as-Platform Has Arrived

Posted at 12:39 AM • No Comments

The Metro newspaper has made a deal to deliver location based resterant reviews through foursquare. It is really exciting, but neither side of the coin has really been explored yet as this article explains.

[ReadWriteWeb article]

Jan25

Most important thing Steve Jobs has done?

Posted at 7:34 AM • No Comments
The original source is TechCrunch, so take the whole thing with a pinch of salt. Still, if this was murmoured about an upcoming announcement, tablet or not, it should be pretty interesting. Big words from a great man.

Jan24

Dedicated services

Posted at 12:40 AM • 2 Comments

I have mentioned previously that I like everything in it’s place. I am a fan of dedicated services. That is, I like my photos shared through a service dedicated to providing the best photo sharing experience possible, such as Flickr. Meanwhile, I like my videos shared through a service dedicated to providing the best video sharing experience possible, such as Vimeo. I realise it’s probably a little pedantic, but it’s the way I like it.

At the same time I’m a fan of rich desktop clients (or mobile ones for that matter) and the interfaces they have to offer. For example, I love the service Google Maps provides, but I love it even more in the iPhone client. I love Wordpress, but I prefer being able to blog through Posterous (or rather, Apple Mail). A lot of the interfaces and rich clients I am seeing now (such as Posterous and Droplr) seem to want to aggregate, and host all my files themselves. Even if they share with other services, aggregators still retain a primary copy.

I ask, what’s wrong with being a delivery mechanism, an uploader? What’s wrong with being a rich client, or an interface? I would like to see the emergence of a company who understands it’s okay to be just that, and leave the hosting and sharing to those who specialise in the particular field (including short URLs people – use bit.ly).

I wonder if I’m along in this, or if there is really any merit in the idea. I leave it to you to decide.

Jan24

Droplr

Posted at 12:03 AM • No Comments

Droplr is one of the most simple apps ever. Take a text file, an image, a video, a URL, just about anything and drag it to the Droplr icon in your menu bar. The item is uploaded to the Droplr server and a short URL is returned, displayed and automatically copied to your clipboard. Now go and paste that into an email, a tweet or wherever you’d like to share it.

This is a very simple, but brilliant idea. I like all my stuff to go to the “right places” (photos to flickr, videos to vimeo, URLs to bit.ly etc.) but the sheer simplicity of this app is great. I want to support it despite the issues I have had. Since I downloaded version 1.1.0 all has been well, so I won’t dwell on those issues.

It’s a free service, so while the shortened URLs behave as expected, images will be displayed on a page with ads, which is only fair really. The same goes for other files, though they will be displayed with a download link also. Check in on the website to see what you are using your 1GB free storage for, and to delete old files. Oh, and you can click the twitter button on your successful upload notification to instantly send your drp.ly URL to a Twitter client of your choice.

Simple, effective and brilliant. If only it would upload to the services of my choosing and return a short URL to that. I will only find out over time how much I will end up using it.

Jan22

What’s wrong with 24 Season 8

Posted at 6:43 PM • One Comment
***SPOILER ALERT*** While none of this will be news to those in the US, it will give away some key plot points to those in the UK since episode 1 won’t air here until Sunday night. That said, it’s all based on the first 4 hours, so how much can it give away?

—

I have always been a huge fan of 24. I love Jack, Chole and the team. I have come to like nearly everyone in the show and while I have been sad to see them go over the years (especially Bill Buchanan and President Palmer) I have always been pleasantly surprised at how much I have enjoyed watching their replacements.

This year I don’t feel that’s going to happen. The 3 main CTU based agents seem fairly plain to me – I don’t like them, but I don’t dislike them enough to be particularly engaged by them (a la Sherry Palmer or Charles Logan). I simply feel they don’t pay adequate respect to people whose incredible backgrounds are a matter of public record. The only one to pay any respect so far has been Cole, who frankly looks like a Bond villain.

The CTU set has also distracted me. The lack of computers, paper or substances other than glass is a little weird. I can’t help but feel it’s a failed attempt to appear futuristic. That reminds me of the drone thing also. It’s fine that some technical terms are used out of context and so on, but using camera laden flying drones with anti-missile technology? It all stinks a little of over-trying to make past masters look old-school.

Is it just me or does Jack look very old suddenly?

The worst thing so far this season however has been it’s use of Renee Walker. When we met Renee last season she was a scared school girl. Sure she had moments where Jack rubbed off, but overall she was way out of her depth. Suddenly we are to believe that this bunny in headlights spent 2 years undercover with crazy, drunken, nuke toting Russians? Lets be serious.

Even pretending she could have handled it, didn’t we already push the “back undercover” button? In Season 3 Jack re-infiltrated the cartel in great form, but in Season 2 he shot a witness in the chest in cold blood and delivered his head in a bag to a bad guy he was formally undercover with. That’s pretty extreme for a federal agent, but such craziness would probably lead to acceptance only following a plot. Now Renee is going to step in (even with a world-defining offer) the day of an international nuclear plot toting a famous government agent?

I don’t think 24 is real, but I do enjoy it’s relative realism (yes I’m one of those guys who thinks back channel espionage is happening outside of politics every day). This is not realism and I’m finding it hard to be excited by it.
Jan22

HTML5 explained

Posted at 1:54 PM • No Comments

HTML5 – what’s the story? I’ve had a couple of posts about its adoption recently but I have never really said what it’s all about. Here is my attempt to sum it up.

Essentially HTML5 is the latest revision of HTML – “the language of the web”. It was designed to reduce the requirement for proprietary technologies like Adobe Flash, Microsoft Silverlight and the like. The question has been how is it going to gain traction? I’d like to explain why as well.

The release of the iPhone in 2007 was the start in many ways. Apple has so far refused to allow Flash on the iPhone which has broken it’s compatibility with some websites including YouTube (thus the included YouTube app). Flash has been long regarded as one of the greatest causes of crashes on any given computer and it’s very CPU heavy which leads to issues of slowness, heat and battery life. Additionally Apple don’t want to give up control of the iPhone by allowing Flash apps when they have their own answer to third party control; the App Store. This meant that many web developers had to find a way to make their content readable by one of the quickest growing web sectors; mobile.

The main use for Flash is to share video online. It’s not one-click simple to download the source and it plays in all modern browsers. YouTube is a good example of a hugely popular website built on Flash. Recently it has provided the option of opting in to a beta program to use HTML5 instead. Such a huge and popular website offering HTML5 will certainly do a lot for it’s credit, and help other web apps on their way to supporting it. The very fact that YouTube is toying with another technology at all is interesting.

YouTube HTML5

YouTube hope the move will provide more accurate scrubbing, lower CPU overhead, quicker loading, less crashing and most of all, better compatibility across all devices. Of course, YouTube is owned by Google, so it will be interesting to see if other Google services begin to use HTML5 also since video/animation is only one aspect of what HTML5 has to offer.

Other online video services such as Vimeo are also now offering the option of HTML 5 over Flash, however it’s not a cold turkey move. HTML5 still has a few limitations such as not allowing full-screen video. Also both YouTube and Vimeo are currently unable to offer it as an option for embedded or ad supported videos. HTML5 video also requires browser and H.264 support, which counts out the older machines on the web and outdated OS’/browsers.

Overall, it’s generally agreed that HTML5 will eventually be able to overtake Flash as the standard for online video, and will open doors to mobile platforms, over-all compatibility and faster browsing experiences. It’s not fully baked yet, but it’s making waves and gaining traction in some very public ways.

Jan22

1Password anywhere

Posted at 12:52 PM • No Comments
I have been a huge fan of 1Password for a while now. It allows me to have different passwords for each and every service and website I use, and they are all so complex I’d never remember them. With 1Password for the Mac, and 1Password Pro for the iPhone I don’t need to. I’m secure and mobile at the same time. That’s not even going into features like form auto-fill, credit card information auto-fill, or app serial number storage.

Today I learned about something new though; 1Password anywhere. I use Dropbox to store my 1Password information. This is because I can then access it from anywhere, securely. That said, I don’t have the app installed on my work machine so others can’t mess with it. Now I don’t need to, with 1Password anywhere. The video below explains all.

If you don’t use 1Password, then my question has to be why not? It makes the iPhone infinitely more useful, and my internet use infinitely more secure. Try it out today.
Jan21

Vimeo and HTML5

Posted at 9:20 PM • No Comments

Talking of noticing YouTube has added HTML5 support… so has Vimeo!

Before anyone notices, the embedded videos (such as the one I just posted) will still use Flash. Only videos viewed on Vimeo.com.

As sad as it makes me to admit it,  I can’t get it to work. YouTube seems to be working fine, but the Vimeo player will load the preview image, then when I click play it just sits there. You can see what I mean in the video below.

UPDATE: Brad let me know there was a couple of crossed wires, but it’s all fixed now. Ignore this video.

In the mean time, I will assume it’s simply the extra load. The Staff Blog does say it will be buggy and they are working on it. Features listed are:

• The player loads right away — no more spinning butterfly thingy
• You can jump anywhere in the video, without having to wait for it to buffer
• Smoother, less jumpy playback (we hope)

Can’t wait ’till it works, but am happy to see this launching everywhere. I guess the iPhone is winning battles after all.

Jan21

YouTube adds HTML5 support

Posted at 6:55 PM • One Comment
One of my pet hates with YouTube and many other video sites is that they show videos in Flash. I don’t like Flash for a number of reasons, but chiefly because it is made by Adobe and it ruined the experience of my favourite computer of all time; the MacBook Air. It’s also not available for the iPhone. Almost everything it can do can be done better using the newer HTML5.

HTML 5 is supported by Safari, Chrome and a host of other browsers. Today, I discovered that YouTube has announced a HTML5 beta program. If you check out this page, you will be able to sign up to show most videos in HTML5 instead of Flash and experience a far more stable, and enjoyable YouTube. I’ll be interested to see how many fewer crashes I get now.

In addition, I just noticed two new buttons on YouTube. One is fairly obvious and I’m sure I have intermittently seen it previously, but not on as many videos as I do now (possibly just partner channels, possibly encoding). The interesting one to me is the icon who’s meaning I couldn’t decipher. It makes no sense to me and there is no tool tip. That’s called a #fail.
Vimeo