Earlier tonight, Alexia found and posted some screenshots of something that sure looked a lot like the mythical “Project Spartan“. Shortly thereafter, Facebook took down the page in question. And for good reason. That was Project Spartan, we’ve now confirmed.
Whoops.
Well, to be fair, I’ve heard numerous times that they don’t actually call it that internally. That may be a name that external developers use. No matter — we all know what I mean. It’s the HTML5-based mobile platform that Facebook has been building in secret for months. And now it’s done. In fact, it has been done for a while. From what I hear, it has been waiting on one thing… → Read More
HTML5, HTML5, HTML5 — it seems to be the only thing anyone wants to talk about these days. And that excitement could get kicked into overdrive next week when Facebook unveils Project Spartan, their platform for HTML5 apps. But why wait? A startup that launched at TechCrunch Disrupt has already built an entire HTML5-based OS: Carbyn.
The great thing about Carbyn is that there’s nothing to install. Because it’s HTML5, it works in the browser. Well, any “modern” browser, as Google often likes to say — that means essentially anything but the older versions of IE. You simply open a browser and log-in to Carbyn and you’re ready to go. The team showed it to me running on both an iPad and a BlackBerry PlayBook. Soon it will work on smartphones as well, they say. → Read More
TechCrunch Disrupt finalist Pressly is an HTML5-based platform that turns online publications into tablet-friendly websites that work on the iPad, Android tablets or the BlackBerry PlayBook. The sites it produces are nearly indistinguishable from their native counterparts, like Flipboard and Zite for example, offering a similar experience for browsing through articles, images and videos. Navigation is designed for the tablet interface, using common gestures like multi-touch swipes and pinches.
Pressly’s platform includes five customizable templates as a starting point, each designed with the needs of different publishers in mind. One template is more text-driven, while others are better for browsing through photos or videos. Like native apps, navigating a Pressly-built site uses intuitive gestures, like a 2-finger swipe up or down to reveal quick navigation and a pinch to close articles. → Read More
Today, Strobe Inc. is launching a new platform that helps developers build HTML5-based Web applications for desktops, smartphones and tablets, and centrally manage them from a single interface.
The launch is a major leap forward in HTML5 app development. From one interface, teams can manage code (both test code and production code), configure the app’s deployment across platforms (Web, Android, iOS, etc.), add additional services (social, push notifications, authentication, etc.), and even track analytics within an easy-to-use dashboard.
In short, it’s a comprehensive platform that makes building apps with Web technologies, like HTML5 and JavaScript, not just possible, but easy, straightforward and fast. → Read More
Nitobi, creators of the HTML5-based mobile app framework PhoneGap, have today launched the PhoneGap Facebook Connect plugin. The addition of the plugin means that developers building apps using Web technologies like HTML and JavaScript can now simplify the log in process for their apps by allowing users to login with their Facebook credentials.
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Bizness Apps, the startup that gives small businesses the tools to quickly and easily build mobile apps, launched in October 2010 and has been growing like gangbusters, reaching over 1,000 applications, 10 languages, and over 20 countries in less than 9 months. It also recently partnered with WuFoo to give SMBS the ability to create and seamlessly add contact forms, online surveys, and invitations to their apps. The startup also has an interesting founding story that provides some useful lessons for your entrepreneurs. Check out our April coverage here.
Bizness Apps’s value proposition is simple: The startup wants to make mobile apps affordable, customizable, and simple to make for small business owners. Thus, the startup offers a DIY iPhone, iPad, and Android app platform that enables SMBs to create, edit, and manage mobile apps without any programming experience required. You start with a template, customize them to suit your business, and then Bizness Apps makes them native apps and distributes them on iTunes and the Android Marketplace. → Read More
Yokto is a newly launched video platform which offers an embeddable player that intelligently switches between a Flash-based interface or HTML5, depending on the device being used to view the content. This idea on its own is not original, of course. Similar solutions from companies like Brightcove, Ooyala, Kaltura and SublimeVideo, for example, offer much of the same thing.
But where Yokto stands out is in its “playlists” feature. Instead of simply embedding a single video on your website or blog, you can collect a series of videos from multiple sources and embed them on your website within a single player interface.
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We’ve been hearing a lot lately about consumer cloud services. There’s Apple’s recently-announced iCloud, Amazon’s Cloud Drive, Google’s Music Beta (which is your music in the cloud) and, of course, Microsoft’s SkyDrive. All of these to one extent or another are moving away from simple online lockers, and we see that today with the release of the latest update to SkyDrive.
The navigation is less clunky. Groups are now built in. Docs open up in online versions of Word or Excel, and can also be opened in the traditional desktop Office apps with edits syncing back and forth. But the biggest change is SkyDrive’s transition away from Microsoft Silverlight to HTML5 for all but a few remaining features. Photos and videos are all viewed with HTML5, which brings infinite scrolling of thumbnails and a new slide viewer. Videos now use the H.264 format and the video player is HTML5 instead of Silverlight. → Read More
FunMobility, the makers of FunMail, a picture-messaging app that organically pairs your texts with appropriate (and fun) images, FunTones, a large collection of funny ringtones, and FunMe, a suite of tools for consumers to create, share, and post their own user-generated content, is clearly striving for a particular brand message. I think it has something to do with “fun”.
Today, FunMobility introduces a new app to its menagerie of fun, called FunChat, which blends chat, multiplayer HTML5 games, virtual currency, rewards and achievements into a realtime user experience for the iPhone, iPod Touch, and Android. → Read More
On today’s ever-evolving Web, it seems there’s a growing demand for web apps that incorporate realtime functionality. Of course, it’s by no means easy to build seamless realtime functionality, as it often requires site developers to learn a whole new framework, or worry over the configuration of existing infrastructure.
To address this problem, Pusher has built a hosted service that helps developers create web apps featuring real-time collaboration in a jiffy, all through a cloud-based API. From a free sandox account, Pusher allows developers to bring the added benefits of realtime technology to existing apps, across various languages and platforms, to small sites for free. And so far, so good. Pusher opened its beta in March 2010 and has delivered approximately 9 billion messages to date. Over 4K developers have signed up to the service, including those from Groupon, Slideshare, Togetherville, and more. → Read More
ppMobi likes HTML5-based mobile games, and it wants you to like them, too, which is why appMobi is focused on giving developers the tools required to make HTML5 and JavaScript mobile applications that run smoothly across platforms and browsers.
Of course, many loudly pronounced HTML5 the new heir to the throne, as it would finally bring the native app experience to every mobile device, and take some of the iterative work in app creation out of the hands of developers. The problem is that this pronouncement jumped the gun by more than a few paces: HTML5, while an important step forward, is still a work in progress.
But, today, appMobi announced a new technology, called DirectCanvas, that it claims speeds up the often slow graphic rendering of HTML5 in mobile games by 500 percent. → Read More
The Financial Times would rather not have Apple take a 30 percent cut of in-app subscriptions for its iOS publications, and has launched a HTML5 Web app that enables readers to access content across tablets and smartphones.
As part of the Web app’s debut, FT will provide free access during launch week.
FT acknowledges that the Web app has been initially optimized for the iPhone and the iPad, but says it will also be adapted for Android-based devices and the BlackBerry PlayBook. → Read More
A few weeks ago, Readability got word that their iPhone app was rejected by Apple. While obviously, that’s never good news, this was especially hard to take because the reason for the rejection was that they were offering a subscription service without offering Apple’s new in-app subscription layer. They were dumbfounded and pissed off by this rejection because they didn’t see it coming and it didn’t seem to make sense. But rather than dwell on it, they went right back to the drawing board.
The result of that and two weeks of fast-paced work is a full-on HTML5 version of their app, which Readability is releasing today. The web app is specifically designed for both mobile and tablets, using some of the more advanced aspects of HTML5, including offline storage support. → Read More
The battle between Flash and HTML5 has largely revolved around video, with Flash proponents pointing out how lame it is to open up your browser on an iPad and not be able to play a Flash video. And yet HTML5-friendly video has quickly been adopted by a majority of video websites and video players. Today video search engine MeFeedia released some stats showing that 63 percent of the 30 million videos in its index are now HTML5-compatible. That number is up from 10 percent a year ago, 26 percent last May, and 54 percent in October, 2010.
MeFeedia indexes 30,000 video sites large and small, including Hulu, CBS, ABC, YouTube, Vimeo, and DailyMotion. Among larger media sites, HTML5 video already reached two thirds last May, and is already above 90 percent, according to Encoding.com. → Read More
HTML5, the next major revision of the HTML standard you’ve most certainly heard of as a TechCrunch reader, now comes with added logo, courtesy of W3C.
The logo is available under a permissive license (Creative Commons 3.0 By). See the FAQ section for more information and check out the badge builder.
Here’s the creative pitch:
It stands strong and true, resilient and universal as the markup you write. It shines as bright and as bold as the forward-thinking, dedicated web developers you are. It’s the standard’s standard, a pennant for progress. And it certainly doesn’t use tables for layout.
Aviary is very good at what they do. That is, offering relatively powerful tools for amateur artists to edit content online. But all of those tools are Flash-based. And some of Aviary’s partners didn’t like that too much, feeling they were too cumbersome. And some users were interested in the tools, but also wanted something more lightweight. So Aviary went to work, and came up with a new editor built entirely with HTML5.
The project, which they codenamed “Feather”, is an HTML5 photo editor that resides on both Aviary’s site, and can be easily integrated with any third party site. The tool, which appears as a small square widget overlay, allows people to quickly edit photos without Flash. And it gives third-party sites an option for a light tool that their users can use right on the site. → Read More
In what they’re calling a throwback to the original comic book they released to announce the launch of Chrome, Google has today unveiled a new site meant to educate users about browsers and the web. 20 Things I Learned About Browsers & The Web is actually an interactive web app meant to look like a children’s book. And while the book’s content is all about web technology, the interactive book itself shows off some of that technology as it’s built entirely in HTML5. And it’s very slick.
In fact, it looks a lot like an Apple iBook — the book platform that Apple created for the iPad. It has a nice and clickable table of contents, a quick-jump area along the bottom, and if you hover over the corner of a page, it will even curl (clicking on the curl will turn the page). But again, all of this is done with HTML5. → Read More
Once a year around this time, Brightcove rolls out a bunch of new features to its online video platform and calls it a new release. With Brightcove 5, this year the service is becoming even more Apple-friendly than ever before. Not only is there more HTML5 goodness baked in, but it now supports Apple’s HTTP streaming for video apps and also offers a template for creating video apps on the iPad.
Brightcove started paying closer attention to how videos play on Apple products last year with Brightcove 4, which added support for an iPhone video player. Then as it became clear that Apple would not support Flash players in its mobile devices, Brightcove started transcoding to HTML5 and laying out a roadmap to add support for analytics, advertising, and custom players. → Read More
Lots of abbreviations in the title and URL, but with an audience like TechCrunch’s I’m not too worried about the point coming across or not. At this week’s Opera press event held in Oslo, Norway, I had a chance to spend a couple of minutes talking to Håkon Wium Lie, who is not only the software company’s chief technology officer but also broadly known as the “father of CSS”.
In 1994 while at W3C, Wium Lie was the man who proposed the concept of Cascading Style Sheets, which describes how documents are presented on screens, in print, or perhaps how they are pronounced. A graduate of the MIT Media Lab, he also spent quite some time at CERN working on the World Wide Web project together with Tim Berners-Lee and Robert Cailliau (see our earlier interview with the latter here).
We talked CSS3 (the next iteration of Cascading Style Sheets), HTML5 (the next iteration of the HTML language) and the role of Opera Software as a company in both. → Read More
San Francisco, CA
