Macgasm

A while back, I was looking at HTML5Test in my browser of choice: Safari 5.1.2. MPEG-4 and h.264 were listed as supported codecs for the HTML5 video tag, and that is to be expected from Apple’s browser since those are their formats of choice. Ogg Theora, unsurprisingly, is not supported. Then I looked down to the next line, and I saw that WebM, Google’s “Open” format, was in fact supported.

I did a lot of testing to see what the deal was. Nobody seemed to be reporting this, so I thought that there must be something up. By luck, I happened to be wiping a MacBook Pro and giving it a fresh Lion install, so I was able to try out Safari without any system modifications. Oddly, WebM support disappeared. What was different in my main machine that allowed WebM support in Safari? After a bit of googling, it looks as if Perian, the “Swiss-Army knife for Quicktime,” is the culprit.

By having Perian, or a similar program installed, it transparently lists WebM as a compatible codec for playback through the video tag. Developers don’t have to do anything special. They just write standard HTML5-compliant code, and your Perian-boosted Safari will act just the same as if they were using h.264.

While it isn’t quite as easy as having everything baked into the browser by default, this is a good intermediate step on the road away from browser plug-ins. At this point, HTML5 video support is so broad, Flash is almost never needed on the web.

Ed McLaughlin, lead of “emerging payments” at MasterCard, talked to Fast Company about the future of NFC in smartphones. He sidestepped the question about Apple, but it’s pretty clear something is up:

Apple is on the vanguard of sales and retail. Without a doubt, they want their users to have the best possible experience when purchasing things with their phones and at their retail outlets. When Apple figures out the best implementation, we’ll be sure to see it.

With the sheer number of phones sold as well as the mind share that Apple has, they’ll need to be on board before NFC-based payments can really take off. Sure, some Android phones have had NFC for a long while, but the market has responded with a firm “Big whoop.”

Do you think the next iPhone will include NFC? What about the iPod touch and iPad? Sound off in the comment section below this post, so we can really explore this topic.

Source: Fast Company

This incredibly fun video pays homage to the visual and auditory symphony that iOS and Mac users experience on a daily basis. We think you’ll appreciate it.

Also worth noting is that Chris Crutchfield, the director, editor, and composer, composed the music in Logic and Reason while editing the video in Final Cut Pro X.

Hat tip to MG Siegler

Firefox has been on a rapid release schedule after Chrome lit a fire under the asses of all browser developers. As of today, the stable version, 10.0, of Firefox is now available to the public.

Included in this update are a few interesting things. The forward button no longer appears until the back button is clicked. A new API is included to help developers make full-screen web apps. More importantly, two substantial crashes, one OS X only, are now fixed.

That said, Firefox 10 is still jacked up on the Mac. Listed in the known issues of the release notes are Growl 1.3 issues and problems playing Silverlight video on some OS X machines. The old-style scroll-bars are still the only option in this latest version, and they are just as ugly as they were in 9.0. While Firefox does now support gesture-based navigation, it doesn’t bother to give you a visual cue as to what is happening. If you accidentally swipe, good luck knowing if you went forward or backward. Lastly, the fullscreen mechanism isn’t even the standard Lion kind. It is their own special sauce that acts differently than how Mac users expect.

Sigh.

Despite the increase in releases, it doesn’t look like Firefox is getting much better at all for us Mac users. Thankfully, Safari and Chrome work incredibly well. We’ll just continue shaking our heads at Mozilla.

Source: Mozilla

Apple’s WebKit is the backbone to many things these days. From iPhone to Android and from your favorite browser to your favorite gaming console, chances are that some of the content you see is rendered by WebKit. In this video, one of NetFlix’s user interface engineers takes the stage at HTML5 Dev Conf to discuss the pros, cons, tips, and tricks of running a WebKit-based application on devices like the PS3 and low-end smartphones.

If you’re curious about why your Netflix client doesn’t update the information immediately if you start scrolling quickly, this is a good explanation. If you’re a developer, he gives some decent tips about how to make your app run decently on low-end equipment. Good advice, and I’ll bet there are very few companies with more experience in this realm than Netflix.

Would you like to see more nerdy videos like this? Go ahead and subscribe to our video feed on Frequency. On the web or on your iPad, you can watch them in a beautiful, easy to use interface.

Hat tip to WebKitBits

Now that the CES foofaraw is well over, a few interesting tidbits are starting to come to the surface. Specifically, this interesting bit of news about Sony supporting AirPlay made us raise an eyebrow.

Joseph Palenchar, TWICE:

That’s great news. When you’re an iTunes or iOS user, AirPlay is wonderful. Be it through an Airport Express or an AppleTV, AirPlay makes watching and hearing your favorite content anywhere in your house as easy as a tap or two. More companies supporting Apple’s AirPlay standard is fantastic.

As it stands, playing audio and video from iTunes on your consoles requires a lot of tomfoolery and use of apps like MediaLink and Connect360. Those solutions don’t even support the iTunes DRM scheme. While music no longer has the chains of DRM, the movies and TV shows still do. Let’s hope that this is a good sign, and we’ll see more AirPlay-compatible devices in the near future. Maybe Sony will take the hint, and add it to the PS4? That would certainly be a nice development, but we won’t be holding our breath.

Source: TWICE

Good news for those of you trying to grab an iPhone 4S! The ever-popular device is now listed as “In Stock” on the Apple Store. Earlier in the month, we reported that Apple had finally reduced the shipping time from a few weeks to three-to-five business days. As of today, the 16/32/64 GB models in Sprint/AT&T/Verizon flavors are now shipping as soon as the order goes through.

While we haven’t checked every country’s store front, we can confirm that the following countries have the 4S in stock:

• United States
• United Kingdom
• Australia
• Canada
• Ireland

Sadly, the Hong Kong online store does not have it available at this time.
Because of Apple’s incredible economy of scale, they could be making iPhone 4S devices for many, many years to come. We’ve seen the 3G/3GS chassis stick around for years, and it finally looks like Apple has ironed out every glitch in the system to have the supply chain running smoothly for the iPhone 4S. So much for the 4S being a “Disapointment.”

 David Beren of TmoNews is reporting that T-Mobile, as of next Monday, will be providing extended support to the non-trivial number of T-Mobile customers using unlocked iPhones.

It’s interesting, and we’re glad to see T-Mobile making a move to support its customers. That said, it does bring up the nagging question of official T-Mobile support from Apple. As it stands, unlocked GSM iPhones work on T-Mobile, but only with 2G data. As we all know from the original iPhone’s launch, 2G (aka EDGE) speeds are atrocious.

As of now, Apple sells its phones on Verizon, AT&T, and Sprint in the United States. That leaves T-Mobile as the last major carrier without an iPhone of their very own. How long until that changes? Surely they are at a substantial disadvantage by being the only network without the best selling smartphone in the US. Their shareholders must be going bonkers.

Source: TmoNews