Linked List: May 13, 2010

Thursday, 13 May 2010

Notes on HTML5 Parser History 

Anne Van Kesteren:

We reached a new milestone with HTML5 this week. Henri Sivonen flipped a switch and now Firefox nightly builds ship with an HTML5 parser by default. It might not seem as a milestone to everyone however. As Henri puts it: “A key feature of the HTML5 parser is that you don’t notice that anything has changed.”

CBC Hockey for iPhone 

Live streaming of NHL hockey playoffs. The app is free; live streaming of games is an in-app purchase. No iPad-native version yet, nor any version at all for Android.

Update: Sadly, there’s a major catch regarding the live streaming: it only works in Canada.

Two Weeks of Travel, Ten iPad Lessons 

Michael Gartenberg:

A while back, I tried traveling on business with nothing but the help of three smart phones. I quickly ran into the headroom of those devices and, by the time I was home, I had a huge list of tasks I needed to deal with that could only be done on a computer. I wondered how I would have fared had I carried an iPad with me instead. So over the last two weeks, I’ve done just that, carried an iPad on my travels and left the laptop at home.

Sprint’s HTC EVO 4G 

Re: my question on which phone will be first with video chat, Sprint’s HTC EVO 4G goes on sale June 4. Looks like one hell of an Android phone. (Sprint’s product page is all-Flash.)

New Beta Version of MobileMe Mail From Apple 

Interesting — the layout is much more like the iPad’s Mail than Mac OS X’s. (That’s a good thing.) They’ve added server-side rules and a simple Gmail-esque archiving feature.

Pages 1.1 for iPad 

David Chartier on what’s new.

The Infancy of Mobile Video 

Tim Bray:

There are two obvious things that everyone wants but just aren’t there yet on the devices we carry around. First of all, video chat. My Nexus One is just the right form factor to bring friends and family up on, for some on-the-road face time. It is after all a communication device, right?

Great idea. I wonder who will be first to bring it to market.

The second thing that’s not there yet is the world’s single most popular application of video technology: TV. What is the damn point of having a video screen that’s connected to the world if I can’t use it to watch a hockey game or CNN reportage, live?!

The closest I’ve seen, or at least that interests me, is MLB.tv, which I love dearly. It really falls down on 3G, though. I think we’re going to have to wait for 4G networking to unshackle live decent-resolution mobile video from Wi-Fi. Update: Slingbox is probably the best answer today for live TV on mobile devices.

Adobe: ‘The Truth About Flash’ 

Part of Adobe’s new “Freedom of Choice” campaign to promote Flash, this is (I assume) Adobe’s attempt at a point-by-point refutation of Steve Jobs’s “Thoughts on Flash”. The only point they really address here, though, is the idea that Flash doesn’t conceptually fit with touch-based interfaces. The rest is all vapid hand-waving.

Adobe Launches ‘We ♥ Apple’ Ad Campaign 

Big ad buy from Adobe; I see these new spots on Ars Technica, Engadget, and The New York Times.

Update: They’ve also purchased full-page ads in the print editions of major newspapers. Here’s the ad (PDF). I think it comes across as passive aggressive.

How to Get Your Brand Onto a Formula One Race Car When You’re Legally Banned From Putting Your Brand on a Formula One Race Car 

Brilliant solution.

An Apple IIe, an iPad, and Jed 

Best iPad stand ever.

Look at What You Get for $499 in an Android Tablet 

A piece of crap. Three pounds, slow, poor battery life, 4 GB of built-in storage, doesn’t work with YouTube, and no support for Android Marketplace apps. All for the same price as a 16 GB iPad.

Or, you could pay just $199 and get the 7-inch Archos 7 Android tablet. It too is slow (“most apps take four to five seconds to open”), it too does not support apps from the Android Marketplace, it doesn’t have an accelerometer, it uses a resistive (rather than capacitive) touchscreen, and it runs the year-old Android 1.5 OS and there’s no way to upgrade it.

Larry Ellison on Sun’s Previous Management 

Jim Finkle, reporting for Reuters:

Ellison says he learned that Sun’s pony-tailed chief executive, Jonathan Schwartz, ignored problems as they escalated, made poor strategic decisions and spent too much time working on his blog, which Sun translated into 11 languages.

“The underlying engineering teams are so good, but the direction they got was so astonishingly bad that even they couldn’t succeed,” said Ellison. “Really great blogs do not take the place of great microprocessors. Great blogs do not replace great software. Lots and lots of blogs does not replace lots and lots of sales.”

TechCrunch Reports That Google Is Adding Tethering to Android 2.2 

And in addition to tethering over USB, it’ll let you create small Wi-Fi networks, like a Mi-Fi does. Great features, but, as iPhone users in the U.S. know, “supported by the OS” and “supported by the carrier” are two different things. AT&T doesn’t allow it, and Verizon uses CDMA, so even if they do allow it, you won’t be able to make or receive voice calls while you’re using tethering. (Imagine the pitchforks if AT&T allowed Android phones to tether but still refused to allow it for iPhones.)