Remember that old game, labyrinth, where you guided a marble through a wooden maze by tilting the game itself? How about the old Marble Madness Nintendo game? I was a big fan of both, and that’s why it’s a treat to see Google releasing a cool new web game called Cube that uses Google Maps to create a similar game using real maps. The game is a bit of a peacocking, meant to show the acuity of their upgraded Google Maps, but is pretty fun to play.
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Announcing the Facebook Antivirus Marketplace (Facebook Newsroom)
We’re announcing the Antivirus Marketplace, developed with industry partners to enhance protection for people on Facebook. AllFacebook The Antivirus Marketplace features free downloads and six-month licenses from Microsoft, McAfee, TrendMicro, Sophos and Symantec. GeekWire The social network says its URL blacklist — which aims to stop its users from accessing malicious sites from Facebook — will also now incorporate the databases of those companies. The Next Web To access the new protection tools, all you have to do is visit the Facebook Security Page and select from the options listed on the page. Read more
The independent Google Operating System blog took note of the improvements to YouTube’s HTML5 player. The HTML5 interface is in an opt-in trial period that you can enter and leave at will. Once you opt-in, Adobe Flash becomes unnecessary when using a browser that supports HTML5. The question I had and answer here is: How does the YouTube HTML5 interface work with mobile browsers?
YouTube’s HTML5 Player Gets Better
The Google Operating System blog noted that YouTube HTML5 player improvements include the ability to enable annotations and captions, a contextual menu to let you copy embedding code and a video’s URL, 480p and 1080p options for WebM videos and full-screen support when using developer builds of the Firefox or Chrome browser.
The YouTube HTML5 player provides a mobile friendly interface too. This worked on the iPhone, Android and Windows Phone 7.5 (Mango) devices I tried with it. The mobile interface allowed giving a video a thumbs up or down (if enabled), adding to a list, sharing via Twitter, Facebook or email and deselecting high quality (HQ) mode (which is the default when available). Most importantly, full screen video viewing worked in the mobile browsers (including the Windows Phone 7.5 Internet Explorer browser). The controls you see in the second screenshot here appear when you tap the display while a video is playing.
OpenTable, the free online restaurant reservations site, launched its redesigned mobile web site this month. The site uses HTML5 to provide a new look and feel to visitors. It makes use of HTML5′s ability to work with integrated geolocation features in a phone to find and make reservations at nearby restaurants.
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Google is not the only company trying to move its services from mobile native apps to mobile web apps. GigaOm’s Kevin C. Tofel used Nokia’s updated web-based mapping service and gave it a thumbs up for features while noting its limitations in saving offline maps due to the large size of the data involved.
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Creating Flash-less web animation for the iPad and other mobile devices has required more than a bit of HTML5, JavaScript and CSS3 coding wizardry. Sencha, which specializes in providing powerful web development tools, introduced a new desktop app for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux this week that lets designers create functional mobile web animation.
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Google, Amazon and Financial Times are just a fe of the big names that offer web alternatives to popular mobile apps for functions like email (Gmail), ebooks (Kindle) and e-newspapers. Here’s a smaller name to add to the list.: i.TV.
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Apps? Who needs apps? This appears to be Google’s motto as they add more features to mobile web pages for services like Gmail. The latest feature addition is the ability to be simulatenously logged in to multiple Gmail accounts and then switch between them.
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Wired also reports that Adobe’s Flash product has had a rough time as computing has shifted to a mobile environment. “Apple stopped shipping Flash capability with products like the 2010 MacBook Air, which gave the 11-inch model a whopping two extra hours of battery life.”
Screenshot courtesy of TechCrunch.
Twitter Rolls Out An Improved, HTML5 Version Of Twitter.com For iPad (TechCrunch)
Much of Twitter’s success can probably be attribute to the many mobile apps for smartphones. But, Twitter has been mounting a drive to control the way people use it by buying popular clients like Tweetie (now the official iOS Twitter app) and TweetDeck.
Interestingly, of the big social networking sites, Twitter was an earlier supporter of providing an app for the iPad. Facebook still does not have an app that scales for the iPad’s display. And, Google’ Google+ iOS app does not even install on an iPad.
The even bigger question is; How does this HTML5 version for the iPad play with Apple’s Twitter integration plans for iOS 5?
I don’t see this version in my Twitter account yet. However, TechCrunch’s Alexia Tsotsis’ account has the new user interface and it looks very similar to Twitter’s current official iPad app. It is ironic that Apple’s original intent for web-apps (the iPhone did not have apps for the first year) is coming into play now that the App Store is a huge success.
