All Articles Tagged webkit

More than 2 years post-iPhone launch, no news on Flash ever coming to the iPhone, yet Apple is pressing ahead with technologies like H.264 video (YouTube App’s been using it since day one), HTML 5 and CSS animation (iPhone Safari supported them first), HTTP Live Streaming, and now WebGL for hardware accelerated 3D-graphics, and TuneKit, the framework behind the new iTunes LP rich media content.

Read on to find out what they are, how they work, and why they might make plugins like Flash increasingly unnecessary…

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At Apple’s annual special music event, this year dubbed “It’s only rock and roll, but we like it” they announced a new, old-style album-centric offering called iTunes LP. The image painted was of a young Steve Jobs, grabbing his bike, riding to the music store, buying the latest Dylan on vinyl, racing home, putting it on his turn table, and then lying back and listening, while pouring over the album art, liner material, lyrics, and other extras.

Fast forward to the era of CDs, and ultimately iTunes and digital downloads, and extras became less common, as did buying entire albums. For lazy artists who made one or two good songs and loaded the rest with filler, well deserved. For true artists who wrote albums like epics, like symphonies in multiple parts, well… the listener was the one missing out.

Admittedly, when we first heard about iTunes LP, code-named Cocktail, we worried that Big Music was trying to force Apple to force us to buy those lazy, filler-filled albums, and maybe even sneak DRM (Digital Rights Management) back into our freshly-liberated iTunes.

Turns out that young Steve Jobs and his Dylan album was closer to what we get with iTunes LP than a Big Music lock down scheme. And thank goodness for that.

Web developer Jay Robinson (via Daring Fireball) has taken a closer look at iTunes LP, and provided lots of great details for those interested in the format. Like what?

• The iTunes LP files are ITLP format and rather large (~500MB)
• They’re in 720p, (which is confusing for smaller display sizes like on some laptops, but might make sense on Apple TV, or dare we say, an iTablet“>iTablet?)
• iTunes LP visualizer
• Internal structure uses WebKit (the foundation of Safari) for rendering, HTML 4.01, CSS, and Javascript.
• And best of all — DRM-free! (YES!)

Check out Robinson’s full write up for a lot more on the new iTunes LP format, and if you try it out, tell us what you get and how you like it!

CrackBerry.com is reporting that RIM has acquired Torch Mobile, makers of the WebKit-powered Iris mobile browser.

Apple-backed WebKit is the open-source rendering engine behind Mac Safari and Google Chrome, which isn’t a very large segment, all told. Mobile WebKit, however, powers the portable world with the iPhone (and iPod touch) Safari, Google Android Chrome Lite, the Palm Pre/webOS browser, and some Nokia devices. Add BlackBerry to the mix and it pretty much looks like the mobile world vs. IE6 on Windows Phone — strangely inverse the desktop landscape where IE dominates and Firefox brings up the rear. (FireFox’s mobile Fennec browser is still in development).

It was just a couple weeks ago that RIM promised an iPhone-class browser from BlackBerry by next summer, and it looks like this might just give them one heckuva jumpstart in getting there.

Daring Fireball has been looking into Google’s new Gmail WebApp for the iPhone and the technologies behind it. We already know the iPhone packs a version of Apple’s Safari Web Browser which is, in some ways, even more advanced than desktop Safari on the Mac. SQLite database caching, for example, for example users continue to archive or star messages even when there’s no internet connection. What’s more interesting to him, us — and likely users — is how that technology improves functionality.

Says Gruber:

I use the native iPhone Mail app to read email on my iPhone, but I’m tempted to start using the Gmail web app for one reason: I waste a lot of time switching back and forth between Mail and Safari after tapping a URL in an email. When using the Gmail web app, tapped links simply open in a new Safari tab. The iPhone Mail app needs a built-in web view, like what most popular iPhone Twitter clients offer.

Google’s Alex Nicolaou has blogged about the process.

We once wondered what the future of WebApps would be in a post-native apps world. Looks like Google expects — and is out to prove — things still look very bright.

Anyone else considering ditching the built-in mobile Mail app for some web-based Gmail?

We so fondly remember Palm’s Roger McNamee stating the Pre would be a million times faster on the web than the iPhone (now retracted), and even our sister-site PreCentral.net jumped on that band wagon, saying the Pre looked to be 4x faster than the iPhone.

Of course, we mentioned that on Sprint, lacking simultaneous voice and data, even a million times zero is still zero. Less flippantly, however, when Safari 4 Beta shipped for the desktop with its new ultra-fast Nitro (formerly SquirrelFish) rendering engine, we figured it would only be a matter of time before that scaled down to the iPhone’s version of Safari (based on the same WebKit foundations as desktop Safari, as is the Palm Pre browser and Android Chrome Lite).

Now Daring Fireball and Wayne Pan posit that turbo boost might have already happened in iPhone OS 3.0:

Wayne Pan has braved the NDA waters and published JavaScript benchmarks for iPhone OS 3.0, and they are impressive — with results ranging between 3× and 10× faster than iPhone OS 2.2. And I’ll confirm that MobileSafari on iPhone OS 3.0 passes my simple “could be Nitro” recursion depth test.

From what we’ve seen of 3.0, it seems that way to us as well. Along with HTML5, CSS, 2D and 3D animation, anti-phishing, AutoFill, etc., it will be interesting to see what Apple and the WebKit team can pull of by the time iPhone 3.0 launches this summer…

Ars Technica has a great article up on the future of web design, involving 2D and 3D graphics and transformations, and what’s most interesting is that it’s the iPhone’s Mobile Safari browser that right now seems to be leading the way in surfacing this next-gen (Flash killing?) goodness for general users:

The WebKit team added CSS Transforms to nightly builds of WebKit back in October 2007, transforms that included scaling, rotation, skewing, and translation in 2D space. As the specification matured, 3D and animation capabilities were added. Eventually, the 3D transforms were broken out into a specification of their own. Though WebKit has had these 3D transform capabilities for some time, only Mobile Safari on the iPhone and iPod touch has them enabled.

Check out some of the other demos, and get the full scoop, over on Ars.

Apple has just released the first public beta of their new Safari 4 web browser for both the Mac and Windows (the Windows version now looking like an actual XP or Vista app). New features include an iTunes/Finder-like CoverFlow visualization for exploring browser history, and Apple TV commercial-esque visual wall of Top Sites (which should cause the same potential pr0nbarassment for some as Chrome and Opera’s “favorite” visualizers in the past), the ability to search, spotlight-like through past sites, Chrome-style top-mounted tabs, robust developer tools… and most important for the iPhone and iPod touch’s future — the new Nitro Engine for screaming fast JavaScript rendering.

Yes, JavaScript engines are the new speeds and feeds. Bottom line, the more script, the slower and heavier the site. Hey, BlackBerry still turns JavaScript off by default on the Bold and Storm to get anything approaching decent rendering speeds. But with Google’s V8 and Firefox’s TraceMonkey helping push the technology — not to mention every Web 2.0 site ladling on the AJAX — we’re going to need all the power we can get, especially on the iPhone.

As for the rest: CoverFlow already works well on the iPhone, though I’m not sure we need it in Mobile Safari, and the smaller screen might make Top Sites a little too tiny to be useful. And the search? Heh. We still need Spotlight on the entire iPhone, so how about we get that rolled up together?

Anything else you want to see in Mobile Safari 3.0?

WebKit is Apple’s open source evolution of the old Linux Konquerer KHTML browser, and it forms the foundation of Safari on both the desktop and the iPhone (and Google Android, Palm Pre, Nokia tablets, etc.). Their Surfin’ Safari blog has just announced CSS animation support, but the better news (via MacRumors), is that iPhone (and iPod touch) Safari already supports both CSS animation and 3D.

Want to check it out? Just hit up this awesome animated falling leaf demo on your iPhone!

Overly provocative headline not withstanding, and while this doesn’t address the ubiquity of Flash video, it should go a long way towards enabling more scalable and open interactivity on the web. (Flash sites don’t always scale well to small screens, after all).

Okay, I’m a web geek, I admit it, but is anyone else excited? Or do we just fear that it will all-too-quickly be perverted into iPhone optimized punch-the-monkey banner ads?

It looks like Apple has begin to approve some 3rd party web browsers for the iPhone. Like the (Jobs save us) “fart” apps that were pulled or pending for a long while only to flood the market on some magic-8-ball decided day, some of these web browsers were biding their time in the App Store approval queue for a good long while according to MacRumors:

 Edge Browser (Free) – No loss of screen real estate to the address or navigation bars. Incognito ($1.99) – Now you can browse without leaving a history of any kind. WebMate:Tabbed Browser ($0.99) – Web Mate simplifies browsing by queuing up all the links you click on, then allowing you to view them one by one when you’re ready. And Shaking Web ($1.99) – adds a sophisticated algorithm to compensate small hand shaking to allow for easier reading.

BUT (you did see the big old BUT in the headline, right), those thinking, hoping, praying, or reporting that these are actually alternative rendering engines need to back on up a second. To the best of our knowledge, these are merely different UI implementations of the built-in iPhone WebKit rendering engine, much like those already used in Twitterrific, 1Password, and other long-ago approved Apps. The only difference — that TiPb can tell — is that these are stand-alone iPhone WebKit implementations (like MobileSafari, though more limited due to SDK restrictions and non-default status).

So, no Firefox, Chrome, Opera, or (Jobs save us again!) IE 6 for the iPhone just yet, okay?

Still, for those who want different user experiences and features, well, now you can go get them! Anyone try one yet?

WebKit, the open source foundation behind Apple’s Safari for Mac and MobileSafari on the iPhone (not to mention Google Chrome, Nokia, and Adobe) introduced the SquirrelFish JavaScript engine a while back, and billed it as the fastest on the planet. Then came Mozilla’s (Firefox) TraceMonkey. Then came Google’s V8. But you just can’t keep a good SquirrelFish down — not when it’s willing to go… Extreme!

Surfin’ Safari, the WebKit blog, made the announcement this week. But what does it mean for iPhone users? Muchfasterwebsiterendering.

As WebApp’s (browser-based productivity tools like Google Docs and MobileMe, or Web 2.0 social sites like Facebook and Twitter) grow not only in popularity but in function, they become heavier to load and slower to run, largely because of all the JavaScript being processed in the background. This is especially true for a mobile device like the iPhone. The ability to tear through those pages — without crashing! — becomes incredibly important in the growing “cloud” based computing world.

In other words, this will make future versions of MobileSafari screaming fast.

Can we have it now please?

(For those interested in how SFX compares with TraceMonkey and V8, check out the stats!)