Posts Tagged ‘html5’
Thank you Microsoft. You have helped to make it easier to produce and convince clients and collegues to use html5 with your latest decision.
Since you are updating Internet Explorer in automatic updates to IE9 currently and hopefully for the future versions. Developing for the web became better as #html5 with canvas goodness is now market ready! (in a nearer term rather than a year or two possibly – still some time to propagate).
Good news, everyone! Microsoft has decided that the time has come to make sure that all users of Internet Explorer are using the most current version possible. To accomplish that goal, they’re turning on automatic updates.
Yes, Internet Explorer patches and new major versions are already available via Windows Update. But to move from one version to the next, it’s never been a fully automatic process. There’s a separate install window that appears for installing, say, Internet Explorer 9. For many users, the additional steps required were often enough to prevent them from installing a new version.
To clients, developers can now say that IE9 and up is the best target since Microsoft themselves are updating the browser in Automatic Updates for security and a better experience. They can tell clients that is is acceptable to build in html5 with canvas and with less tedium in making things work for IE7 and IE8, less middle man proxy technologies. Microsoft will also be less of a bad name for developers stemming from IE6 and lagged, slow upgrading software progress and users. For many clients that were risky on projects this wasn’t an issue, but deciding what tech to use and convincing others with so much old IE out there was difficult. Hopefully this helps soon.
Ryan Gavin, Microsoft’s senior director for Internet Explorer, pointed out several benefits. The overall security of the Windows user community will be improved as outdated browsers are replaced, developers can focus their attention on building sites using modern web code, and those who surf with IE will be able to enjoy the full Beauty of the Web.
Browsers that silently update like Chrome are the best model, but automatic software updates are also good. html5 is on soon when this kicks in across the world, it seems Microsoft plans to do this at different times around the world.
And so from now on, Internet Explorer will quietly update itself just as Windows does. Starting in January, users in Australia and Brazil will be the begin receiving automatic IE updates. Microsoft will then gradually extend coverage to other parts of the world as time goes on.
This news comes on the same day that Chrome 15 is now the most used browser in the world. IE9 could take the top spot for a while if all IE versions move to IE9 as IE is still 40% of the world share in browsers for all versions.
Ship it! html5 has entered the arena officially. And so it begins…
[source from geek.com + microsoft]
Interactive on the web is changing at a rapid clip. The path of the next wave of ineractive and gaming on the web is beginning to materialize.
WebGL, Canvas grouped with html5 are final and providing new landscapes to draw on and new ways to make levels to beat. Most browsers and platforms are supporting this technology. Tools like Three.js make that very fun. Mozilla Firefox, Chrome and Safari are including WebGL + canvas and mostly hardware accelerated, making Javascript an even more powerful glue of the web.
Adobe is going low level with Flash ‘Molehill’ 3D and hardware acceleration platform that companies like Unity will be including as an export target.
Microsoft has finally laid out their plans. Silverlight is alive with Silverlight 5 / 3D powered by XNA (any surprise? guess it isn’t dead) and hardware acceleration throughout Internet Explorer, this appears to be Microsoft’s version of the future.
Plugins like Flash, Unity, Silverlight, others will continue to push the bounds cross platform where standards cement the technology behind it for a platform to reach the next innovative step.
Mobile has blown up the scene with native and low-level focus, causing web platforms to also go low level for more performance thanks to Apple and now Android. Native languages like C, C++ and Objective-C came roaring back as the hardware was reset a bit back to late 90s/early 2000s processor and graphics power. However with mobile and cpu cost on platform as service system, native will stay more over the coming years.
Games, interactive and entertainment projects and apps are going to be even more fun. New opportunities all over the place. Game on!
Cocos2D has been ported to run in javascript and called cocos2d-javascript by Ryan Williams.
Cocos2D is a game engine similar to Flash in that it is a 2d engine but it natively renders to OpenGL ES. Cocos2D-iphone was originally a port of Cocos2D, a python game engine. But the similarities to Flash and DisplayObjects = Nodes, Sprites, Scenes, Layers etc. This helps to port games over fairly quickly or start in productive in cocos2D.
Having this in javascript is a great thing! It runs on html5/canvas/javascript.
Cocos2d-javascript is a 2D game/graphics engine based on cocos2d-iphone but designed to run in the web browser. It uses the latest features available in HTML 5 allowing real-time rendering of 2D graphics without the need for plug-ins such as Adobe Flash.
While HTML 5 is still new and not fully supported across all browsers it won’t be long before the vast majority of web users are able to enjoy all that it offers. When this time comes cocos2d-javascript will be an excellent way to develop games and applications.
To see a small sample of what is on offer, please check out the demo section.
cocos2d engines are now available on almost all platforms, so if you are building a 2d game and need a 2d engine typically with Box2D physics, cocos2d offers lots of ways to get the game out there with some porting work.
- cocos2d-javascript (web)
- cocos2d-iphone (mobile)
- cocos2d-iphone site (objective-c)
- cocos2d-android-1 (java)
- cocos2d-android (java)
- cocos2d – original python (desktop)
- cocos2d other
- cocos2d-x c++ (C++ port for win, iphone, android-ndk)
- Similar to cocos2d – andengine (android java)
Firefox 4 in beta to be released soon, also joins the WebGL ranks with Chrome 9. Safari has it in nightlies and IE hasn’t even mentioned it.
There really is too much to list as this release is feature packed! Of course the most exciting being WebGL and hardware acceleration from our perspective.
Firefox 4 now has WebGL enabled by default. Based on the original 3-D Canvas work by Vladimir Vukićević, this is being
widely implemented in browsers. The WebGL spec is on the short path to a 1.0 release and we’re very excited to see this be used in the wild.
Hardware acceleration has finally arrived even though it should have been in nearly all platforms for web last decade, but we’ll take it.
Firefox 4 supports full hardware acceleration on Windows 7 and Windows Vista via a combination of D2D, DX9 and DX10. This allows us to accelerate everything from Canvas drawing to video rendering. Windows XP users will also enjoy hardware acceleration for many operations because we’re using our new Layers infrastructure along with DX9. And, of course, OSX users have excellent OpenGL support, so we’ve got that covered as well.
The javascript engine JaegerMonkey is comparably fast to SunSpider and V-8 javascript benchmarks and has support for EC5 javascript.
And you might have noticed that it’s really fast. This is the world’s first third-generation JavaScript engine, using Baseline JIT technology similar to engines found in other browsers and kicked up a level with the Tracing engine found in Firefox 3.6. As such, we’re competitive on benchmarks such as Sunspider and V8, but we’re also fast at a whole mess of things that we expect to see in the set of next-generation web applications, hence Kraken.
WebConsole looks like they are joining Chrome and Safari with built in inspection tools similar to Firebug, however Firebug still available.
Firefox 4 will include the Web Console. This is a new tool that will let you inspect a web page as it’s running, see network activity, see messages logged with
console.log, see warnings for a page’s CSS, and a number of other things.Note this that is something that we’ll be including with Firefox 4 directly. It’s not an add-on.
(Also Firebug will be ready for the final Firefox 4 release.)
Firefox 4 has other improvements like layering (in-memory retained layers), caching/scheduling improvements and lots of other performance enhancements.
2011 is looking like the year all this is coming together, at least for Chrome, Firefox, possibly Safari (need WebGL in main release) and IE is still the biggest problem to getting WebGL. At this point WebGL looks like it is still over a year out as it may not come to IE until IE10 or possibly never, the WebGL 1.0 spec is on the fast track though (don’t we all love Khronos? They have been amazing with OpenGL since they took over). html5 is looking like it will be close to mainstream by the end of this year depending on the install rate of IE9 when released.
The world is waiting to see if Microsoft implements WebGL or tries the old DirectX/D2D only ways. Nevertheless, getting a push for hardware acceleration and fast renders in 2d/3d is a very sweet direction.
EaselJS is a new library from Grant Skinner that somewhat mimics the Flash display list/display object heirarchy. It is the result of the game Pirates Love Daisies which demonstrates some great gameplay in html5.
The API is loosely based on Flash’s display list, and should be easy to pick up for both JS and AS3 developers. In our preliminary testing, Easel appears to be fully compatible with iOS, Android, and all major browsers that support the canvas element.
Lots of great javascript libraries have been made public including such contributions as this, Three.js (3d canvas/svg/webgl), Lettering.js (typography), audio.js (audio) and many many others, a complete pipeline is emerging. EaselJS adds to that a helpful flash like api for html5 (<canvas> + javascript).
The API contains these familiar classes for Flash/AS3 developers:
DisplayObject
Abstract base class for all display elements in Easel. Exposes all of the display properties (ex. x, y, rotation, scaleX, scaleY, alpha, shadow, etc) that are common to all display objects.
Stage
The root level display container for display elements. Each time tick() is called on Stage, it will update and render the display list to its associated canvas.
Container
A nestable display container, which lets you aggregate display objects and manipulate them as a group.
Bitmap
Draws an image, video or canvas to the canvas according to its display properties.
BitmapSequence
Displays animated or dynamic sprite sheets (images with multiple frames on a grid), and provides APIs for managing playback and sequencing.
Shape
Renders vector drawing instructions within the context of the display list.
- EaselJS
- Grant Skinner Post on EaselJS
- EaselJS Examples: game, sparkles, rollover / drag & drop, localToGlobal, globalToLocal, sprite sheets
WebSockets and many other great features are now available across the iOS devices that are updated to iOS 4.2.
You can test your devices for WebSocket support and I just tested iPad and iPhone/iPods on iOS 4.2 and it is a go.
The update also adds some other excellent Safari browser features including:
- As mentioned, WebSocket support
- Accelerometer support
- Improved SVG and Canvas rendering
- Better Ajax
The new Safari on iOS 4.2 makes the iOS platform the current best html5 mobile solution for interactive apps and games in the browser. This should add some fun in terms of interactive web, games and better web experiences for iOS users.
- More on new features in iOS 4.2 Safari
- Test your browser for WebSockets
- Play with the accelerometer in javascript
We hope they add in WebGL support soon, there was mention of WebGLRenderingContext but not supported in browser yet.
Helpful tool for taking vector art from Adobe Illustrator .ai assets and exporting them as html5 with canvas script.
It is a visitmix lab product so it is a Microsoft tool. Mike Swanson has builtmany great conversion tools for interactive such as SWF2XAML (silverlight/wpf markup).
John Nack from Adobe has been presenting Adobe tools exporters to html5 recently. One is a Flash to html5 convertion tool. It looks good for converting flash vector assets to html5, but you could also use the Illustrator exporter to html5 (canvas/svg) for static assets.
This converter doesn’t appear to do anything for scripted animation or code, just exporting assets via old skool timeline. But this is definitely the right idea.
Silverlight launched in 2007 to compete with Flash as a rich media and internet app toolkit. Microsoft had failed before with Liquid Motion competing with Flash back in late 90′s early 2000′s. Now, over 10 years later, Silverlight might be dying as a technology that was another competitor to Flash, due to poor timing and lack of committment.
Now Microsoft has all but confirmed that Silverlight is losing steam.
I asked Bob Muglia, the Microsoft President in charge of the company’s server and tools business, that very question and got what I consider to be the clearest answer yet about how Microsoft is evolving its Silverlight strategy.
“Silverlight is our development platform for Windows Phone,” he said. Silverlight also has some “sweet spots” in media and line-of-business applications, he said.
But when it comes to touting Silverlight as Microsoft’s vehicle for delivering a cross-platform runtime, “our strategy has shifted,” Muglia told me.
Silverlight will continue to be a cross-platform solution, working on a variety of operating system/browser platforms, going forward, he said. “But HTML is the only true cross platform solution for everything, including (Apple’s) iOS platform,” Muglia said.
Silverlight was launched as a competitor to the Flash Flex framework and competing with Flash video most of all. This was before the H.264 battles, right when the mobile scene blew up and changed the game immensely. It was actually nice when it launched because it pushed Adobe on Flash and Flex (Flex was even later merged into the Flash brand to help it be more consistent like Silverlight). This was good for the whole interactive space.
Microsoft is now going with an HTML5 strategy. The odd thing is that the Windows Phone is entirely Silverlight driven, no html5 support. So is Microsoft going to leave their new mobile platfform high and dry due to this change in strategy? It just seems so short sighted and reactionary over at MSFT that everything is wavering. Who’s developing just silverlight for just Windows Phone? The timing of them stating this couldn’t be worse for Windows Phone.
Microsoft’s html5 strategy is hardware accelerated, something that Silverlight only partially has like Flash (though Adobe is changing that). It is apparent that mobile has changed even the rich internet applications game as well as gaming in that we are back to multiplatform, native apps and non browser plugins for web content (mobile devices support no web browser plugins at all let alone Flash or Silverlight). Still for the next 2-3 years limitations in hardware on mobile devices prevents anything software rendered to be fast (including html5 canvas and svg if there is no hardware acceleration), and due to this slowness, not able to compare/compete to compiled native apps that do have hardware access. This has forced Adobe and now Microsoft to change their strategies to get through it. We may see a resurgence of Flash and Silverlight like plugins on mobile browsers but not for years.
The only real place we see Silverlight is over at Netflix (maybe they will go html5 video or Flash video) and on Microsoft shop client apps. It appears with no support from Microsoft it will fall out of favor faster. Microsoft developers are usually forced to go with what Microsoft is recommending as much of it is sold through a business channel rather than developers now. It is good html5 and standards will be more prevalent in that ecosystem as long as they don’t start marginalizing it to proprietary elements. But if you step back and see the rumors a week ago that Microsoft might be interested in Adobe, the mobile surge and strategy shifts at Microsoft, it seems to send out a clarion call that Silverlight is over or the credits are about to roll.
The mobile surge, standards, native, hardware acceleration and cross platform aims of current market leaders, we have the new game, again. It doesn’t appear like Silverlight was, or will be, a success.
Wow. IE9 just set it in motion.
Canvas 2D is now really on the horizon for all browsers. IE9 preview now supports the <canvas> tag and all canvas element APIs and most Canvas 2D context APIs and attributes!
Features Available
- Canvas
- In the latest Platform Preview we support all Canvas element APIs and most Canvas 2D Context APIs and attributes.
Features Partially Implemented
- Canvas
- globalCompositeOperation
- The latest Platform Preview does not include support for the globalCompositeOperation attribute.
- DOM Exceptions
- The latest Platform Preview does not include support for Canvas 2D Context DOM Exceptions.
- drawFocusRing()
- The latest Platform Preview does not include support for the drawFocusRing() Focus management API.
This is pretty amazing even though it has been hinted at by other news (previously from AMD). Why should we care what Internet Explorer is up to? Well the dream of standards across web browsers seems to be materializing for html5 and more importantly, canvas 2d.
Even with Silverlight Microsoft has decided to join the party and upgrade the web on some great standards to build even more innovative platforms on top of. Some may see this as a death knell for Silverlight, Flash etc but I do not see it that way. I see <canvas> as a competing interactive technology but many times technologies bind together for a better experience, they also drive one another to innovate.
Much like Silverlight pushed Flash, and Silverlight was created because of Flash, those two technologies brought on canvas 2D and more graphical capabilities for the web in the interactive, game and application space. As javascript execution has sped up so has the graphical capabilities of browsers now. What is not to like about that if you are an interactive developer?
Canvas, Flash, Silverlight are all for the most part still software/CPU accelerated. The question is who will start the hardware acceleration of canvas and competing technologies even further to bring us closer to OpenGL ES/WebGL in the browser?
Ars Technica states that IE9 will have hardware accelerated canvas in addition to SVG but that doesn’t seem to be officially stated anywhere by Microsoft yet that I can find. AMD has hinted at it and previous news about SVG being hardware acclerated. Time will tell and it will be a HUGE boost to the browsers that do, of course we need all of them to do it to be worthwhile for mainstream content.
Ars on the hardware accelerated canvas support:
What does come as a surprise is canvas support. Microsoft has been promoting Internet Explorer 9′s support of SVG, which provides vector graphics capabilities within the Web browser, but thus far has kept quiet when asked if it would support the canvas bitmap graphics specification. Not only is canvas being supported, it is also being hardware accelerated, continuing Microsoft’s efforts to give Web applications the ability to exploit the extensive hardware capabilities of modern PCs.
Of course we should tread carefully here, there is still a big chance that portions of the canvas 2d spec will not be implemented exactly the same or some browser may have missing features much like CSS and javascript evolution. For instance the “most Canvas 2D Context APIs and attributes” is something I hope is addressed in the final IE9. If you are gonna spend the time implementing a standard, do it fully and right, don’t try to break it (an old Microsoft tactic). But this step was needed to again push interactive web technologies to more closely compete with desktop graphic technology which adds some really exciting times ahead.
Another golden ray of hope is ES5 support in IE9. Again Wow!
