Yesterday Apple quietly posted a web page that showcases some of the dazzling things you can do with HTML5. Their showcase includes what can be done with video, pictures, text, audio and more. It’s impressive, as a few of these things could only previously be done with Flash.
For the video showcase, they show how a video can be dynamically resized or rotated on-the-fly.
For photos, they demonstrate 360 degree views, along with 2D and 3D galleries.
For text, they show how it can be dynamically resized, rotated, how shadows can be added and colors changed.
And for audio, they demonstrate how audio files can be played on a web page without any plugins required.
There are a few other HTML5 goodies on their showcase page as well. The catch is you must use Apple’s Safari browser to watch the showcase. That means if you don’t already have Safari, you need to download and install it (they have Windows and Mac versions) or you can view the page from an iPad or iPhone.
There’s always a catch with Apple!
Yep – Flash is a sunset technology. “Open” is the way of the web for video… but it appears that we’re a long ways from that being the ‘standard’.
Jobs definitely fires more than one or two much needed ‘shots across the bow’ of Adobe and the PC world with his open letter – I liked it.
It was real and authentic… and now that Apple is the largest tech company in the world (at least as measured in terms of market cap) – they can / he can afford to “tell it like it is”.
I think that Microsoft will become like IBM: they’ll still make lots of money but people couldn’t care less about them…
Having said all this… I fear that there’s a long road ahead for competing standards, codecs and file formats before we finally settle on a universal standard – so that the rest of us can put our time and money into creating great video content and not having to wrestle with technology – but if history is any indication – that’s just a fantasy.
“You need to download safari to view this demo”
…yes html5 standards…yes apple, stick to making mp3 players as you are no different than MS and your Intel buddies can confirm that. 🙂