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Adobe Announces Plans To Discontinue Flash, Will Stop Supporting Entirely in 2020

[Ding, dong, the witch is dead][link]:

>But as open standards like HTML5, WebGL and WebAssembly have matured over the past several years, most now provide many of the capabilities and functionalities that plugins pioneered and have become a viable alternative for content on the web. Over time, we’ve seen helper apps evolve to become plugins, and more recently, have seen many of these plugin capabilities get incorporated into open web standards. Today, most browser vendors are integrating capabilities once provided by plugins directly into browsers and deprecating plugins.
>
>Given this progress, and in collaboration with several of our technology partners – including Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Mozilla – Adobe is planning to end-of-life Flash. Specifically, we will stop updating and distributing the Flash Player at the end of 2020 and encourage content creators to migrate any existing Flash content to these new open formats.

My own experience with Flash was mostly terrible, and it really did tear your battery life to shreds, but without it we wouldn’t have Homestar Runner, and for that I am thankful.

[link]: https://blogs.adobe.com/conversations/2017/07/adobe-flash-update.html “Flash & The Future of Interactive Content | Adobe”

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MicIO.js

[This is some crazy magicks and I love it][link]:

> Use HTML5’s web audio API to create a hardware bus somewhat similar to how Square’s Credit Card readers works.

I am abuzz with ideas for this right now and this is bad because I have actual work to do. (via [Jesper][jesp])

[link]: http://colinbookman.com/2014/03/23/micio/ “MicIO.js”
[jesp]: http://waffle.wootest.net “Waffle, Jesper’s blog”

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Structure.io homepage refresh

So, we just launched an update to the [Structure Sensor homepage][link], and it features some neat HTML5 / CSS3 tech. I’m pretty happy with it. It required me to learn a few things, which I’ll hopefully have time to write about here soon.

It also marks the first time I’ve ever encoded video in [WebM][webm]! It was easy thanks to [Miro Video Converter][miro] and [FFMPEG][ffmpeg].

[link]: http://structure.io/ “The Structure Sensor is the first 3D sensor for mobile devices”
[webm]: http://www.webmproject.org “The WebM project”
[miro]: http://www.mirovideoconverter.com “Miro Video Converter”
[ffmpeg]: http://www.ffmpeg.org “FFMPEG”

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Exploring canvas drawing techniques

A [very well put-together interactive tutorial][link] and examination of drawing using the HTML canvas tag. Even if you’re pretty up on things, you might learn something new.

[link]: http://perfectionkills.com/exploring-canvas-drawing-techniques/ “Perfection kills » Exploring canvas drawing techniques”

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ScummVM Ported to Javascript

[Day of the Tentacle, Maniac Mansion, LOOM, Indiana Jones, Monkey Island, all of the classics now playable in HTML5][link]. The audio is Firefox-only for now, but this is damned impressive. And cool.

[link]: http://clb.demon.fi/html5scummvm/dott/dott.html “HTML5 Day of the Tentacle”

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Timeline JS

[Really slick timeline visualization that can pull in data from a Google Spreadsheet, Flickr, etc.][link] I plan on using this for some weird stuff.

[link]: http://timeline.verite.co/ “Timeline JS – Beautifully crafted timelines that are easy, and intuitive to use.”

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Defend the Open Web: Keep DRM Out of W3C Standards

[The EFF is on the right side of this one, if there was any doubt:][link]

>All too often, technology companies have raced against each other to build restrictive tangleware that suits Hollywood’s whims, selling out their users in the process. But open Web standards are an antidote to that dynamic, and it would be a terrible mistake for the Web community to leave the door open for Hollywood’s gangrenous anti-technology culture to infect W3C standards. It would undermine the very purposes for which HTML5 exists: to build an open-ecosystem alternatives to all the functionality that is missing in previous web standards, without the problems of device limitations, platform incompatibility, and non-transparency that were created by platforms like Flash. HTML5 was supposed to be better than Flash, and excluding DRM is exactly what would make it better.

Adding DRM to HTML5 would absolutely enable new web apps to be made, but guess what: The kind of apps it would enable are across-the-board *worse apps* than the apps that we already build without DRM. A vote for DRM is a vote for *worse* in every possible way.

[link]: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/03/defend-open-web-keep-drm-out-w3c-standards “Defend the Open Web: Keep DRM Out of W3C Standards | Electronic Frontier Foundation”

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Play the Original Spelunky in HTML5

[Darius Kazemi used the newest version of GameMaker to port the game to HTML5/Javascript][link]. No sound yet, but totally playable and pretty cool. I’ll have to revisit GameMaker myself soon.

[link]: http://tinysubversions.com/2012/07/spelunky-html5/ “Spelunky HTML5”

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BrowserQuest

[An HTML5-based massively multiplayer game using WebSockets.][link] I’ve been wishing for something like this to exist for years now.

[link]: http://browserquest.mozilla.org/ “BrowserQuest”

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JavaScript WebRTC in Opera Mobile 12

[Featuring live video from the built-in camera on your mobile, totally within the browser and without plugins.][link] This is great and exciting. [WebRTC][webrtc] is making big strides today.

[link]: http://weblog.bocoup.com/javascript-webrtc-opera-mobile-12/ “JavaScript WebRTC in Opera Mobile 12 – Bocoup”
[webrtc]: http://www.w3.org/TR/webrtc/ “WebRTC specification”

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HTML5 Please

[Paul Irish’s new site which gives general advice on which HTML5 features you can use responsibly.][link]

[link]: http://html5please.us/ “HTML5 Please – Use the new and shiny responsibly”

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Handheld Designer

[A successor to the “Sweet solution,” an HTML5-based iOS app creator for Macs.][link] Looks great in theory, looking forward to trying it out.

[link]: http://handhelddesigner.com/ “Handheld Designer, Easily create and host beautiful HTML5 mobile web applications for the iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch”

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Paper.js

[A canvas-based HTML5 vector library][link]. The examples are great.

[link]: http://paperjs.org/ “Paper.js — Paper.js”

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HTML is the new HTML5

[Ian Hickson:][link]

>The WHATWG HTML spec can now be considered a “living standard”. It’s more mature than any version of the HTML specification to date, so it made no sense for us to keep referring to it as merely a draft. We will no longer be following the “snapshot” model of spec development, with the occasional “call for comments”, “call for implementations”, and so forth.

Behold, [HTML’s living specification][html]. The w3c is still looking to publish a “snapshot” of HTML5.

[link]: http://blog.whatwg.org/html-is-the-new-html5 “The WHATWG Blog — HTML is the new HTML5”
[html]: http://whatwg.org/html “HTML Specification”

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An Encoder Is Not A State Machine

Fellow Michigander [Chris Adamson does a good job of elaborating on the problems Google’s decision to drop H.264 from Chrome in favor of WebM][link] from the perspective of an implementor or creator. The short: It ain’t pretty.

via [@soypunk][via]

[link]: http://www.subfurther.com/blog/2011/01/13/an-encoder-is-not/ “An Encoder Is Not A State Machine”
[via]: http://twitter.com/soypunk “Soypunk on Twitter”

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Google to Drop H.264 Support in Chrome

[They’re replacing H.264 support with WebM][link] (a video codec [acquired and open-sourced][webm] by Google last year). It looks like the HTML video codec pissing match is about to start up again.

[link]: http://blog.chromium.org/2011/01/html-video-codec-support-in-chrome.html “Chromium Blog: HTML Video Codec Support in Chrome”
[webm]: http://extrafuture.com/2010/05/19/webm/ “WebM”

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HTML5 Audio Safari Extension

[Another in the recent line of “replace Flash whenever possible” Safari plugins,][link] which replaces popular Flash-based audio players with the HTML5 <audio> element. See also: [The YouTube5 extension][yt5], which does the same for YouTube embeds.

[link]: http://shauninman.com/archive/2010/11/05/html5audio_safari_extension “HTML5 Audio Safari Extension // ShaunInman.com”
[yt5]: http://www.verticalforest.com/2010/10/27/youtube5-version-2/ “Youtube 5”

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HTML5 Video Player Comparison Chart

[A handy reference for the HTML5-minded][link]. via [Gruber][gruber].

[link]: http://praegnanz.de/html5video/ “HTML5 video player”
[gruber]: http://daringfireball.net “Daring Fireball”

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Vimeo Releases Embeddable HTML5 Video Player

[Another shot across the bow of Flash][link]. Vimeo embeds will use the HTML5 player automatically in browsers that support the codecs involved.

[link]: http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/vimeo_releases_embeddable_html5_video_player.php “Vimeo Releases Embeddable HTML5 Video Player”

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onprogress

[My good friend Shawn Medero’s new blog][link], which is a conversationally-toned look at the latest web browser development trends, issues, and a wee bit of futurecasting.

Worth monitoring if you build websites or just need to look into the sausage factory every now and again.

[link]: http://onprogress.net/ “onprogress.net | fetching the latest in web browser development”