Posted January 12th, 2011
by admin
Attention budding guitar players, the web just might turn into the best guitar teacher around.
The Mozilla hacks blog has details on an awesome web-based guitar tab player experiment from developer Greg Jopa. Using Mozilla’s experimental Audio Data API and the Vexflow HTML5 music notation rendering API, Jopa’s guitar tab player displays interactive sheet music that traces the notes of a song as it plays.
If you’re using Firefox 4, head over to the demo site to see the mashup in action. Other browsers won’t work, but the demo movie below shows how the guitar tab player works.
The reason this experiment only works in Firefox is because it uses Mozilla’s new Audio Data API, which gives web developers a way to interact with raw audio data in HTML5’s <video> and <audio> elements using JavaScript. With the Audio Data API, developers can read and write audio data within the browser, opening the doors for online tools like spectrum analyzers, audio remixing tools and 3D audio visualizations.
While Mozilla’s Audio Data API hasn’t been blessed by the W3C just yet, plenty of what we use on the web right now — XMLHttpRequest anyone? — started out exactly the same way. Because the web embraced XMLHttpRequest, it became a standard. Given this awesome experiment and some of the other great demos we’ve seen that use the Audio Data API, we’re really hoping the W3C adds the Audio Data API to the spec.
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Posted January 12th, 2011
by admin
Whenever we write about HTML5 here at Webmonkey — whether it’s something great, like Microdata, or something not-so-great, like the flaw in WebSockets — there is an inevitable comment or two telling everyone that they should wait until HTML5 is done. Some people think even the W3C doesn’t want you adopting HTML5 just yet.
Of course all those people, including the W3C, are wrong. Not only is much of the HTML5 spec well on its way to being finalized, browsers already support much of it. The level of support varies by browser, but HTML5 is very much here today.
The real reason you should use HTML5 now is that early adopters are already helping to make it better, finding bugs and giving the browser makers a reason to fix them.
Mark Pilgrim’s site Dive Into HTML5 is a fantastic resource for learning HTML5 and it’s written in HTML5. Pilgrim recently pointed out that the site’s use of HTML5 and CSS 3 has “led to bug fixes in at least four browsers and one font.”
If we all waited to use HTML5 until it was “done” we wouldn’t know about those bugs. It’s early adopters — like many Webmonkey readers — who are helping to make the web better by using HTML5 today and helping to discover the parts that don’t work in the real world. Browser bugs aren’t always discovered by reading specs or through stress tests like ACID 3, they’re discovered in the wild, on the web. Finding them now means that than in five or ten years when HTML5 is set in stone, it will have fewer problems.
Naturally we’re not suggesting that HTML5 is right for every website. Mainstream sites don’t want to discover bugs, though that hasn’t stopped big names like Nike from jumping in the HTML5 waters.
Maybe some parts of HTML5, like say WebSockets, aren’t quite ready to be used on the New York Times homepage. But smaller sites using WebSockets are helping to pave the way so that eventually sites the size of the Times can use WebSockets and the rest of HTML5 without worrying about bugs.
Not every site needs to live on the edge, but those that do make the web a better place for all the rest.
[Note to the commenters who will inevitably point out that we don't use HTML5 at Webmonkey: those of us that write for Webmonkey do not also write the code that runs it.]
5 Mosaic photo by Leo Reynolds/Flickr/CC
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Posted January 12th, 2011
by admin
One day, you’ll have a little tablet or phone, and carry it everywhere. It’ll be your only computer. When you need to use a “real” PC, you’ll dock it. Motorola’s Atrix is a little glimpse at that day. More »
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Posted January 12th, 2011
by admin
Fuck You, AT&T. That’s the scream of the Internet. Dropped calls, no data connection even with full bars, spotty coverage, collapsed networks in big cities… it’s a huge clusterfuck of customer rage. That’s why people are crying for the Verizon iPhone. More »
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Posted January 12th, 2011
by admin
It’s conventional wisdom now that iPhone exclusivity is the best and worst thing that ever happened to AT&T. A rocket that sent them into space—and directly into the sun. Will the same thing happen to Verizon? More »
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