Stephen Bolen

Looks like Google is trying to be (more) evil again.

Though H.264 plays an important role in video, as our goal is to enable open innovation, support for the codec will be removed and our resources directed towards completely open codec technologies.

Really, though… is anyone surprised that Google is pushing their own self-interest with the WebM Project? This should set back the HTML5 transition quite a bit. Moreover, arguments about H.264 being ‘closed’ are even more ridiculous when you consider that on August 26, 2010 MPEG LA announced that H.264 encoded internet video that is free to end users will never be charged for royalties. Sounds pretty open to me…

But hey, Google wants to push WebM and Theora. So they will.

Excellent post from John Gruber at Daring Fireball on how to subvert Adobe Flash entirely and recapture some of your battery.

For the time being, though, I’m going to stick with Click2Flash, as I’ve built up a pretty robust whitelist of sites that I actually need Flash to function (for instance, this blog needs Flash to assist in image uploading. It’s not necessary, per se, but batch-loading images for upload is much easier).

Via Techcrunch, Sencha has a new timeline-based HTML5 animator. Fair warning, though: Until the rest of the web world gets hip to Webkit (ahem, Microsoft/Mozilla), your sweet-azz renderings will only come to life on Chrome and Safari.

“The Wilderness Downtown” was inspired by recent developments in modern browsers and was built with Google Chrome in mind. As such, it’s best experienced in Chrome or an up-to-date HTML5-compliant browser. You can launch the project and learn more about it on our Chrome Experiments site at www.chromeexperiments.com/arcadefire.

It combines like, two of my favorite things! HTML5 and a guy named Win!