Designed by Apple in California
I once met Tim Cook just after he became CEO. Puzzled to what to ask a man whose company has so inspired me, I asked him to sign my iPhone. Tim smiled, declined and said, “I strongly believe that artists should sign their work.”
Google’s official announcement, and developer FAQ.
For sensible commentary about the core mission of Blink and the history leading up to the fork, there’s Alex Russell’s post from Google’s perspective, and Maciej Stachowiak’s comments from Apple’s perspective.
For more detail, there’s the threads between Google (Adam Barth and co.) and Apple (Darin Adler and co.) folks on the WebKit dev mailing lists.
There’s a lot of interesting goals for Blink which I’m excited to see: implementing the DOM in JavaScript; snapshotting in V8; incremental and parallel layout; and multi-process improvements.
I’m also excited to see what Apple is working on, but we’ll need to be patient there as Apple’s style is “show, don’t tell”.
Maciej says it best: “I do not consider Blink to be a hostile fork. I wish the Blink developers good luck & godspeed.”
This is the new PlayStation Video Unlimited service. This PlayStation app runs at a full 60 frames per second (when you see it on a PS3), has tons of 3D graphics effects, full-speed 1080p video playback, and a fluid, hardware accelerated, animated user experience. What you may not know is that this is a web app.
The Video Unlimited service is a JavaScript application with a carefully designed runtime platform and very lightweight APIs to access hardware accelerated 3D graphics and shader effects, video playback engine, and other aspects of the PS3 hardware.
Two years ago, I helped start this project at Sony. In six weeks, our team took a working Flash UI prototype and recreated it on a PS3, complete with an early version of the platform, now internally called Trilithium. Alex Bustin, the same UI developer who built the original UI prototype, also wrote the Trilithium port.
The release of Video Unlimited was delayed until now, but Trilithium was used to build another of Sony’s partner’s apps, Hulu Plus for PS3. (See video at the end of this post).
Trilithium’s strength comes from taking full advantage of the PS3 hardware and existing well-optimized frameworks to do everything from graphics to video playback, leaving the decisions about the high level application to a very flexible JavaScript core API.
We built Trilithium for several reasons:
True, there’s no hyperlinking and Trilithium isn’t open (for now).
But Video Unlimited, Hulu Plus, and future Trilithium apps do show what’s possible when you bring the best parts of web and native technology together.
