Category: Plugins

Playing WebM in Safari with plugins

As you’re no doubt aware, HTML5 video is this year’s big thing — but there’s a dis­pute going on about which should become the default stan­dard video codec. The cur­rent nascent de fac­to stan­dard is H.264, but recent­ly the new WebM for­mat is gain­ing traction.

I’ve no idea how the web video for­mat war will end. My pref­er­ence is that a free, non-patent encum­bered, high-qual­i­ty video codec will become the stan­dard, and WebM is the best fit for that descrip­tion. Despite the recent announce­ment by the MPEG LA, the patent pool which con­trols licens­ing of H.264, that it will always be free for ‘video deliv­ered to the inter­net with­out charge’, that still does­n’t make it free-as-in-speech, and still not free-as-in-beer for any­one want­i­ng to build a busi­ness around video encoding/decoding (which includes, if I’m not mis­tak­en, bundling it with a brows­er). All that said, my pref­er­ence is mean­ing­less in the face of so many vest­ed busi­ness interests.

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Five plugins (and a theme) to improve Textpattern

Fol­low­ing on from my pre­vi­ous post, I thought I’d explore in a lit­tle more detail how I like to opti­mise my Textpat­tern instal­la­tion when start­ing a new site. While TXP has a pret­ty good set­up out of the box, there are a few more steps I like to take to real­ly make it zing.

Bear in mind that I’ve only real­ly noticed the pow­er of TXP in the last year or so, and there may be a heap of oth­er plu­g­ins that I’m unaware of; list­ed below are just my favourites that I’ve dis­cov­ered so far.

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Links Round-Up: Firefox, Microsoft, Yahoo

The last month has seen me com­plete­ly immersed in User Expe­ri­ence the­o­ry and Infor­ma­tion Archi­tec­ture for my new role, and it’s been a very hec­tic time. While that has­n’t stopped me from keep­ing an eye on devel­op­ments on the web, it’s giv­en me less time to write about them.

Here’s a quick round-up of a few links that have grabbed my inter­est over the past weeks; I’d like to write more about them, but time forbids.

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IE8’s WebSlices — another practical Microformat

One of the new fea­tures already announced for IE8 is Web­Slices; essen­tial­ly, the abil­i­ty to sub­scribe to any part of a web page, even if it does­n’t have an RSS feed. It sounds some­what sim­i­lar to Fire­fox’s Micro­sum­maries fea­ture*, although it’s a) eas­i­er to imple­ment, b) more flex­i­ble, and c) not buried in the brows­er where no-one could ever find it.

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Immediate uses for Microformats

One of the hard­est things about Micro­for­mats is explain­ing their ben­e­fits to peo­ple. You can say “It’s a stan­dard­ised for­mat of mark­ing-up con­tent, which is both human and machine read­able!” until you’re blue in the face, but until you can show peo­ple a prac­ti­cal ben­e­fit they usu­al­ly remain unmoved.

Luck­i­ly there are a few tools out there which will help you show off the ben­e­fits of using Micro­for­mats, and involve lit­tle work from you.

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My favourite features in Firefox 3 are in Opera

I’ve been play­ing with the Fire­fox 3 nightlies for quite a while now so the first beta release did­n’t real­ly hold any great sur­pris­es for me. The updat­ed ren­der­ing engine is fast and clean, and it’s got lots of nice new fea­tures which make it a treat to use. Most of my favourite new fea­tures are already in Opera 9.5, how­ev­er; and one that isn’t could real­ly do with the Opera touch.

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Aside

I’ve updat­ed my Speak­ing page to include more con­fer­ences, more videos, and a lit­tle on my speak­ing require­ments and pref­er­ences. I’m plan­ning to cut down on the num­ber of talks I give in 2014 (twelve is too many), but am always open to inter­est­ing offers and oppor­tu­ni­ties, so please get in touch if you’re organ­is­ing an event.

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