Chrome Experiments - Arcade Fire. The Wilderness Downtown Choreographed windows, interactive flocking, custom rendered maps, real-time compositing, procedural drawing, 3D canvas rendering... this Chrome Experiment has them all. "The Wilderness Downtown" is an interactive interpretation of Arcade Fire's song "We Used To Wait" and was built entirely with the latest open web technologies, including HTML5 video, audio, and canvas. HTML5 Canvas 3D engine renders a flocking bird simulation that reacts to the music and mouse. HTML5 audio plays music and keeps track of timecode. Sequence system controls and synchronises effects and windows to the timecode. HTML5 video plays film clips in custom sizes. Choreographed windows are triggered by the music and placed relative to screen size.
Map tiles are rendered, zoomed, and rotated in a scripted 3D environment. Animated sprites are composited directly over maps and Street View. 3D sky dome is used to render Street View with scripted camera control. On Its Second Birthday, Google Chrome Officially Hits Version 6. Ever since it became stable enough to use on a day-to-day basis on a Mac last year, Google Chrome has been my browser of choice. Other browsers have been adding some nice features — but Chrome keeps adding them faster. And today on its second birthday, that rate of change isn’t slowing down. Remember that it was just two years ago when Google surprised the world by announcing a new browser (a little early) via a comic. The next day, we got the first shots of what the browser would look like — and it was released as a beta for Windows users. It actually looks pretty much the same today, but it’s now much, much faster (and when it launched it was already faster than most browsers out there).
Google says that Chrome today is a full three times faster when it comes to JavaScript performance versus Chrome circa 2008. The rapid speed increases have also undoubtedly pushed rival browsers to become faster, so we’ve all benefited. Happy birthday Chrome. Chrome then: Chrome now: Google Launches Chrome’s ‘App Store For The Web’ In Developer Preview. Earlier this week we covered new details about the Chrome Web Store, an ‘App Store for the web’ that Google first announced at its I/O conference in May. Now Google is giving developers their first taste of what they can expect from the new marketplace: the Chrome Web Store has launched in a developer preview. Developers can now start uploading apps using the developer dashboard at the Chrome extensions gallery. During the preview, developers will only be able to see applications they’ve uploaded themselves (they won’t be visible to users).
Details are on the Webstore’s overview page. One key thing to note: while Google’s slides that were presented at GDC (and we reported on) indicated that developers would only pay a modest fee of 5% (Apple’s rev share on the App Store is 30%), the fee is actually 5% plus an additional 30 cents per transaction — which obviously represents a more significant chunk if your app is only selling for $1.99. Google Begins Charging Devs $5 To List Chrome Extensions, Themes, And Apps. Completely open stores and galleries are great — until you realize that they quickly get loaded up with crap. And especially when you realize that some of that crap is intending to be malicious. With that in mind, Google today is announcing a couple new rules for its Chrome extensions, themes, and soon, apps. The biggest change is that now all developers will be subject to a one-time $5 fee from Google if they wish to have their extensions, themes, and apps published in Google’s galleries.
Google notes that they’re waving the fee for those who have already registered for the galleries previously — and those people can keep pushing updates without paying the fee. But for all new developers, the fee begins today. Google say it is “intended to create better safeguards against fraudulent extensions in the gallery and limit the activity of malicious developer accounts.” The other thing they’re doing on that end is domain verification. Chromium Hits Version 7 As The Chrome Train Keeps Speeding Along. It looks like Google wasn’t lying when they said they planned to more rapidly iterate their Chrome web browser. Today brought the initial release of version 7 of Chromium, the open source browser that Chrome is based on.
If all goes as planned, this latest iteration should begin to trickle into the Chrome stream in just a few weeks. It wasn’t even a week ago that version 6 of Chrome hit the beta stage. While the stable build of Chrome is still stuck on version 5 (5.0.375.126, to be exact), given the rate at which Google is refreshing the beta channel (just about daily), you can probably expect 6 to go stable shortly.
Google has stated that they hope to ship a new version of Chrome every six weeks now. So what’s new in Chromium version 7? One thing still not enabled by default in Chromium 7 are Chrome Web Apps. But if not, it may only be another few weeks until Chromium 8. Google Begins Rapid Iteration Plan With Chrome 6 Beta Deployment. Last month, Google let people know that the pace at which they deploy builds of Chrome would be greatly increasing.
The thought is that work is happening so quickly in Chrome but much of it is stuck in the developer channels (or in Chromium, the open-source browser on which Chrome is based) because of code freezes and long waits to deploy the stable versions — so why not just speed the whole process up? Google is wasting little time doing that as the latest version of Chrome, version 6, is being released into beta today. So what do we get with Chrome 6? As users of Chromium and the dev channel builds of Chrome will know, the entire browser UI has gotten a facelift. The buttons (back, forwards, reload, etc) are now seamlessly integrated into the toolbar. But the biggest changes in Chrome 6 come in the JavaScript speed increases, Autofill, and the syncing capabilities. A Hint Of A Chrome OS Product With Verizon.
While we’re still likely a few months away from seeing the first Chrome OS devices, work continues to move forward on getting the OS ready to go. And some recent discussions on the Chromium OS (the open source version that Chrome OS will be based on) Google Code page suggest that not only is wireless connectivity going to be a part of some of these devices, but that Verizon may be a partner. As you can see in a few of discussions on the Google Code pages for the projects, a lot of work is being done to figure out the UI for network connectivity. For example, they’re thinking about how will the OS will alert users when they’re running low on data they’ve purchased. The interesting part is that the latest mockups for these UI changes are in a folder called “Verizon”. Granted these are just mockups, so it’s perfectly possible that the person who made them simply chose one carrier to make the mockups with.
And, of course, the two even see eye to eye now on net neutrality. [thanks Alberto]