Mac OS X Lion top 10 features

1. Multi-touch gestures — Apps will be controlled by different multi-touch gestures; including three fingered swipe, scroll, pinching and zooming.
2. Full Screen Apps — Much like iOS5, apps will be full screen in OS Lion.
3. Mission Control — Like an expanded expose. All of your open app instances are grouped by app
4. Mac App Store — Mac store is now built in, as well as in-app purchases. The new built in version will also include push notifications for app updates.
5. Launchpad — Make a simple gesture: pinch motion — all your apps fly on screen.
6. Resume — Before you had to quit apps. Now when you launch an app in Lion – it brings you right back to where you were when you quit.
7. Autosave — Lion automatically saves your work in the background without you having to do much.
8. Versions — Automatically save different versions of your document as you’re working.
9. AirDrop — A Dropbox-type feature that allows you to get documents between computers.
10. Mac Mail Version 5 — Including a threading feature called conversations.

Must have add-ons for Thunderbird 5

Well below is the list of add-ons I like to use with thunderbird

1) Thunderbird Conversations: This is a must have add-on. This addon provides a conversation view for Thunderbird, including contacts tooltips, attachment thumbnails, quick (inline) reply, integration with other addons, and much more.

2) QuickFolders: Cut through the clutter of the folders sidebar with your favorite folders as tabs. Open folders and sub folders, move mails without scrolling around or searching.

I am using the above two add-ons and enabled vertical layout and hidden the folder pane. Look at the screenshot below

what is new in Android 4?

As we are getting near to the release date of new android version, which is middle of Nov, 2011. Lot of rumors floating around some of like to believe rumors

1) Better performance there is no surprise as with every new version they does come up with  performance improvements.

2) Universal operating system for both tablets and mobile phones. That is something will really help both for users and developers for pushing new changes quickly. Hope this also brings much more user friendly UI.
3) Not sure how true it is but people say android 4 has camera sensor, but even if the software supports it what about the hardware.

As Android 4 is a major release there must lot more features which are coming as part of the bundle, hope make our experience with android much more enjoyable.

Wait continues………

What happens to orkut?

Google plus is almost here. It looks almost looks like facebook but has more features when compared to facebook. Now its facebook that need to play catch up game. The one advantage facebook is 750 M user based it already got. But once thing I don’t understand is Google already got Orkut as social network and now they got google plus, what happens to Orkut and its users now?

1) They will automatically migrate all the orkut users to google plus and shut orkut.

2) They shut orkut and redirect all its users to google plus to start a fresh.

 

Not sure what they are going to do, lets wait and see.

Future and Android

Just amazing and fearsome to know one platform having controlling everything around you from mobile to your car and house.

This article I am pasting here is by Marko Gargenta on the website http://radar.oreilly.com/2011/07/3-android-predictions-home-clothes-car.html

Prediction 1: Android controls the home

Marko Gargenta: Google painted their vision of Android @ Home at the last Google I/O. I think this has huge potential to make Android the de-facto controller for many other devices, from lights to music players to robots and factory machinery. We are seeing the first stage with numerous home security systems being developed using Android, as well as set-top boxes powered by Android. At the moment, many of these devices simply use Android as a replacement for embedded Linux and they're still just self-contained devices.

In the second stage, manufacturers will start exposing libraries so developers can build custom applications for their devices, effectively turning them into platforms. I predict this will happen later this year as manufacturers realize the power of letting users hack their systems. The latest case study with Microsoft Kinect should help pave the way.

In the third stage, various devices will be able to interact with one another — my phone can detect my TV and my TV can communicate with my stereo. This will take a bit longer to get to as we still don't have common protocols for this type of communication. We also run the risk of companies developing their own proprietary protocols, such as a Samsung TV only talking to a Samsung phone, etc. Compatibility may require Google stepping in and using the Compatibility Test Suite(CTS) as a tool to enforce common protocols.

Prediction 2: Wearable Android

Marko Gargenta: The form factor for Android boards is getting to be very small and the price of the actual chipset is approaching the $100 point for a full-featured device. This allows for development of wearable Android-powered devices. Some of them will be for fashion purposes, such as watches. Others will be for medical and safety applications. I predict that toward the end of this year we're going to start seeing high-end fashion accessories based on Android. We may not be aware they are Android-powered, and we may not be able to develop for them. At the same time, early medical devices will emerge, initially for non-critical applications. These will likely be closed, purpose-built systems with little opportunity for development or extension.

Prediction 3: Android and networked cars

Marko Gargenta: This is the next big frontier for Android to seize. The car industry is now at the point where the mobile phone industry was 5-10 years ago. People are going to want more from their car systems as they realize that things like Google Maps beat any stock navigation system. Consumers will want car-based connectivity to the Internet as well as apps.

The first stage of networked car development will involve using Android to build proprietary systems. This is already underway withcommercial systems being built for cars without users even knowing the systems are based on Android. The second stage will involve connecting the cars to the Internet. This can be done in a couple of ways: cars can have radios with their own connections to the Internet or a driver's mobile phone can be tapped for online access.

Whatever approach we take, 4G and LTE network developments will help the process quite a bit. Once the cars are connected, manufactures will have the opportunity to open up kits for developers to build purpose-built applications for those systems. It is likely that manufacturers may tightly control what apps are allowed into what vehicles by running their own proprietary app stores with strict policies and quality control. This is simply the nature of the auto industry to self-police itself and focus heavily on testing the software. It is not very likely that we'll be able to simply download car apps from a major app market right away.

Why choose Android over iPhone?

This is a nice article from lifehacker, check from the below given link. But top 10 reason why you choose android over iPhone

1) True App Integration

2) Flash

3) Controlling Your Phone From Your Computer

4) Custom ROMs

5) Wireless App Installation

6) Removable Storage and Battery

7) Widgets

8) Custom Home Launchers

9) Automation

10) Alternate Keyboards

http://lifehacker.com/5801862/top-10-awesome-android-features-that-the-iphone-doesnt-have

Google Chrome Book

Well, at last the much awaited and much talked about product is launched by google and ready to be shipped to end users. Looking at the specifications I am impressed with hardware capabilities,boot speed and battery backup(8.5 hours). Also this device provides solid state storage which is much reliable, and also hope Google’s claim about layered security from viruses is true and reliance.

But one think I am not impressed is with the price they(both samsung and acer) are quoting $500, which is very steep and for the same price you can get windows 7 laptop with similar hardware capabilities and disk space. That aside, I still think this new model of the laptop is the future of computation.

My feedback in Infibeam Pi E-book reader

I am one of the very early users of Pi, I have been using this device for more than 10 months.  If you are reading normal text based PDF files, its good. Though its gets stuck some times. The funny part if every time its stuck I round around to find a sharp device to reboot it, I don't understand the logic of having a small reboot button for the device which needs so frequent resets.

If you try to open a PDF with images and sizes more than 40 MB then you will have lot of problem like the device gets rebooted in a never ending loop or its stuck at the boot screen. Every time I see this issue the only solution suggested by support is to install the firmware. I have seen this issue two times in last 10 months.  To my understanding if there is a problem with the file or file is too big to open then it should exit gracefully and should not hamper users from reading any other book till be re-installs the firmware.

Too bad, I guess some basic stuff they should have checked before they ship the device.

Hope they resolved these issues in the latest pi2.

Firefox 4.0 RC2 is out and it has status bar

Just now I have downloaded firefox RC2 and first thing I looked for is status bar and its there :). That’s a very good decision by Mozilla, because like many out there I am missing that dearly since I started Firefox 4.0 Beta 8. Everything else looks normal on UI, need to see what else changed in RC 2.

 

[Edit] I am wrong there is no status bar, its just that my add-on Status-4-Ever started working on RC2 which was not working on RC1. Sorry for this.

How to search for a string in profile rules of Oracle Universal Content Management(UCM)?

From time to time I have a requirement where I need to find rules which are using specific string or specific metadata as part of a the side effect. Its very tuff to find the same by opening each and every rule using configuration manager applet. There is a easy of doing it by just going to <ucm_install_dir>/data/profiles/document, where you will find hda files for each and every rule you create. Just issue a operating system find command in that folder with the string you want to find, that should return the results you are expecting to see.

Let me know if this helpful for you.

Try new Opera 11

I just downloaded Opera 11 and its looks pretty good. The first thing I observed is its looks and the way it loads the we b pages. As usual it has much appreciated feature of blocking images and animations from loading. Also this version introduced concept of extensions and when looking at the developer’s guide I realized developing a extension is pretty simple and no nonsense involved. Just need to know html, css and javascript( Yeah…! no need to learn any fancy XUL).  

There is one more feature Opera Unite which promises a lot of revolutionary additions, yet to try that thing. Will post something on that soon once I explore it. Keep watching this space.

 

But make sure you download and try this, its too good. I have already made this browser my default browser.

GMail not working in Opera 11

I just downloaded Opera 11 and impressed with its speed and useful options like not loading images and animation to the page. Also impressed with the simplicity of creating extensions for opera. As I said impressed with its speed and looks and I have decided to make it my default browser instead of chrome. Then I found the worst thing, gmail does not work and throws a message Connection closed by remote server. I am not sure whose fault, if its gmail’s fault its worst case blocking a competitor. Its totally unfair. Hope I will figure out a away to make gmail work and keep opera 11 as my default browser on my system.

 

As on update looks like Opera does something with gmail javascript resulting it to fail to load just check this thread

http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/gmail/thread?tid=6e4ba0f797ec5c55&hl=en

Google going to launch E-book venture

From the first report it looks like google going to offer a platform to buy and sell e-books. Google Editions hopes to upend the existing e-book market by offering an open, "read anywhere" model that is different from many competitors. Users will be able to buy books directly from Google or from multiple online retailers—including independent bookstores—and add them to an online library tied to a Google account. They will be able to access their Google accounts on most devices with a Web browser, including personal computers, smartphones and tablets.

"Google is going to turn every Internet space that talks about a book into a place where you can buy that book," says Dominique Raccah, publisher and owner of Sourcebooks Inc., an independent publisher based in Naperville, Ill. "The Google model is going to drive a lot of sales. We think they could get 20% of the e-book market very fast."

Read more: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704369304575632602305759466.html#ixzz16pyAUa6G

Compare cell phone and book prices in India

Now we have two good sites in India to find best deal for cell phones and books.  For cell phones you can use mysmartprice, this site also provides comparison of book prices. There is also one more site(indiabookstore.net) dedicated for comparing book prices which will by default give you the best price but does not really allow you to compare book prices of different stores like in mobile phones.  But one thing I don’t really like is none of the above mentioned stores mentions about e-book and their prices. In this era of e-book readers that’s a major gap that must be filled by these site owners.

Future Mobile Phone

I may be thinking wild about the mobile phone future and using lot of my imagination here. Sometime in future there are things you can expect from a mobile phone

- Its not going to be rectangular in shape with keypad/touch screen. Its just going to be a small device with projector using which you can use any surface to project things from your phone and do your regular tasks like selecting a number and making call or sending out a message. The projecting you can very well use your palm. The technology is all ready exists called sixth sense(http://www.google.com/url?url=http://www.ted.com/talks/pranav_mistry_the_thrilling_potential_of_sixthsense_technology.html&rct=j&sa=X&ei=-H70TPXoE4j0sgaDu4nSBA&ved=0CD8QuAIwAw&q=sixth+sense&usg=AFQjCNEKBhwN3inYm3d3y9Wf2tDQVIQZKA).

- Your mobile will be replacing your wallet as it will be used as your plastic money. It will literally becomes your identity. Of course will be connected to seamlessly to internet all the time(3G/4G/may be 5G :) or free Wi-Fi).

- For avoiding theft and misuse it will recognize your finger prints and will shutdown if someone else is trying to use it.

- It’s going to replace all your paper books and newspapers as it will be used as your e-book reader. No need to carry bulky kindle or iPad with you all the time.

- It will become your personal TV. As mentioned you can use the projector to project the TV from web on any surface.

- It may not be having any internal storage as everything you want to store(photos, books, movies, HD vedios taken using the device etc.) will be placed in a cloud.

- With all the above mentioned features the size of the device should not be more than a ping-pong ball(Yes it should be round in shape).

 

At least these are the things I imagine add if you have any other ideas.

Acer tablet are going to be market leader in 2 years

If acer CEO’s words to be believed in the coming years Acer tablet will be marketing leader. Rather than betting on a single form-factor and OS, the company has developed a trio of tablets in two sizes, running on two platforms. In February, Acer will ship a Windows-based device with a 10.1-inch-display. And in April, it will ship two Android-based tablets, one with a 7-inch display and another with a 10.1-inch display (native 1280×800 screen resolution), a dual-core 1GHz processor, a front-facing camera for video calling, a 5 megapixel rear-facing camera, and HDMI output.

Facebook Email

It sounds real fun to me. There are lot of posts in blogs and news sites that facebook at the verge of launching a email service. The first thought comes to me is what are they going to offere new, which is not available in the existing services like gmail etc. I use gmail and find everything I need in that screen from making a phone call using google voice to sending a mail. Just one more thing that makes me wonder is there are lot of arguments in blogs that the email obsolete and the future of communication is using the social media only. But now the same blogs and wait on facebook to release a email service. Lets see what will be the out come. Hope something revolutionary comes out from facebook.

These people got creativity

Google docs supports fonts now

Documents without font choices are like photographs without colors. Just as shades of color can add depth to a picture, smart font choices give your text another dimension.
For a long time, the set of fonts that you’ve seen when you browsed the web has been quite limited. That’s because you could only use a font that’s already been installed on your computer. So if a website designer wanted all her visitors to see the same thing, she could only use fonts that are so ubiquitous that the chances are very high that every computer will have them. And there are only a handful of fonts that fit that bill.

Thankfully, that situation is changing. All modern browsers now support the ability to download web fonts. A web font doesn’t need to be installed on your local computer—it can be read directly from a web server and used immediately on the webpage that you’re loading. In May, we launched the Google Font API, which makes it easy for website developers to include any one of an ever-growing list of web fonts on their pages. We’re already using the new API for the latest themes in Google forms.
As of today, Google documents supports web fonts (using the Google Font API) and we’re excited to announce six new fonts.

Droid Serif and Droid Sans
Android fans will already be familiar with the Droid family of fonts. Droid Serif and Droid Sans both feature strong vertical lines and a neutral, yet friendly appearance. They’re designed specifically for reading on small screens.

Calibri and Cambria
Every day we have many people import documents from Microsoft Word into Google Docs. Today we’re making import fidelity better by adding two of the most popular Microsoft Word fonts. Calibri is a beautiful sans serif font characterized by curves and soft edges. It’s designed to be high impact. Cambria is built with strong vertical serifs and subtle horizontal ones. It’s very legible when printed at small sizes.

Consolas and Corsiva
Consolas joins Courier New as the second monospaced font in Google Docs. It’s a modern monospaced font with character proportions that are similar to normal text. Finally, Corsiva is our first italic font with embellished characters and an elegant style.

Right now our font support covers most Latin and Western European character sets. However, we’ll be adding web fonts for other languages (like Hebrew and Greek) soon. If you don’t see the new fonts in your documents, check that web fonts are supported in your language and that the document language is set correctly from the File -> Language menu.

This is just the beginning of fonts in Google Docs. We added six new fonts today and we’re already testing our next batch. You’ll see many more new fonts over the next few months. And because Google Docs uses web fonts, you’ll never need to install a new font: when you load your document, the latest set of fonts will always be there, ready to use.
Finally, adding web fonts is just one of the challenges that the Google Docs team has been working on. If you’re interested in learning more about the challenges of building a collaborative application, check out the first post of a three-part series on collaboration posted on the Google Docs Blog.

HTML 5: Facts and Myths

[via: http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2010/09/23/html5-the-facts-and-the-myths/]

First, Some Facts

Once upon a time, there was a lovely language called HTML, which was so simple that writing websites with it was very easy. So, everyone did, and the Web transformed from a linked collection of physics papers to what we know and love today.

Most pages didn’t conform to the simple rules of the language (because their authors were rightly concerned more with the message than the medium), so every browser had to be forgiving with bad code and do its best to work out what its author wanted to display.

In 1999, the W3C decided to discontinue work on HTML and move the world toward XHTML. This was all good, until a few people noticed that the work to upgrade the language to XHTML2 had very little to do with the real Web. Being XML, the spec required a browser to stop rendering if it encountered an error. And because the W3C was writing a new language that was better than simple old HTML, it deprecated elements such as <img> and <a>.

A group of developers at Opera and Mozilla disagreed with this approach and presented a paper to the W3C in 2004 arguing that, “We consider Web Applications to be an important area that has not been adequately served by existing technologies… There is a rising threat of single-vendor solutions addressing this problem before jointly-developed specifications.”

The paper suggested seven design principles:

1. Backwards compatibility, and a clear migration path.
2. Well-defined error handling, like CSS (i.e. ignore unknown stuff and move on), compared to XML’s “draconian” error handling.
3. Users should not be exposed to authoring errors.
4. Practical use: every feature that goes into the Web-applications specifications must be justified by a practical use case. The reverse is not necessarily true: every use case does not necessarily warrant a new feature.
5. Scripting is here to stay (but should be avoided where more convenient declarative mark-up can be used).
6. Avoid device-specific profiling.
7. Make the process open. (The Web has benefited from being developed in the open. Mailing lists, archives and draft specifications should continuously be visible to the public.)

The paper was rejected by the W3C, and so Opera and Mozilla, later joined by Apple, continued a mailing list called Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group (WHATWG), working on their proof-of-concept specification. The spec extended HTML4 forms, until it grew into a spec called Web Applications 1.0, under the continued editorship of Ian Hickson, who left Opera for Google.

In 2006, the W3C realized its mistake and decided to resurrect HTML, asking WHATWG for its spec to use as the basis of what is now called HTML5.

Those are the historical facts. Now, let’s look at some hysterical myths.

The Myths

“I Can’t Use HTML5 Until 2012 (or 2022)”

This is a misconception based on the projected date that HTML5 will reach the stage in the W3C process known as Candidate Recommendation (REC). The WHATWG wiki says this:

For a spec to become a REC today, it requires two 100% complete and fully interoperable implementations, which is proven by each successfully passing literally thousands of test cases (20,000 tests for the whole spec would probably be a conservative estimate). When you consider how long it takes to write that many test cases and how long it takes to implement each feature, you’ll begin to understand why the time frame seems so long.

So, by definition, the spec won’t be finished until you can use all of it, and in two browsers.

Of course, what really matters is the bits of HTML5 that are already supported in the browsers. Any list will be out of date within about a week because the browser makers are innovating so quickly. Also, much of the new functionality can be replicated with JavaScript in browsers that don’t yet have support. The <canvas> property is in all modern browsers and will be in Internet Explorer 9, but it can be faked in old versions of IE with the excanvas library. The <video> and <audio> properties can be faked with Flash in old browsers.

HTML5 is designed to degrade gracefully, so with clever JavaScript and some thought, all content should be available on older browsers.

“My Browser Supports HTML5, but Yours Doesn’t”

There’s a myth that HTML5 is some monolithic, indivisible thing. It’s not. It’s a collection of features, as we’ve seen above. So, in the short term, you cannot say that a browser supports everything in the spec. And when some browser or other does, it won’t matter because we’ll all be much too excited about the next iteration of HTML by then.

What a terrible mess, you’re thinking? But consider that CSS 2.1 is not yet a finished spec, and yet we all use it each and every day. We use CSS3, happily adding border-radius, which will soon be supported everywhere, while other aspects of CSS3 aren’t supported anywhere at all.

Be wary of browser “scoring” websites. They often test for things that have nothing to do with HTML5, such as CSS, SVG and even Web fonts. What matters is what you need to do, what’s supported by the browsers your client’s audience will be using and how much you can fake with JavaScript.

HTML5 Legalizes Tag Soup

HTML5 is a lot more forgiving in its syntax than XHTML: you can write tags in uppercase, lowercase or a mixture of the two. You don’t need to self-close tags such as img, so the following are both legal:

<img src="nice.jpg" />
<img src="nice.jpg">

You don’t need to wrap attributes in quotation marks, so the following are both legal:

<img src="nice.jpg">
<img src=nice.jpg>

You can use uppercase or lowercase (or mix them), so all of these are legal:

<IMG SRC=nice.jpg>
<img src=nice.jpg>
<iMg SrC=nice.jpg>

This isn’t any different from HTML4, but it probably comes as quite a shock if you’re used to XHTML. In reality, if you were serving your pages as a combination of text and HTML, rather than XML (and you probably were, because Internet Explorer 8 and below couldn’t render true XHTML), then it never mattered anyway: the browser never cared about trailing slashes, quoted attributes or case—only the validator did.

So, while the syntax appears to be looser, the actual parsing rules are much tighter. The difference is that there is no more tag soup; the specification describes exactly what to do with invalid mark-up so that all conforming browsers produce the same DOM. If you’ve ever written JavaScript that has to walk the DOM, then you’re aware of the horrors that inconsistent DOMs can bring.

This error correction is no reason to churn out invalid code, though. The DOM that HTML5 creates for you might not be the DOM you want, so ensuring that your HTML5 validates is still essential. With all this new stuff, overlooking a small syntax error that stops your script from working or that makes your CSS unstylish is easy, which is why we have HTML5 validators.

Far from legitimizing tag soup, HTML5 consigns it to history. Souper.

“I Need to Convert My XHTML Website to HTML5”

Is HTML5′s tolerance of looser syntax the death knell for XHTML? After all, the working group to develop XHTML 2 was disbanded, right?

True, the XHTML 2 group was disbanded at the end of 2009; it was working on an unimplemented spec that competed with HTML5, so having two groups was a waste of W3C resources. But XHTML 1 was a finished spec that is widely supported in all browsers and that will continue to work in browsers for as long as needed. Your XHTML websites are therefore safe.

HTML5 Kills XML

Not at all. If you need to use XML rather than HTML, you can use XHTML5, which includes all the wonders of HTML5 but which must be in well-formed XHTML syntax (i.e. quoted attributes, trailing slashes to close some elements, lowercase elements and the like.)

Actually, you can’t use all the wonders of HTML5 in XHTML5: <noscript> won’t work. But you’re not still using that, are you?

HTML5 Will Kill Flash and Plug-Ins

The <canvas> tag allows scripted images and animations that react to the keyboard and that therefore can compete with some simpler uses of Adobe Flash. HTML5 has native capability for playing video and audio.

Just as when CSS Web fonts weren’t widely supported and Flash was used in sIFR to fill the gaps, Flash also saves the day by making HTML5 video backwards-compatible. Because HTML5 is designed to be “fake-able” in older browsers, the mark-up between the video tags is ignored by browsers that understand HTML5 and is rendered by older browsers. Therefore, embedding fall-back video with Flash is possible using the old-school <object> or <embed> tags, as pioneered by Kroc Camen is his article “Video for Everybody!” (see the screenshot below).

But not all of Flash’s use cases are usurped by HTML5. There is no way to do digital rights management in HTML5; browsers such as Opera, Firefox and Chrome allow visitors to save video to their machines with a click of the context menu. If you need to prevent video from being saved, you’ll need to use plug-ins. Capturing input from a user’s microphone or camera is currently only possible with Flash (although a <device> element is being specified for “post-5″ HTML), so if you’re keen to write a Chatroulette killer, HTML5 isn’t for you.

HTML5 Is Bad for Accessibility

A lot of discussion is going on about the accessibility of HTML5. This is good and to be welcomed: with so many changes to the basic language of the Web, ensuring that the Web is accessible to people who cannot see or use a mouse is vital. Also vital is building in the solution, rather than bolting it on as an afterthought: after all, many (most?) authors don’t even add alternate text to images, so out-of-the-box accessibility is much more likely to succeed than relying on people to add it.

This is why it’s great that HTML5 adds native controls for things like sliders (<input type=range>, currently supported in Opera and Webkit browsers) and date pickers (<input type=date>, Opera only)—see Bruce’s HTML5 forms demo)—because previously we had to fake these with JavaScript and images and then add keyboard support and WAI-ARIA roles and attributes.

The <canvas> tag is a different story. It is an Apple invention that was reverse-engineered by other browser makers and then retrospectively specified as part of HTML5, so there is no built-in accessibility. If you’re just using it for eye-candy, that’s fine; think of it as an image, but without any possibility of alternate text (some additions to the spec have been suggested, but nothing certain yet). So, ensure that any information you deliver via <canvas> supplements more accessible information elsewhere.

Text between <canvas> tags simply becomes pixels, just like text in images, and so is invisible to assistive technology and screen readers. Consider using the W3C graphics technology Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) instead, especially for things such as dynamic graphs and animating text. SVG is supported in all the major browsers, including IE9 (but not IE8 or below, although the SVGweb library can fake SVG with Flash in older browsers).

The situation with <video> and <audio> is promising. Although not fully specified (and so not yet implemented in any browsers), a new <track> element has been included in the HTML5 spec that allows timed transcripts (or karaoke lyrics or captions for the deaf or subtitles for foreign-language media) to be associated with multimedia. It can be faked in JavaScript. Alternatively (and better for search engines), you could include transcripts directly on the page below the video and use JavaScript to overlay captions, synchronized with the video.

“An HTML5 Guru Will Hold My Hand as I Do It the First Time”

If only this were true. However, the charming Paul Irish and lovely Divya Manian will be as good as there for you, with their HTML5 Boilerplate, which is a set of files you can use as templates for your projects. Boilerplate brings in the JavaScript you need to style the new elements in IE; pulls in jQuery from the Google Content Distribution Network (CDN), but with fall-back links to your server in case the CDN server is down.

It adds mark-up that is adaptable to iOS, Android and Opera Mobile; and adds a CSS skeleton with a comprehensive reset style sheet. There’s even an .htaccess file that serves your HTML5 video with the right MIME types. You won’t need all of it, and you’re encouraged to delete the stuff that’s unnecessary to your project to avoid bloat.

Further Resources

HTML5 is a massive topic. Here are a few hand-picked links. Disclosure: the authors have their fingers in some of these pies.

• W3C Specification: HTML5 (Edition for Web Authors)
  
  
  Just the stuff for those who write websites (as opposed to those who write browsers).



• HTML5 Demos and Examples
  
  
  Demos of the HTML5 APIs that are implemented in browsers.



• HTML5 Doctor
  
  
  Short, focused articles, “helping you implement HTML5 today.”



• html5-shims
  
  
  Scripts that fake HTML5 functionality in older browsers.