TeleNav’s been bringing the turn-by-turn goods to both Android and iOS for quite a while now, and has added plenty of nifty features to its GPS platform along the way — from personalized routes to offline access. Now, the company has unveiled plans to put its navigation in every HTML5-capable browser on the planet, and the best part is, it’s free. The new service is available now for a select group of developers, who can add TeleNav’s voice-guided GPS by plugging in a single line of code into their websites or apps. The service will eventually be released for consumers and all developers, but for those devs who’d like to dip their toe into TeleNav’s web-based waters early, the company’s accepting applications now. The GPS bar has officially been raised… the question is, how will the team in Mountain View respond?

SOURCE via Telenav

Opera believes that Apple is, once again, using patents to unfairly block an open web specification. The browser developer points to four Apple patents as well as the W3C page of the Web Events Working Group which aims to finalize the Touch Events Specification. According to the W3C, the specification could infringe on four Apple patents, which are not provided under a royalty-free commitment by Apple.

According to Opera, Apple notified the W3C of the patent claims in a last minute move on November 11. The deadline is December 26. Opera accuses Apple of deliberately blocking standards development.

“The odd thing is that Apple chose not to join the working group that handles touch events,” the poster wrote. “If they had joined, they would have been forced to file the patent claims far sooner. So now we know why they didn’t join. What we don’t know is why Apple insists on waiting almost until the last minute before filing its patent claims.”

He noted that Apple engaged in similar behavior in 2009, in 2010 and earlier this year.

Even if the standard can be created in the end, Opera complains that Apple is forcing working groups to waste time and other resources and become a burden for the W3C. The members of the Web Events Working Group include representatives from Boeing, China Unicom, ETRI, Google, Infraware, Intel, Mozilla, Nokia, Opera, Samsung and Zynga.

SOURCE via Opera

The company just announced another step and tells web developers to stop using VML and DX filters as IE10 will not support those components anymore.

DX filters are based on DirectX and were first included in IE back in 1996 with IE4. Microsoft said that the most popular “multimedia-style” effects that are made possible via DX can now be created using CSS3 and are covered by CSS3 working drafts and standard recommendations. This change mainly affects effects such as gradients, shadows as well as opacity.

SVG is officially replacing VML (vector markup language) in Microsoft’s world as well. VML was proposed to become a web standard by Autodesk, Hewlett-Packard, Macromedia, Microsoft, and Visio back in 1998. Several more proposals targeting vector graphics on the web were submitted to the W3C in the same time frame, which resulted in the creation of SVG, which is not compatible with VML. Microsoft never discarded VML officially, but there has been no active development on VML since 1998.

IE9 still supports DX filters as well as VML, but it’s certainly good news for developers to see Microsoft dropping legacy baggage and moving its browser closer to the standards line.

SOURCE via MSDN

Microsoft is now offering the fourth platform preview (PP4) of IE10 for download. The new version demonstrates that IE is no longer trailing the HTML5 trend, but is beginning to help shape the future of web applications.

The improvements in IE10 are almost exclusively tied to JavaScript and CSS3 changes that are part of a future HTML5 platform. Microsoft said that “developers can start working with more site-ready HTML5 technologies” with PP4. The latest version is, like with PP3, only available for the Developer Build of Windows 8. If you are running Windows 7, you will have to stick with PP2, which was released in June and has begun collecting dust.

According to Microsoft, the main changes in PP4 over PP3 are:

• Cross-Origin Resource Sharing (CORS) for safe use of XMLHttpRequest across domains.
• File API Writer support for blobBuilder allowing manipulation of large binary objects in script in the browser.
• Support for JavaScript typed arrays for efficient storage and manipulation of typed data.
• CSS user-select property to control how end-users select elements in a Web page or application.
• Support for HTML5 video text captioning, including time-code, placement, and captioning file formats.

The ongoing additions of HTML5 features had turned IE10 into a browser that can now compete with its rivals in terms of HTML5 support. It is still behind Firefox and Chrome, but IE10 has passed Opera and Safari. When Can I Use shows that IE10 supports 83 percent of HTML5 recommended, proposed, and working draft features. IE9 is at 52 percent, while Firefox is currently at 86 percent, and Chrome at 89 percent. Safari is at 77 percent and Opera at 70 percent.

It is safe to assume that, until the final release, Microsoft will continue on this path and aim to turn IE10 into a compelling HTML5 browser specifically on Windows 8.

SOURCE via Microsoft

Scientists have created a new software program that will automatically detect any image that has been modified in Photoshop. The software is now tuned to faces, but it will be able to flag any type of image, they say.

The application—created by Hany Farid and Eric Kee of Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire—uses eight statistical parameters to detect real changes on the model, not general modifications like cropping or color adjustments. It can sniff geometric modifications like reshaped face features or body parts used to make models appear thinner. It will also detect texture changes, like smoothed skin.

They trained their program using input from 350 volunteers, obtaining an 80% accuracy. The first version of the software is tuned for faces, but the scientist claims that they can easily repurpose it to detect manipulations in any kind of images, such as those presented by scientists in research. Or, you know, the classic Apple rumor spy shots.

For now, they hope that advertisers would include the manipulation percentage next to the model faces and bodies, as a warning label to women who may fall into self-confidence problems that eventually may lead to anorexia and other eating disorders. That’s a great idea that is not coming soon enough.

SOURCE via NATURE

Monday Futuremark said that it’s already working on a new version of 3DMark that’s designed for gaming performance measurement and comparison across all Windows 8 tablets, notebooks and desktops. This upcoming Windows 8-specific edition will also support both x86 and ARM-based architectures.

“With Windows 8 gamers will be able to enjoy their games on a wide range of devices from lightweight tablets to heavy-duty desktop rigs,” said Jukka Mäkinen, CEO of Futuremark. “Faced with so much choice it will be hard to work out which devices offer the best value for money. Fortunately 3DMark for Windows 8 will be our most wide-reaching 3DMark ever, able to accurately measure and compare gaming performance across all devices and graphical feature sets available with Windows 8.”

Little else is known about 3DMark for Windows 8 (working title) thus far, but Futuremark plans to release the software sometime next year. As indicated, it will measure and compare gaming performance on all Windows 8 devices. It will even offer users a choice of benchmarking in Metro UI or “classic” Windows environments using “stunning real-time scenes” that stress test all levels of hardware.

Monday Futuremark invited companies to contribute in the development of 3DMark for Windows 8 via its Futuremark Benchmark Development Program (BDP). This program already includes AMD, Nvidia, Microsoft, Imagination Technology, Dell, HP and other well known companies. Those wishing to participate in the BDP should head here to get specific contact information.

Grooveshark has found itself in hot waters by streaming digital music some time ago and is defending itself in a lawsuit brought forward by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA).

However, as far as piracy is concerned, a tool that connects to Grooveshark to download media files could be of much greater concern for the music industry as it makes illegal music downloads about as simple as the long-gone original Napster client.

SciLor’s Grooveshark.com Downloader is a simple open source program with a basic, but very effective interface that offers a search, search result and download interface. Currently in beta, the interface is very fast and the downloads from Grooveshark were transferred at a rate of about 1.5 Mbps. The only downside of this particular downloader appears to be the fact that MP3 tags will have to be renamed and search results are limited to 200 tracks in each search. The music industry does not seem to be aware of streaming music downloaders at the time of this writing, the problem of such tools are clearly that, even if consumers have shown for years that they are willing to pay for music, they are convenient enough to possibly attract a decent user base.

Remember the old Napster and the feeding frenzy that resulted from the service which enabled users around the world to download virtually any song in blazing speed? It’s obvious that many users have moved on — and perhaps have accepted to pay for their music downloads. But piracy won’t die and the music industry is caught in a cat-and-mouse game to track down the latest trends in media downloads. We may actually be witnessing the new trend here people!

Mozilla said that this release will focus on HTML5 enhancements, giving us the feeling that the silent update feature will be pushed to version 11.

Aurora 10 will get WebGL anti-aliasing, support for the HTML5 Visibility API, 3D Transforms, some additions to its developer tools, web workers, DOM and Javascript functionality such as the addition of the battery API. However, we were surprised to see that Mozilla does not list the silent update as a feature for Aurora (Firefox) 10. In its feature tracker, the silent update has been marked as “at risk” and may not make it into version 10 as a result. As controversial as the silent update is among enthusiast Firefox users, there has been little doubt that the mainstream would like to make the update process more convenient, which possibly could convince more users to stay with Firefox.

Another much anticipated feature is not mentioned either – a tool that would automatically import Chrome bookmarks and settings to Firefox. It appears as if this feature will also not surface until version 11 – and is even mentioned as “at risk” for version 11. These two features, as well as a the new home tab (also marked as “at risk” for version 11) are features that Firefox would have needed need yesterday rather than tomorrow to be able to be more competitive with Chrome. At least the silent update support is a must-hit target for version 10.

Google has revealed first details about a new Chrome user interface that has been in development for some time, but has remained a mystery until this past weekend. The company currently develops the Aura window manager, which will take advantage of hardware acceleration capabilities to display an advanced interface in Chrome and Chrome OS.

A recently posted wiki page and a Chromium project page describe Aura as “a new accelerated user interface framework for Chrome UI” which “must offer rich visuals, large-scale animated transitions and effects that can be produced only with the assistance of hardware acceleration.”

There isn’t much detail and not even mockups beyond basic window buttons such as restore, maximize and minimize at this time, but the Chromium revision blog is, with more than 400 changes to Aura over the past two months, an indication that Google is working on a major new feature.

The new interface will mark a departure from the Gtk toolkit, which has been used for Chrome’s interface so far and may take Chrome much closer to a platform that can compete with (and possibly go beyond) Windows in a cloud environment. Google said that its main goals for the initial release of Aura is cross-platform code for a “flexible windowing system” on multiple form factors. The company said that it will initially not support multiple monitors and there will not be software rendering support for remote desktop capability.

Next week, Mozilla will release another Firefox 8 version, which specifically targets users of Firefox 3.6. The “advertised update” is somewhat odd as Mozilla is pushing out Firefox 3.6.24 today and pitches the update next week as a plea to 3.6 users to make the move to version 8. Perhaps it would be a better idea to send the update to version 8 out simultaneously with version 3.6.24 to reduce the overall number of updates.

Mozilla stresses that 3.6 will still be supported, even if users aren’t upgrading to version 8. There is no official end for 3.6 just yet. Mozilla says that users can update to the new version, if they are “inclined” to do so. Mozilla has made similar pitches with previous versions, but was not very successful. Firefox 3.6 users still account for about 5.8 percent market share, according to StatCounter, while Firefox 6 users are down to about 1.4 percent.

The update offer is scheduled to be sent out on November 17. Mozilla has not said when it will phase out Firefox 3.6. Current Firefox users will be getting a silent update (like Chrome) in Firefox with version 10 or 11, depending on Mozilla’s ability to implement the feature.

SOURCE via Mozilla