Friday Roundup - News from Across the Chrome and HTML5 Ecosystem

Google launches new developers.google.com branding and redesigned site

"Our goal with the Google Developers site is to bring together all developer resources, programs, events, tools, and community into one place. Soon, all our information will be on this new Google Developers site, and Google Code will return to its roots as an open source project hosting service. As part of this project, today we’re introducing a new identity, complete with a new look, to unify all of our developer offerings. Our new logo says Google Developers, and that's intentional: it reflects our focus on you, not just the tools we provide."

Chrome Dev Tools get a CSS Color Picker

"Another 1,642 changes landed in the repositories last week, 958 for Chromium and 684 for WebKit. Highlights include a color picker for Web Inspector and early functionality for the calc() function. Brian Grinstead’s color picker is now enabled by default in WebKit nightlies, following some slight polishing. To aid the undo and redo system, an event has been added to monitor CSS modifications"

Apple Games Converge With Android’s by Using HTML 5 Code

"The goal of HTML 5, which is gradually making its way into all modern Internet browsers, including ones on mobile devices, is to make sites look and feel just like applications downloaded directly to a phone or desktop. Until recently, that was more of a promise than a reality. That’s changing in part because of the steamroller effect of Apple’s iPad and iPhone, which don’t run Flash content."

Getting Started with the HTML5 Track Element

"The track element provides a simple, standardized way to add subtitles, captions, screen reader descriptions and chapters to video and audio. Tracks can also be used for other kinds of timed metadata. The source data for each track element is a text file made up of a list of timed cues, and cues can include data in formats such as JSON or CSV. This is extremely powerful, enabling deep linking and media navigation via text search, for example, or DOM manipulation and other behaviour synchronised with media playback."

Why HTML5 makes justifying native applications more difficult

"One of the biggest shifts in development in the last few years has been the move to Web applications. For a long time, developers resisted this move, and some of the reasons why were good. For example, I said that for a long time the Web model wasn't so great--the UI capabilities weren't there without a ton of work, and the ability to do "real work" was lacking. Some of the reasons were not so good, and mostly boiled down to a refusal to learn something new. I have recently become very bullish on Web applications, and I now highly recommend that you consider them over desktop applications in all but a very few sets of circumstances."