As I settle into my role as an Internet elder, I’m increasingly asked to be a judge or expert for various events, competitions, awards and whatnot. I love being involved with these events, and I especially value the opportunities I get to make grand pronouncements and voice my opinions. Occasionally, my advice helps someone out, which is excellent.
The competition that I get the most out of, however, is one that I’ve been judging since very early in my Internet and writing career: the Jolt Awards. Currently sponsored by Dr. Dobbs Journal, Jolt Awards are given to software development tools and books that “jolted” the industry during the previous year, as decided by a panel of industry experts. I’ve had the privilege and pleasure of being a Jolt judge for the last 16 consecutive years.
This year, I was a judge for the Mobile category. The winner of this category was a project that I’ve been a user and proponent of for the last couple years: PhoneGap. PhoneGap is a technology that HTML5 mobile developers can use to convert their web apps into native apps on multiple mobile platforms (including iOS, Android, Blackberry, and Windows Phone). If you’re interesting in learning more about PhoneGap, check out my write-up of it on the Dr. Dobbs site.
Since completing my judging, a couple very new tools and advances in mobile software have come to my attention. While these tools either weren’t nominated or weren’t eligible for a Jolt Award, I believe that they are definitely noteworthy. In this special end-of-month issue of the newsletter, I’m going talk about a couple of these latest HTML5-related technologies that I’m currently excited about.
famo.us
The first is famo.us. If you haven’t heard about famo.usyet, you will very soon. Or better yet, you should check out their demo at famo.us. What this little startup has managed to do is nothing short of breathtaking. In short,famo.us enables extremely high performance HTML5 applications. This is important because, until now, it has been easy to write slow HTML5 applications and very difficult to write fast ones. Famo.us promises to flip that on its head. Their demo shows hundreds of objects moving in 3 dimensions, without the use of any plug-ins or unusual web technologies. Any description pales in comparison to the live demo.
WebRTC
The second thing I want to mention is WebRTC. WebRTC is a project sponsored by Google, Mozilla, and Opera. WebRTC enables real-time communications in Web browsers — without the use of plugins. In browsers that support WebRTC, it’s now possible to create video and voice chat applications, for example. In the near future, WebRTC support will expand to mobile devices and most modern browsers. The result will be that adding real-time communications to web sites and web apps will be as easy as adding an image to a web page today. As stated in a recent article at venturebeat.com,WebRTC will change the web.
With both famo.us and WebRTC poised to go bigtime in 2013, I’m looking forward to a very exciting year in mobile apps, web sites, and video!
If you have any topics that you’d like to see covered in a future issue, or if you have any questions, please email me at chris@minnick.com!