Monthly Archives: November 2011

How Google Music Works

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Google announced Google Music. Needless to say I was curious how they implemented an audio player in the browser. Most of the application is your run of the mill modern Web Application with lots of JavaScript. It looks like pretty much anything Google’s built in recent years. It doesn’t do anything really out of the ordinary for the most part. Until you get to the audio playback.

How the audio is played is interesting:

<div id="embed-container">
  <audio autoplay="autoplay" id="html5Player"></audio>
  <div class="goog-ui-media-flash">
    <embed wmode="window" pluginspage="http://www.macromedia.com/go/getflashplayer" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" seamlesstabbing="false" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="sameDomain" bgcolor="#000000" flashvars="" src="r/musicplayer.swf" class="goog-ui-media-flash-object" name=":0" id=":0" quality="high" style="width: 1px; height: 1px;"></embed>
  </div>
</div>

You’re reading that right. That’s a HTML5 <audio/> tag. First time I’ve seen it appear in a major product. However as of this writing in Firefox, Safari, and Chrome on Mac OS X the Flash player seems to be used. I suspect, but can’t confirm that this may indicate a future intent of using HTML5 <audio/> in place of Flash. Flash is likely the default for now. But it’s still very interesting to see.

The audio itself seems to be 44,100 Hz 320 kb/s MPEG Layer 3 (MP3) audio. The samples I’ve looked at were encoded with LAME 3.98.2. Obviously if they intend to use HTML5 audio they will need to offer something other than MP3 at least for Firefox users. It’s not currently possible to serve everyone without multiple encodings. I don’t see that changing anytime soon.

The servers serving the media seem very similar to YouTube’s delivery servers for H.264 video. It’s progressive download, again just like YouTube. No DRM. I suspect there’s a shared history between this delivery system and YouTube or a very strong influence. But knowing how Google works, there’s likely a shared backend.

It’s pretty good stuff. I highly recommend checking it out. Google built a decent mp3 player in the cloud.

On The Future Of Flash

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Adobe is killing Flash, as a plugin for mobile. This shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone who works on the web. Anyone who knows me knows I’ve bet on HTML5 since the beginning and haven’t been ashamed to say it. I don’t do Flash. To quote Adobe:

Our future work with Flash on mobile devices will be focused on enabling Flash developers to package native apps with Adobe AIR for all the major app stores. We will no longer continue to develop Flash Player in the browser to work with new mobile device configurations (chipset, browser, OS version, etc.) following the upcoming release of Flash Player 11.1 for Android and BlackBerry PlayBook.

I strongly suspect that even this use case is limited and will experience the same fate as the Flash plugin within the next 24-36 months. HTML5 is supported by browsers, a browser is shipped with the OS and is highly optimized for what it’s running on. It’s also the ultimate in cross-platform. Why write Flash when you can do something for every platform and not rely on a vendor to abstract you?

Platforms like PhoneGap bridge the world of Apps and HTML5 quite nicely. Adobe bought Nitobi which develops PhoneGap, but PhoneGap is also going to Apache Software Foundation which means Adobe’s ability to derail the project would be somewhat limited if they wanted to go that route.

Quite a few Apps use HTML/JS extensively already. HTML5’s success is despite Apple essentially crippling the use of HTML5 in native apps by preventing UIWebView from taking advantage of the Nitro engine. If/when Apple gets to fixing this another barrier will be gone. I suspect Apple will eventually make scrolling that doesn’t suck on iOS easier. Right now Joe Hewitt’s Scrollability is likely your best bet.

Adobe goes on to say:

However, HTML5 is now universally supported on major mobile devices, in some cases exclusively. This makes HTML5 the best solution for creating and deploying content in the browser across mobile platforms. We are excited about this, and will continue our work with key players in the HTML community, including Google, Apple, Microsoft and RIM, to drive HTML5 innovation they can use to advance their mobile browsers.

Interestingly they left out that little browser vendor Mozilla. Perhaps because they are most likely targeting WebKit on mobile and that’s the common tie between those companies sans-Microsoft which they need IE support. If Adobe wants a future here they should learn quick that you can’t ignore platforms. My advice to Adobe is to make sure their solution allows developers to bring their product to any modern browser on any device.

Flash is the last plugin with real usage even on the desktop. This is the first step towards the concept of plugins in the browser going away. It’s unlikely many will see a need to go HTML5 on mobile and develop a separate Flash code base to do the same thing on a desktop. The name of the game these days is write once, run anywhere (credit to Sun for the slogan). Today marks the start of the decline of Flash.

As Brendan Eich best put it: “Always bet on JavasScript“. I have and I continue to do so. The Open Web is winning. Slowly but surely.

On Andy Rooney

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One of the benefits of working at or near the CBS Broadcast Center is you never know who you’ll see walking the many hallways of the storied yet somewhat obscure complex. It’s not at all uncommon to hear a head of state, or celebrity sighting. Lots of things, including some you wouldn’t expect are taped there.

I likely saw Andy Rooney at least a dozen times in my years at CBS, always in or outside the Broadcast Center, generally on my way in and out. He’d always be slowly shuffling through with those iconic bushy white eyebrows, a few papers in his hand, hunched over. I mention this detail because it stands out in my mind. You don’t enter your late 80’s and early 90’s and continue the daily grind the way he did unless you enjoy your job at least a little bit. I could be wrong, but I imagine it must have been exhausting for him. It looked tiring. Most people want to be retired by 65 and he was working a generation beyond that. But I guess you don’t want that to love of your job to be terribly obvious when your known as “America’s Curmudgeon”. He made a career out of expressing his disdain for so many little nuances of life.

He said before he hated being recognized, but every time I or someone else said “good morning” or “good evening”, he’d always look up and return the pleasantry then continue on his way. Hardly a grump whenever I saw him.

There aren’t many people who could make a career out of complaining about the little things. Not many could even make a career complaining about the big things. He managed to do this with just a few minutes. He said in his last piece “When I went on television it was as a writer. I don’t think of myself as a television personality. I’m a writer who reads what he’s written.” Reading the transcripts is a reminder that a great wordsmith can say quite a bit in very few words.

Disclosure:As always, the views expressed in this blog are mine alone, and do not represent the views of CBS or CBS Interactive.