Google has been showing off a lot of neat goodies at Google I/O. But the most interesting announcement as far as I can tell of the day is the availability of Chrome for Android. The existing Android browser is relatively wonky and not exactly fast. It also is surprisingly behind the iPhone browser in the adoption of some of the HTML5 javascript APIs. Chrome could really change this equation and as a by product make HTML5 apps a reality far more quickly. My best guesstimate is that we are stil...

I believe that PDF and Flash will hang around for quite some time. They are too widespread to disappear quickly. But I am excited about the rise of HTML5 and the gradual replacement of these closed formats. For instance, Scribd’s move to HTML5 is one such step. The reason for my excitement is mostly because I don’t like how PDF and Flash often break basic ingredients of the web, such as linking and search (yes, I am aware that there are workarounds, but they are ugly). But there is one additi...

Adobe made a couple of big announcements about the future of Flash on mobile platforms. First, they announced that RIM has committed to making full Flash available on BlackBerries. Second, they showed an early version of compiling Flash into native iPhone apps as a way of getting them into the app store. Now some of the discussion has focused on all the problems with flash. And yes, there are many problems with Flash, the biggest being that it is a proprietary and closed system controlled by ...

Google has been showing off a lot of neat goodies at Google I/O. But the most interesting announcement as far as I can tell of the day is the availability of Chrome for Android. The existing Android browser is relatively wonky and not exactly fast. It also is surprisingly behind the iPhone browser in the adoption of some of the HTML5 javascript APIs. Chrome could really change this equation and as a by product make HTML5 apps a reality far more quickly. My best guesstimate is that we are stil...

I believe that PDF and Flash will hang around for quite some time. They are too widespread to disappear quickly. But I am excited about the rise of HTML5 and the gradual replacement of these closed formats. For instance, Scribd’s move to HTML5 is one such step. The reason for my excitement is mostly because I don’t like how PDF and Flash often break basic ingredients of the web, such as linking and search (yes, I am aware that there are workarounds, but they are ugly). But there is one additi...

Adobe made a couple of big announcements about the future of Flash on mobile platforms. First, they announced that RIM has committed to making full Flash available on BlackBerries. Second, they showed an early version of compiling Flash into native iPhone apps as a way of getting them into the app store. Now some of the discussion has focused on all the problems with flash. And yes, there are many problems with Flash, the biggest being that it is a proprietary and closed system controlled by ...