Apple holding back on web-based 3D graphics for the desktop

Apple has added 3D position and transform capabilities to WebKit, along with the 2D CSS-based transform abilities added some time ago. However, Apple allows access to these advanced 3D abilities only via Mobile Safari. If Apple enables the features on the desktop, they could kickstart the development of a whole new class of visually rich web applications... without Flash.

By Chris Foresman

Apple has created a series of specifications for performing two-dimensional transforms via CSS, as well as animating those transforms over time. The Safari 4 beta highlights some of these CSS-based transforms, along with Safari's support for HTML 5's video and audio tags, in the "welcome page" that's loaded on Safari 4 beta's first launch. But flying much lower under the radar is an addition to Apple's CSS Transforms that gives web app developers some powerful 3D graphics capabilities—so long as that web app is made for an iPhone.

The WebKit team added CSS Transforms to nightly builds of WebKit back in October 2007, transforms that included scaling, rotation, skewing, and translation in 2D space. As the specification matured, 3D and animation capabilities were added. Eventually, the 3D transforms were broken out into a specification of their own. Though WebKit has had these 3D transform capabilities for some time, only Mobile Safari on the iPhone and iPod touch has them enabled. Currently, neither Safari 3.2, Safari 4 beta, nor WebKit nightly builds can take advantage of these advanced 3D transforms.

The 3D transforms, it should be noted, only apply to 2D elements. However, the transforms allow a web developer to translate, scale, rotate, skew, and change the perspective of almost any DOM element in 3D space, resulting in some rather spectacular effects. Below are two examples—provided by Apple on the Mobile section of its Safari Dev Center site—loaded in iPhone Simulator.

Though many of the 2D transforms and animations are possible to replicate with JavaScript, and Mozilla is experimenting with some JavaScript-based 3D effects, WebKit's CSS transforms offer a serious performance advantage.

"It's hardware accelerated, and all the timing and intervals needed for the animations are handled more efficiently by Safari itself instead of Safari's JavaScript engine," Peter Zich, a Chicago-area developer, told Ars. "The framerate for JS animations on the iPhone usually doesn't get past 5fps, for instance, while with CSS it is far more."

Apple promotes these capabilities as a way for iPhone web app developers to achieve near native speed 3D effects. So why isn't Apple bringing the technology to the desktop? "I talked to Vicki Murley, a Safari Tech Evangelist at Apple, about why they left 3D off of non-Mobile Safari," Zich said. "She said they didn't really have a reason for it... they just hadn't done it."

A ticket in the WebKit team's bug tracker, opened in July of 2008, requests that the transforms be enabled in desktop builds of WebKit.

Zich would like Apple to take browser 3D even further. "I'm hoping they make a 3D canvas," he said. He's been experimenting with the capabilities, making a simple model of a van using PNG files for the faces, which are then placed in 3D-positioned divs.

"What I'd like to do is make something where you throw in a set of points, and it makes a 3D model," he says. His 3D van demo model, though, certainly opens up the imagination to the possibilities.

If you needed further evidence that Apple will never allow Flash to sully its portable Internet devices, then 3D CSS transforms are it. Along with WebKit's support for HTML 5's advanced media handling capabilities, advanced Nitro JavaScript engine, and CSS-based transforms and animations, Apple is readying WebKit to be the best tool for providing web-based applications on a wide variety of platforms. Enabling the 3D capabilities on the desktop would go a long way towards generating interest in making Apple's currently-proprietary CSS extensions into a de facto, or even official, web standard.

Original here

We found the chip inside the new iPod headphones...but is it DRM?

Posted by Joel Johnson and Rob Beschizza

You'd never guess it was there—a tiny chip, barely a millimeter square, hidden inside the headphone module on the third-gen iPod shuffle. If you dismantle the module itself, you still won't see it: it's underneath a board containing a few simple copper traces, itself minuscule, and glued to the plastic. Even the traditional iFixit teardown gallery missed it.

We decided to take a closer look after iLounge reported that the third-generation iPod Shuffle's headphones had an "authentication chip" that Apple could use to turn something as basic as headphones into a proprietary licensing scheme.

By adding such a chip to headphones, Apple could force third-party manufacturers to pay fees to make headphones for its iPod Shuffle—after all, the device has no controls, so normal headphones are useless.

"This is, in short, a nightmare scenario for long-time iPod fans," wrote iLounge's Jeremy Horwitz. "Are we entering a world in which Apple controls and taxes literally every piece of the iPod purchase from headphones to chargers, jacking up their prices, forcing customers to re-purchase things they already own, while making only marginal improvements in their functionality?"

Even if someone invented headphones that worked without a licensed chip, that could amount to circumvention of a digital lock: Apple could shut them down using the Digital Millenium Copyright Act, provided the signal sent from the headphone buttons to the iPod itself is encrypted.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation's Fred von Lohmann followed up, exhorting gadget reviewers to looks closer:

One final thought: why have so many of the reviews of iPods failed to notice the proliferation of these Apple "authentication chips"?

What we found is a mystery to us: we're not electrical engineers. For all we know, it could be something the FCC made them put in so that it doesn't interfere with whalesong.

But it's an honest-to-god chip inside the proprietary headphones required to listen to the latest iPod, and it's hard not to wonder if Apple, with its 70% market share, just tried to eat the headphone industry whole.

If so, they've been planning it since at least the last update of the iPod line. According to the product page for the new "Apple Earphones with Remote", the new controls will also work with the most recent iPod Nano, iPod classic, and second-generation iPod Touch. That means that whatever sort of signal is being sent from the new headphones, it's been in the works before the latest Shuffle. And while the new headphones do not work with the iPhone 3G, it can be expected that they will be compatible with the next version of the iPhone.

If it's not an "authentication chip", then, what could it be? The current in-line click remote for the iPhone works by dropping the resistance on the second ring of the headphone's TRRS minijack connector, which the iPhone recognizes as a simple on or off. One click pauses. Two clicks fast forward.

It is possible the new Shuffle headphones simply send a pulse or other analog electrical signal to the headphone jack of the Shuffle, but we do not have the equipment to determine that ourselves. (Put a multimeter on the second ring of the new headphones, though, and you'll at least be able to see if different button presses causes different resistance, implying the controls work with analog controls, not a digital scheme.)

But it is also possible the signals are digital. "Digital" does not mean "encrypted", however. If the signals are not encrypted, then there would be no legal impediment to manufacturers making compatible and unlicensed headphones that work with the new controls. (Either way, regular audio headphones still work, although without controls they're useless on the Shuffle.)

If the signals are encrypted, it would mean that headphones with in-line controls compatible with Apple's latest (and future) iPods would have to be made with chips* available exclusively from Apple. Manufacturers attempting to reverse-engineer the simple three-button controls could be prosecuted under the DMCA.

Previously:
• New iPods have DRM on the headphone interface
• Old inline iPod/iPhone adapters don't work in new Shuffle

* Labelled in the headphones we have as "8A83E3", not currently listed in Octopart.

Update: Hideki Francis Onda opened his up, and found that his one has a different number. Original here

Would you buy an Intel smartphone?

by Brooke Crothers

Intel concept wide-screen mobile device

Intel smartphone and mobile Internet device concept designs have potential. So, as Intel prepares to enter the smartphone market with LG Electronics and others, will these designs be realized? And would you buy one?

One thing is certain. A re-badged Apple iPhone running Windows isn't going to upset the Apple cart (pun intended).

So, one obvious challenge is for Intel to get its considerable weight behind a new smartphone or mobile Internet device (MID) design that resets the market.

Just so happens there's a design that Intel has been brandishing for a couple of years now (see photos). It's essentially a high-end wide-screen smartphone or MID (choose your favorite device category nomenclature).

A series of videos demonstrating the Intel Moorestown-based mobile device pretty clearly show how--by virtue of the wide screen--the device would be different.

Intel concept device, with virtual keyboard

(Credit: Intel)

Now, if that device could run a browser and basic applications faster than my BlackBerry Storm (which I gauge has circa 1995 PC performance) on a bigger screen, that would be enough for me to buy one.

At least one analyst expects big things from Intel in this market. Doug Freedman of Broadpoint AmTech upgraded Intel to a "buy" this week, partially on expectations that Intel may flourish in the system-on-a-chip market as a result of the chip production deal struck earlier this month with Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing. Intel's upcoming Moorestown chip--the linchpin of the deal--is a system-on-a-chip that's targeted, not coincidentally, at high-end smartphones, among other devices.

Freedman had this to say in a research note about Intel: "The TSMC (deal) likely opens the door to highly integrated (system-on-a-chip) solutions for target markets such as consumer, wireless, communications and networking infrastructure, and automotive," he wrote. "Though we cannot assign a value to future business opportunities without specific customer announcements or end-market intentions...We note that a minor incremental opportunity would not have triggered a press release event for Intel or TSMC."

Original here