Apple has announced Safari 5 which now supports extensions.
I’ve downloaded the Youtube5 which is an extension that convert Youtube Flash players to an HTML5 video tag.
I thought that was very cool so I wanted to do the same for Dailymotion with this extension : Dailymotion5 (download).
Why is it better than Flash?
You don’t have any lag, you can go fullscreen with a beautiful animation and nothing freeze. You can do something else while playing a video because the CPU isn’t at 100%. That doesn’t suck.
Extension
The extension is downloadable for free : Dailymotion5 (download).
When installed, this will work in new tabs only. The extension will be auto-updated.
It’s not working for embed video in third-party websites yet.
A lot of people still use Instant Messaging and I’m one of them. I have multiple accounts (GTalk, MSN, AIM and Facebook) and different devices (Mac, iPhone and more recently, an iPad). I have some problems with this configuration, even when I only had 2 devices.
Log in, log out, log in, log out.
The biggest problem with having multiple devices is : on which device am I right now? The system doesn’t know that and I need to manually log out on the device I leave to login on the device I’m coming.
I know, Jabber (and so GTalk) can have multiple connected accounts in the same time. That fixes the problem that we can log in in all our devices. But then the messages arrive in 3 places at a time. That’s a mess.
Conversations
Another problem is that we lose the current conversations. Indeed, when you switch from a device to another, the conversations and the previous messages are not there. Too bad that my friend sent me some messages first on my iPhone and then some on my Mac. I don’t understand what he’s telling me and he thinks I’m crazy. That sucks isn’t it?
Preferences and data
As I said, I have many IM accounts. What I also have is many duplicate buddies. I want to group them as they were only one. If you use Adium, you’ll know what I mean.
The problem with Adium is that it doesn’t push this data to a server. Everywhere else you log in, you still have duplicate buddies.
The same discontinuity exists between your history logs, your files that you receive, order of your buddies in the list or account picture. We need a way to get them synced.
What I think would be better.
We need a better system than that. A way to get back to your conversations when you switch to a new device. The way Firefox get your tabs back if it crashes. The way that if someone reply to you on Twitter, you got it on all your Twitter clients. The way you get your mails everywhere via IMAP.
When someone is talking to me on my iPhone and I switch to my Mac, I don’t want to log out the iPhone first. I want to log in the Mac and get the conversation where I was. If someone is talking to me when I wasn’t on my Mac yet, I need to get the messages anyway.
And I think that some companies can do what we all want! Think about Meebo and imagine if you can connect to your Meebo account from Adium, from your iPad and from your iPhone. When you change the name of a buddy, it gets synced through the cloud on Meebo and get back on all your other devices. All your history, the files that your received, the open conversations are on the server and every IM client could retrieve these information.
Think about your accounts always connected on Meebo and once you connect one client to it, you get the conversations and everything. You can even imagine that multiple devices are connected to this new fictional service and that when you do something on one client, all is synced in real time to the others.
