TeleNav’s native apps have been doing this for a while but the HTML 5 browser based webapp uses HTML5 location APIs along with Offline caching. The service would be free and is known to run on iOS, Android and WP7.

At the time of writing, its available to a group of developers, who can add TeleNav’s voice-guided GPS by plugging in a single line of code into their websites or apps. It would soon be released to commercial users.

We’ll let you know when its available, in the meantime you check the best Navigation app ever.

“This is an enormous amount of added value for any mobile, location-based website or app focused on travel, shopping, local search, deals and more,” said Sal Dhanani, co-founder and vice president of products for TeleNav. “With one line of code, you can give your customers one-click access to premium, voice-guided turn-by-turn directions to any location, including hotels, restaurants, merchants or deal locations. Customers never need to leave your app.”

TeleNav would like to partner with select developers to test the service. Interested mobile website publishers and app developers can apply for early access by visiting TeleNav’s website at www.telenav.com/developer/HTML5.

TeleNav expects to publicly launch its HTML5 service in early 2012. Consumers will not need to be current TeleNav customers but will need to have an HTML5-compatible feature phone or smartphone.

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IF you are not convinced that Google Docs Presentation can do wonders, its time to recharge your views. Checkout the video below created by Google Demo Slam entrant.

A group of animators created a mind-blowing 450 page presentation in just three days, and none of them were located in the same space. Thankfully for you, it’s all explained in a blistering 1:29 minutes, showing you true potential of of Google Docs.

If you need more webapps that can replace all your current desktop Productivity Apps, Checkout Productivity category of Chrome Web Store, its amazing. Also checkout SlideRocket:

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How to Try Chrome OS Apps, Features in Chrome Browser

Step 1. To begin with,  add these command line switches to your Chrome shortcut, without the “quotes”:

“–enable-apps” : turns on extension apps, otherwise you’ll get an error when you try to install them.
“–apps-panel” : (optional) instead of loading the new tab page, Chrome will display a floating panel above the current tab

Step 2. Next we  install  some Google apps:

They’re hiding in a folder called resources — which you’ll find in your Chrome profile folder.

• On Windows, they reside in %localappdata%\Chromium\Application\6.0.428.0\Resources.
• Linux /opt/google/chrome/resources/.

Step 3. Head to your Google Chrome extensions tab (chrome://extensions) and make sure you see the developer mode buttons above. If you don’t, click the plus next to the text to reveal them.

Step 4. Now click “load unpacked extension” and browse to location you found in step 2. Click into the folder of the app you want to install (like gmail_app), then click OK. If the install is successful, Chrome will refresh your Extensions page and you should now see the icon for the app.

Step 5: Loading app: Open new Tab and click one. There you have it — the new tabs that  use full-color .PNG images which are packed with the apps. Overall, the Google apps seem to work the same as a pinned tab — just with nicer icons and ease of access. You can try the same for other apps.

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When Google started with iGoogle, one of the first companies to design AJAXy widgets was LabPixies. Over the years, Google worked closely together on a variety of projects, including the launch of a number of global OpenSocial based gadgets. And finally, they decided that they are better off being part of the same team, and hence acquired LabPixies.

Apart from iGoogle gadgets, Google aims on developing next generation webapps and leverage their expertise to change the face of the web.

One of the other primary motivators is the fact that LabPixies ranks as the Top personalized homespage service’s developer.  ”We are looking forward to working with Labpixies to develop great web apps and leverage their knowledge and expertise to help developers and improve the ecosystem overall” said Google’s Dan Loeb:

The team will be based in our ever-growing Tel Aviv office and will anchor our iGoogle efforts across Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. We are looking forward to working with Labpixies to develop great web apps and leverage their knowledge and expertise to help developers and improve the ecosystem overall.

What LabPixies is good at, however, is taking a game on the Web and creating versions of it across different platforms, especially the iPhone and Android. Its iGoogle gadget games may generate as many as one billion impressions a month, but it makes all of its money on the iPhone. Now, Google will likely try to sprinkle some of that LabPixie innovation on Android. One strategy could be to create games and apps first for iGoogle, or add reach to to more users via social web.

LabPixies’ purchase price is at about $25 million, is expected to give out much higher ROI.

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Silverlight 4 now lets developers write apps that access your webcam, microphone, and even provide local recording features out of the box. Flash has supported them for years, but Adobe is now seeing downfall thanks to Apple.

So what that means is a typical Silverlight 4 app will be able to capture and edit voice or video and allow you to store the video locally or publish online at youtube, or even attach it to an email. This is something Flash was never designed to do.

Silverlight 4 also brings hardware-accelerated (GPU) video decoding, that makes 1080p H.264 playback possible even on an Intel Atom-based netbook that runs Nvidia’s ION GPU. Adobe announced similar feature in it’s Flash 10.1.

Apart from that, Silverlight 4 also includes support for adaptive streaming, DRM, and DVR-like capabilities.

Trusted Silverlight apps can now read and write files to local system, access attached peripherals.Various localization enhancements that include bidirectional text, right-to-left support, and complex scripts such as Arabic, Hebrew and Thai, as well as 30 new languages, seems like a big deal.

Silverlight Beyond Computers

The Silverlight platform would soon be seen across a number of gadgets like set-top boxes, internet TVs (aka connected TVs), Blu-ray players, and DVRs, etc.

With Silverlight now installed on nearly 60 percent of all connected devices around the world, I see good prospects for Microsoft to take over the lost share of Flash. And if it works better than Flash on Mac OS, there’s a one in a hundred chance that Apple considers making it a choice for RIA on iPhone, iPad.

The launch event and some demos are available Developer Tools Newsroom.

Download: www.microsoft.com/getsilverlight [Windows & Mac OS]

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Tests/Scans

Currently, the SkipFish scans wide variety of most critical and medium, low  risks, and then produces Internal warnings for certain failures like unexpected response variations. The scan coverage looks sufficient for most web applications as it covers all common vulnerabilities. The detailed list of types of scans are available at SkipFish wiki. The Tool works on all three major platforms: Linux, Mac OS X, windows (cygwin) and can be downloaded from here.

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Twitter will soon release new set of features that would “make you forget” desktop clients, as claimed by Alex Payne’s Tweet sent out today:

If you had some of the nifty site features that we Twitter employees have, you might not want to use a desktop client. (You will soon.)

Uh, everything I like that’s on the employees-only beta site is actually *built* on public API methods we’ve already given developers.

I just mean that our web client team is building cool stuff. It’s going to inspire desktop app developers. Same data, new perspectives.

On one side Seesmic web is a perfect example of how this is possible, on the other, it worries the Desktop client developers. However, one thing I hate about TweetDeck or any other desktop client is time-polls and related delays. It fetches tweets after every few seconds (say 40s) but is  never realtime.The Twitter’s web interface will let us overcome this issue with intelligent and frequent AJAXy refreshes which have no API limitations present in desktop clients. (coz the mainstream web implementation would not use APIs)

Twitter.com has added a number of new features over last year, they all had been slow but nifty. They could use HTML5 and if they do, it would be first mainstream implementation, and we can get GeoLocation, local storage, and what not.

The upcoming Twitter Ads are said to be built around Twitter search, so that’s one more monetization necessity for Twitter to force people to adopt web client.

More to come, stay tuned. We write about Twitter, Open Source, Programming, Web, Apple, iPhone, Android and latest in Tech@taranfx on Twitter or by subscribing below:

Though few predict that HTML5 would kill Flash, it’s more evident that HTML5 will innovate new web applications co-existing with flash.

The Latest web application “SketchPad” let’s you do a lot in your web browser. I’m deeply impressed by the capability of this app.

Sketchpad by Mugtug is a Pixelmator-like application that has desktop like tools, colour selection, patterns, swatches, all built using HTML5 and CSS. The performance is pretty good even on Firefox. And on Chrome 5 it was as good as any Desktop app, perhaps faster than Photoshop.

However, The UI doesn’t seem to take input from touchscreen, I couldn’t get it to run on iPhone or Android. But it would be one killer app.

It will not replace your current desktop image editor,  but it’s a tool you must check out and admire for what it is.

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Till now, the most popular method for local storage had been limited potential HTTP cookies or Google Gears for a few. All Cookies can do is key-value pairs of strings that are stored locally in a text file of 4KB max. We definitely need a smarter solution that an industry wide standard can solve.

Out of all that comes bundled in HTML5, Client-side storage is probably one of the most talked about features: Both +ve and -ve — lot of criticism of it’s security, and +ve innovation.

Client-side storage is divided into 3 methodologies:

1. Session storage.
2. Local storage
3. Database storage

Let’s get into each one of them:

1. Session Storage

Session storage is way better than what cookies have to offer. With different implementations the max limit can be something sufficient of the order of few MBs.

Unlike Cookies Session data is not sent with every request. The advantage: request payload is minimal.
So how exatly do we write it? Here goes an example:

sessionStorage.setItem('userName', 'taranfx');              // defining the session variable
alert("Your user is: " + sessionStorage.getItem('userName'));// accessing it
alert("Hello " + sessionStorage.userName);                   // another way of accessing the variable
sessionStorage.removeItem('userName');                       // finally unset it

2. Local Storage

The localStorage JavaScript object is functionally identical to the sessionStorage object. They only differ in persistence and scope. Scope: localStorage data is accessible across all browser windows while sessionStorage data is confined to the browser window that it was created in.

Global Storage is a memory space given by the browser that websites can use to store persistent data that doesn’t need to be sent to the server. The data is accessible by JavaScript/AJAX and hence by Flash. this could be really handy for Flash Games:

globalStorage[''].foo = 'bar';               // foo will be accessible by any website
globalStorage['com'].foo1 = 'bar1';          // foo1 will be accessible by websites ending in '.com'
globalStorage['taranfx.com'].foo2 = 'bar2';  // foo2 will be accessible by taranfx.com

The specification was more insecure what different browsers implemented. They replaced global storage with local storage where you cannot specify domains; the data you store is automatically associated with the domain under which the script is running. This means strictly we will disallow XSS which is very important.

Persistence: The choice for Local Storage is obvious — the data persistence — data remains there even when the browser Window/Tab closes. Here’s how this can be done:

localStorage.setItem('userName', 'taranfx');                 // defining the localStorage variable
alert("Your user is: " + localStorage.getItem('userName'));  // accessing it
alert("Hello " + localStorage.userName);                     // another way of accessing the variable
localStorage.removeItem('userName');                         // finally unset it

3. Database Storage

Till now what we have discussed is limited to key-value pairs. But when you are dealing with a larger amount of data, database is the weapon of choice. So far, I think Safari is the only browser (correct me if wrong) to have implemented this feature. It uses SQLite database, which is light and fast with few limitations like lack of foreign key constraints.

Here is example code for accessing the local database:

var db = openDatabase("Database_Name", "Database_Version");
database.executeSql("SELECT * FROM taranfx", function(result1) {
  // do something with the resultset, there could be n no. of things
  database.executeSql("DROP TABLE taranfx", function(result2) {
    // do some more cleanup or blah
    alert("My second database query finished executing!");
   });
});

You can get a demo of this local database storage here (needs webkit nightly)Apart from the limited functionalities, it has some serious vulnerabilities Detailed in Vulnerabilities in HTML 5 and Future.

I believe, as HTML 5 finds its destiny in more and more web applications, they would become more powerful and capable. You can check our other Programming articles and Subscribe to us, discuss Technology, programming via Twitter @Taranfx - Join the dialogue.

Related:

• Vulnerabilities in HTML 5 and Future
• HTML 5 drops most awaited open source Video codec
• What is HTML 5 and FAQ. Will it kill Flash?
• Why choose JavaFX. How to Code. Benchmark Graphics, CPU, Memory

With launch of Google chrome Extensions, Google has punched in a new extension to help web developers speed up the performance of webapps: Speed Tracer. For those of you who use GWT (Google Web Toolkit), this tool is a bliss.

Using this tool developers can identify problems in their web apps at a detailed level. Tracer exposes a  ”sluggishness graph” that shows how the app is doing w.r.t UI, network, processing performance. It accurately identifies the bottlenecks that  make the web user experience less delightful.

Google Web Toolkit has added a bunch of new stuff, Speed Tracer is barely one of them.

One of the features that attracted me is: Google Web Toolkit splits code to help speed up the start time of large applications. Basically, Code Splitting enables developers to safely and easily slice and dice their application code so that key functionality can load immediately and other features can be loaded later as needed.

If you have used Java’s VisualVM, you will find Speed Tracer equally competent on the web apps front.

With Speed Tracer, you can trackdown problems caused by JavaScript parsing and execution, layout, CSS style recalculation and selector matching, DOM event handling, network resource loading, timer fires, XMLHttpRequest callbacks, painting, and more. To start with, install the extension to Chrome and checkout the Example Webapps Google provided to test out it’s features. You would love it.