Nobody puts it in a square box, at least. Boxee , the software that brings Internet media to your television, has been seen in the flesh at CES today. We first heard about the Boxee Box in November , but the announcement was light on details. This time around, D-Link offered a list of specifications and media-format compatibilities at the oddly-shaped device's unveiling. Sponsor According to D-Link's press release , the device will retail for under $200 and will come embedded with support for a number of web sites, including Netflix , Facebook , Pandora , Twitter and Flickr . As for media formats, the Boxee Box will handle a majority of necessary file formats, including DiVX, MPEG1 through 4, VOB, Flash, and most standard video and image types. Most notably missing from the mix are GIFs and QuickTime files. The device comes prepared to handle RSS and XML feeds to keep its users up to date. Discuss

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Nobody Puts Boxee in a Box

Ribbit Mobile , which offers a set of VoIP services that is very similar to Google Voice , just launched its first iPhone app ( iTunes link ). The app allows users to check their voicemail, read voicemail transcriptions, forward voicemails by email and create a to-call list based on these messages. It uses the iPhone's native phone app to make calls and the default SMS app to send text messages. Ribbit also gave us 500 invites to hand out to our readers. If you would like to get one, just read on to find out how to claim it. Sponsor In terms of features, Ribbit Mobile, which launched in November, compares very well to Google Voice. While the interface takes some getting used to, the ability to make and receive calls from Ribbit's website through the Flash-based interface is extremely useful while traveling, for example. For a more detailed look at Ribbit Mobile, have a look at our in-depth review from November . Focus on Voicemail Your voicemail inbox is the central focus of the app, and the way the app handles these is exemplary. Once you click on a message in the inbox, the app switches to a new view that displays details about the call: name of caller, number, date and time. Here you can also listen to the message and read the transcript. (Ribbit offers both automatic and manual transcriptions.) From here, a small bar at the bottom of the app also allows you to respond to the message by phone, SMS or recorded voicemail. In addition, you can add the caller to your to-call list and forward transcripts and audio by email. Playing it Safe Given that Apple didn't allow the Google Voice app into the store, Ribbit clearly played it safe with this app. While it provides access to all the service's voicemail features, the app doesn't replicate any of the phone's calling or SMS features. The app also doesn't allow you to access your Ribbit Mobile address book. Sadly, this also means that you can't use your Ribbit phone number to make calls, and that the caller ID will always show your iPhone's number. In the current version it's also not possible to see a list of missed calls that didn't result in a voicemail. You can, however, choose to receive alerts for missed calls and new voicemails by SMS, email and instant message. You can set your alert preferences in the app and through the service's web interface. We understand that Ribbit probably had to remove quite a few features to stay on Apple's good side, but the result of this is that the app misses quite a few essential features. Hopefully - now that Ribbit managed to get this castrated version of the app approved - the Ribbit team will soon be able add more of the missing features into the app. Invites Ribbit Mobile is still an invite-only service. If you would like to give it a try, just head over to Ribbit's sign-up page and use the following invite code: RWW09 Discuss

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Google Voice Competitor Ribbit Mobile Launches iPhone App (500 Invites)

It only took 3 years to go from HTML2 to HTML4, but the HTML4.01 specifications were published 10 years ago and even though today's web looks very different, we are still waiting for HTML5. The Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group started preliminary work on what is now known as HTML5 in 2004 and the W3C HTML Working Group was adopted this draft as the basis for the HTML5 specs in 2007. Some modern browsers already offer partial support for HTML5, but there are still quite a few issues that need to be resolved before we will see the finalized version of the HTML5 specifications. One area where there is still a lot of discussion is support for video in HTML5. Sponsor What Codec? Philippe Le Hegaret, the interaction domain leader for the W3C, talked about this issue in an interview with WebMonkey's Michael Calore . According to Le Hegaret, video support is still one of the main issues surrounding the development of HTML5. Safari and Chrome are both based on the same open-source WebKit engine. Video support, however, is not part of WebKit yet, so every vendor implements it differently. Currently, browser developer disagree over how to implement this feature and what codec to use. Apple wants to use uses H.264 and Mozilla, Google and Opera support Ogg Theora. As of now, HTML5 still includes the tag, but doesn't specify which codec to use. Transition from Plugins Until these issues are sorted out, users will have to continue to rely on plugins. Of course, the only way to do away with video plugins would be to make sure that every online video provider also adopted this new standard. As Le Hegaret rightly points out in the interview with WebMonkey, people don't like to install plugins, but everybody installs the Flash plugin because "if you can't see YouTube, your life on the web is pretty miserable. You're missing a lot." Le Hegaret acknowledges that there has to be a transition period before users can switch from Flash to HTML5 video. For developers, the fact that the video is not running in a plugin that can't talk to the browser is a major advantage of having built-in video support in the browser. With video in HTML5, developers can connect the video to the rest of the page and have actions on the page or video influence other parts of the site. What About Microsoft? At today's PDC keynote, Microsoft noted that it has to improve support for HTML5 in its browser. While the company didn't say a lot about Internet Explorer 9, Microsoft

Today Adobe released new beta versions of the company's Flash Player and AIR . The Flash Player 10.1 technology now includes HTTP streaming and hardware decoding of H.264 video. The company plans to bring the updated Flash Player to mobile devices too, starting with the Palm Pre and then completing versions for other major smartphones by the first half of 2010 (with the notable exception of the iPhone, of course). However, out of the two updates, it's Adobe AIR 2 that received the biggest overhaul. The new runtime allows developers to create entirely new types of applications that simply weren't possible using AIR 1. What sort of apps are those? Adobe's gallery of sample apps should give you some ideas of what's to come. Sponsor 1. Mass Storage Detection In Adobe AIR 2, apps can now detect when a mass storage device has been inserted into the computer. That means the app can "see" your USB flash drives, external drives, and even some digital cameras. For example, developers could build an app that recognizes when your Flip camera is plugged in and lets you automatically upload videos to YouTube. To demo this capability, Adobe has released FileTile, a sample app that does just this (minus the video uploading). FileTile recognizes external devices and lets you see the files and open them with their default application. Download Installer | Source 2. Native Process API The native process API allows developers to better integrate their AIR apps with existing code libraries or extend their apps using native code. With the new native process API, this can now be done without compromising the cross-platform capabilities of AIR which allows it to run on Windows, Mac, and Linux. Developers using this new functionality can now deploy their apps with operating-specific installers like .exe, .dmg, .rpm, and .deb instead of an .air installer file. To demonstrate the native process API, Adobe released SearchCentral, an application that taps into Mac OS X's Spotlight feature for desktop searches. It also lets you do web searches on Google and Wikipedia. Installer | Source | How to Here's a video explaining in more detail how the native API works: 3. Microphone Data Access Like it sounds, the microphone data access feature lets you acquire the sound data from a computer's microphone without the need of a server. For example, a developer could build a note-taking application that lets users record audio clips even when they're offline. To get started, a simple app called Microphone is now available which does recording and playback with variable playback speeds supported. Download Installer | Source | How to 4. Drag-and-Drop Support for Remote Files The new "file promises" feature of AIR 2 lets you drag remote files out of an AIR application. A file promise, as described by Adobe's Christian Cantrell , is "what you put on the clipboard when you want the user to be able to drag and drop files that do not yet exist, or that exist elsewhere (not locally on your machine)." It's a promise to deliver a file at some point, but not an actual file. For example, an app could generate a CSV file but only when a user tries to drag and drop the file. It could also refer to files on a remote server, like an FTP server. When a user grabs that remote file and pulls it into the AIR app, the app could then download the data. It even supports files accessible via a URL like those hosted on Google Sites. Unfortunately, this feature is Windows and Mac only. A sample app called S3E provides a graphical front-end to your Amazon S3 account to demonstrate this feature. Download Installer | Source | How to 5. Peer-to-Peer Networking Capabilities Adobe AIR 2 also adds support for new networking capabilities including UDP, secure sockets and peer-to-peer. To demonstrate the possibilities, Adobe released KeePIPE, a javascript app that lets users on the same network share files using peer-to-peer technology. It also lets VMWare users transfer files between a virtual machine and a host computer. Download Installer | Source | Read me 6. Multi-Touch Perhaps the most exciting enhancement in AIR 2 and in Flash Player 10.1 are the new multi-touch APIs. In Windows 7, AIR apps can respond to multi-touch and in both Windows 7 and Mac OS X Snow Leopard, they can respond to gestures. In this video (below), Adobe's Kevin Lynch demos a multi-touch app on an HP TouchSmart computer: Obviously, Adobe is excited about this new feature, too, because they've released not one but four sample applications that demonstrate multi-touch in action: GeoTest : Lets you move images around the screen using a built-in physics engine. Download Installer | Source PhotoPhysics : A multi-touch app with a built-in physics engine. Download Installer | Source SpriteFract : A multi-touch app with a built-in physics engine that demonstrates a mouse-compatible, direct-manipulation interface. It also uses PixelBender to asynchronously process a large amount of geometry data. Download Installer | Source TouchTest : Lets you drag, scale, and rotate images on the screen. Download Installer | Source Other Features Other features in Adobe AIR 2 include the following (courtesy of Rob Christensen ): A new API lets you open documents with its default application Global error handling Enhanced printing support, including vector printing support on Mac and new APIs to query the local machine for a list of printers or print without a dialog box. WebKit in AIR 2 is now based on the version shipped with Safari 4.0.3 which includes support for JavaScript profiling, SquirrelFish Extreme JavaScript engine performs 50% faster using SunSpider tests, CSS3 Module support (2D transformations, transitions, animations, gradients, zoom and WebKit CSS selectors), styling scrollbars via CSS and Canvas enhancements. IPv6 format addresses can now be used with all APIs that accept an IP string as input. Increased maximum size of NativeWindow: AIR 2 apps can have a window size of 4095 x 4095 where before the maximum was 2880 x 2880. DNS lookup Network interface enumeration Database transaction savepoints Screen reader support in Windows IME API and IME text input enhancement Smaller runtime installer sizes More efficient CPU usage and reduced memory size Adobe AIR 2 is available for download here on Adobe Labs . You can send Adobe feedback here or participate on the user-to-user forums here . Discuss

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See Adobe AIR 2's Best New Features Demoed in 9 Sample Apps