The Digital Buzz at Stormfront Productions

Well, it wasn't first place, but coming in second place in the tournament our first year of competition wasn't too shabby. We had a blast playing in this year's co-ed softball league through the West Lafayette Parks Department and are planning a strong return next year.

Thanks to all who came out for the games to cheer us on. Pitchers and catchers report next March. Keep your eyes open for the practice times and schedule.

Gmail announced a revamp of many important features yesterday. By taking suggestions from Gmail users, who now amount to over 176 million users monthly, many of the features that were labor-intensive have now been improved. According to the official Gmail blog, the revamped features are as follows:

• Sort by last name (look under "More actions")
• Keyboard shortcuts (go to Contacts and hit "?" for the full list)
• Custom labels for phone numbers and other fields
• The ability to undo changes you've just made
• Automatic saving
• Structured name fields, so you can adjust titles, suffixes, and other name components
• A bigger, more prominent notes field

Any user of Gmail should feel comfortable using the revamped features, and will not require a long adjustment period.  Another new feature is a small tweak in the navigation area.  Instead of the 'compose mail' being a link, it is now a button. The automatic saving feature is amazing, since you do not have to manually save drafts. I wonder if users of Google's 'Blogger' suggested this, since Blogger has employed automatic saving for years. There is no worse feeling than losing an important email or blog post (especially if it was really good or really important.) The contacts link has also been added to the navigation area. It used to be pretty difficult to find, and extremely dated.

Life In A Day is a global experiment Google is going to be doing July 24th. They are asking people to send in a user-generated film: a documentary, shot over one day. It will cover a 24-hour period setup to capture a glimpse of life through the lens. The best of the best will be used as part of an experimental documentary film, produced by Ridley Scott and directed by Kevin Macdonald.

If you happen to be one of the people lucky enough to be chosen, you'll get your 15 minutes of fame by being credited as a co-director and may even be asked to attend the film's world premiere at the 2011 Sundance Film Festival. Find out more at Life In A Day.

Long gone are the days where flash had to be used in order to display video on a website. Over the past few years, there has been a new web technology in the works; HTML5. In addition to many new features, such as Geolocation, advanced selectors, and animations, HTML5 sports a new way to embed video files.

Stormfront Productions has recently started to incorporate HTML5 video into our own website. With a new banner video which is compatible with all browsers, we are starting to make the long transition to that of HTML5. Check out our new video here.

As of now, there are three formats that can be used to display the video. First, H.264 was developed by the MPEG group and standardized in 2003. It can be used on any platform no matter what type of hardware is used. H.264 is a patented technology and requires payment of patent license royalties, so when using this codec you must be very careful. Google's Chrome and Apple's Safari are the only browsers that have native support for H.264 at this time while Microsoft's Internet Explorer 9 plans to support this codec. Next, there is the VP8 codec which was developed by On2. On2 was bought by Google in 2010 with the intent to irrevocably release all of its patents pertaining to VP8 and release it as a royalty-free codec for use in WebM videos. WebM is a container format for VP8 video and Vorbis (sometimes called Ogg Vorbis) audio, much like Flash Video (FLV) and MPEG 4 (MP4) are for H.264 video and AAC audio. Because of its BSD license and royalty-free nature it is a very good choice for use in online video. WebM is not currently supported by any stable browser release, but support has been announced for all major browsers (except Safari) with development releases already coming down the pipeline. Lastly, there is the Ogg container format. It is completely open source, utilizing a BSD license, and has no royalties or patents associated with it. The Ogg format is the most compatible format with current browsers with support from Chrome , Firefox and Opera . If you'd like to convert your video to this format, you can utilize Firefogg from within Firefox. Other methods are available, but this is by far the easiest to use.

As of now, all the current browsers are lacking support for WebM. Even though we would like it, not every browser is going to support all three formats. As new versions of browsers are released, more support for HTML5 video will be added. Chrome will support all three types of codecs in their next major browser release. Firefox and Opera will support WebM and Ogg codecs with their next major browser release. Microsoft's IE9 will support H.264 as previously stated. Internet Explorer, the perennial bane of most developer's existences, will surprisingly feature support for WebM video with the catch that the codec will have to be downloaded and installed separately as Microsoft will not be shipping IE9 with native support. Meanwhile, Apple's Safari is holding tight with support for H.264 only, without any announcement for support of WebM as of yet.

Since different video codecs only work in certain browsers when using HTML5's <video> tag, there needs to be three sources for the same video to insure that it will be viewable in almost all browsers. The problem arises when someone is using Internet Explorer (IE9 has not yet been released). The unfortunate workaround that developers have been using is Flash. While the point of HTML5 is to get away from Flash and third-party companies that specialize in video software, this cannot happen until HTML5 is widely adopted and users make use of these updated browsers. Luckily, the ability to fall back on Flash is a graceful transition within HTML5. HTML5 is a great step forward in the world of web development and design. Getting new browsers into that hands of users will take some time, but the wait will be worth it.

Need custom web-based software created to help your business? Look no further. We can help and have done so for many of our clients over the last several years. We thought it would be nice to share our experience working on a few of these projects by creating case studies.

We've created everything from e-commerce systems, PDF generation software, inventory management systems, talent database applications, CMS and site administration tools, multi-user calendar systems and more. Let us show you how we can help improve your business processes though custom web-based software.

With the launch of Google's new personalization options yesterday, the #2 search on Google's trends page today is "remove Google background". I myself wondered what the new background was all about, if it would be a permanent fixture and why it reminded me so much of another search engine.

The change didn't go unnoticed by many. The group at Microsoft's Bing search engine - which also has similar photos on its homepage - didn't have an official comment to make at this time. However, other channels on Twitter mentioned how some of the same photos that have been used on Bing are now up on Google's homepage. Hey, imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, right?

While web personalization may catch on, I don't see this background change being a permanent fixture for Google. They havefocused their brand too long with a "simple is better" type of approach for the homepage. There is no need for the #1 search provider in the world to change, especially after looking at the recent search trends.

As the Web continues to develop, most of us are wondering, "What is next?" The answer is HTML5 and CSS3. Both of these new markup languages have a vast number of improvements over the previous versions.

HTML5 is the latest update to the HTML and XHTML markup family. HTML5 has many major improvements. First, it has new types of tags. In place of <div> or <span> tags, other tags can be used. For example, the navigation on the page can be enclosed in a <nav> tag, or a website footer can be enclosed by a <footer> tag. These new tags make it easier to see your markup by eliminating the chore of searching through div tags with various ids and classes. Second, HTML5 adds support for embedding videos. Long gone are the days of using flash to embed videos on your website. As of now, the feature is supported poorly on most browsers, but is getting updated in the next major browser releases. Lastly, HTML has its own set of API's that can be used with it. Canvas, Geo-location, and drag-and-drop are just a few. HTML 5 is going to look more and more like a programming language than just a set of tags on a page.

The most current project in the CSS realm is CSS3. There are many differences in CSS3 besides the 3 at the end of the name. First, there are totally new selectors and selector methods. To make a table's row background alternate color's, one would usually have to check the color, make sure it's the opposite of the current color, and if not change the color. This can all be done using a new selector in CSS3 in one fell swoop. There are many more selectors like the previously mentioned that help designers make better designs while using less bandwidth or server space. Next, CSS3 has a bunch of new effects. Text-shadow, RGBA colors (RGB with opacity), HSL colors (Hue, Saturation, Lightness), and multiple backgrounds are just a few. Most of these features would greatly improve the way that people design websites. I cannot wait to see what it looks like when all the browsers are compatible with it.

As of now, HTML5 and CSS3 are a long way off from being implemented in everyday web design. HTML5 is hoping to become a W3C Candidate Recommendation by 2012, and a full on recommendation in 2022. CSS3 is currently in the working draft phase. This means that it will still be a while until the W3C will recommend it for use. This does not mean that web developers are not allowed to use HTML5 and CSS3; it just means that they are not recommended by the standards committee (W3C). One of the major reasons that it is going to take so long for all of these new languages to become recommendations is the current web browsers. Most of the major web browsers only support a handful of features that CSS3 and HTML5 sport. Many browser companies are hard at work to make their browsers compatible with these new technologies, but these updates do take time.