{"id":547357,"date":"2010-04-29T11:42:25","date_gmt":"2010-04-29T15:42:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mobilecrunch.com\/?p=30562"},"modified":"2010-04-29T11:42:25","modified_gmt":"2010-04-29T15:42:25","slug":"skyfire-2-0-for-android-launching-today","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/547357","title":{"rendered":"Skyfire 2.0 for Android launching today"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/www.mobilecrunch.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2010\/04\/skyfire-2-sb1-200x300.png\" alt=\"\" title=\"skyfire-2-sb1\" width=\"200\" height=\"300\" class=\"alignright size-medium wp-image-30563\" \/><\/p>\n<p>Back in February, Skyfire (makers of the popular, Flash-enabled smartphone browser of the same name) announced that <a href=\"http:\/\/www.mobilecrunch.com\/2010\/02\/11\/skyfire-for-android-kolbysoft-steel\/\">they&#8217;d snatched up Kolbysoft<\/a>, the company behind the well-established Steel browser for Android. Today, we&#8217;re seeing the first fruits of that purchase coming to the market: Skyfire for Android is here.<\/p>\n<p>Skyfire&#8217;s flagship feature is that it supports Flash video playback, so you&#8217;d expect their Android port to do the same, right? And it does! It just does it&#8230; a bit differently.<\/p>\n<p><span id=\"more-30562\"><\/span><\/p>\n<p>In past versions of Skyfire, Flash videos were embedded and played back directly within the page, just like you might expect from a PC version of the page. With Skyfire 2.0, one more step is thrown into the mix: the &#8220;Skybar&#8221;. When they&#8217;re ready to play back a Flash video, users tap the menu key to bring up the Skybar, click the &#8220;Video&#8221; label, and then choose which Flash video they want to view. Skyfire converts the video from Flash to H.264 in the cloud on-the-fly, and the video plays back (in full screen) on the device.<\/p>\n<p>Why the change? A rep for Skyfire shared a few reasons with us:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>In this release, they&#8217;re building on top of WebKit rather than building their own browsing core from the ground up. Unlike all other versions of Skyfire, the page itself doesn&#8217;t go through a proxy. Standard content goes straight from the web server to the handset &#8212; only things that need to be transcoded go through Skyfire&#8217;s proxy.<\/li>\n<li>Business reasons. Skyfire&#8217;s looking at OEM partnerships, and not all OEMs want Flash video playback, as they &#8220;want to enhance what they have rather than compete with another browser&#8221;. <\/li>\n<li>They say it helps them adhere to Apple&#8217;s guidelines, improving the odds that they&#8217;ll be approved when they go to submit the iPhone\/iPad release.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/www.mobilecrunch.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2010\/04\/skyfire-2-sb2-200x300.png\" alt=\"\" title=\"skyfire-2-sb2\" width=\"200\" height=\"300\" class=\"alignright size-medium wp-image-30564\" \/><\/p>\n<p>Besides being the window to video, the Skybar also packs a few other tricks. An &#8220;Explore&#8221; option digs through Youtube, Twitter, Digg, and other sites for relevant video\/imagery on the same subject as the content you&#8217;re currently looking at. For example: Believe it or not, they have videos of cats doing hilarious things on the Internet now; if you&#8217;re watching one of these and tap Explore, it&#8217;ll dig through the aforementioned feeds for other, equally hilarious cat videos. The &#8220;Share&#8221; button will let you sling the page out to Twitter, Facebook, Gmail, SMS, or save it for offline viewing.<\/p>\n<p>Beyond the Skybar, Skyfire&#8217;s got a few other features that make it worth checking out: Pinch-to-zoom, tabbed browsing, on-the-fly user agent switching, and optional automatic history dumping (Porn mode!), to name a few.<\/p>\n<p>Check out the video demonstration below, and look for the download <a href=\"http:\/\/get.skyfire.com\/dl_android.php\">to go live here<\/a> and on the Android Market at right around 9 a.m. PST.<\/p>\n<p><center><object width=\"640\" height=\"385\"><param name=\"movie\" value=\"http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/v\/9t00fEV2_kE&#038;rel=0&#038;color1=0xb1b1b1&#038;color2=0xd0d0d0&#038;hl=en_US&#038;feature=player_embedded&#038;fs=1\"><\/param><param name=\"allowFullScreen\" value=\"true\"><\/param><param name=\"allowScriptAccess\" value=\"always\"><\/param><embed src=\"http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/v\/9t00fEV2_kE&#038;rel=0&#038;color1=0xb1b1b1&#038;color2=0xd0d0d0&#038;hl=en_US&#038;feature=player_embedded&#038;fs=1\" type=\"application\/x-shockwave-flash\" allowfullscreen=\"true\" allowScriptAccess=\"always\" width=\"640\" height=\"385\"><\/embed><\/object><\/center><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/feedads.g.doubleclick.net\/~at\/X8ESqXiZYKiHsvcHj-qNkoec8yg\/0\/da\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/feedads.g.doubleclick.net\/~at\/X8ESqXiZYKiHsvcHj-qNkoec8yg\/0\/di\" border=\"0\" ismap=\"true\"><\/img><\/a><br \/>\n<a href=\"http:\/\/feedads.g.doubleclick.net\/~at\/X8ESqXiZYKiHsvcHj-qNkoec8yg\/1\/da\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/feedads.g.doubleclick.net\/~at\/X8ESqXiZYKiHsvcHj-qNkoec8yg\/1\/di\" border=\"0\" ismap=\"true\"><\/img><\/a><\/p>\n<div class=\"feedflare\">\n<a href=\"http:\/\/feeds.feedburner.com\/~ff\/Mobilecrunch?a=pqiCYBe95xk:IMR6iCiO7hI:V_sGLiPBpWU\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/feeds.feedburner.com\/~ff\/Mobilecrunch?i=pqiCYBe95xk:IMR6iCiO7hI:V_sGLiPBpWU\" border=\"0\"><\/img><\/a> <a href=\"http:\/\/feeds.feedburner.com\/~ff\/Mobilecrunch?a=pqiCYBe95xk:IMR6iCiO7hI:F7zBnMyn0Lo\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/feeds.feedburner.com\/~ff\/Mobilecrunch?i=pqiCYBe95xk:IMR6iCiO7hI:F7zBnMyn0Lo\" border=\"0\"><\/img><\/a> <a href=\"http:\/\/feeds.feedburner.com\/~ff\/Mobilecrunch?a=pqiCYBe95xk:IMR6iCiO7hI:yIl2AUoC8zA\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/feeds.feedburner.com\/~ff\/Mobilecrunch?d=yIl2AUoC8zA\" border=\"0\"><\/img><\/a>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Back in February, Skyfire (makers of the popular, Flash-enabled smartphone browser of the same name) announced that they&#8217;d snatched up Kolbysoft, the company behind the well-established Steel browser for Android. Today, we&#8217;re seeing the first fruits of that purchase coming to the market: Skyfire for Android is here. Skyfire&#8217;s flagship feature is that it supports [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":682,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-547357","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/547357","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/682"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=547357"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/547357\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=547357"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=547357"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=547357"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}