Steven Shankland, over at CNET, has written an interesting piece about Google’s NaCl (yes, chemistry geeks, that is the formula for table salt). Overall, it’s a fairly balanced review.

On the one side, we get all of the benefits of WebKit, but with the performance of a compiled native application. In theory, that then allows us to write a knock-off of Photoshop and make it cross-platform, with easy electronic distribution.

On the other side, it’s not so cross-platform that it works on mobile devices and it does splinter development efforts. It only works on x86 CPU’s to date and it requires a browser plug-in API, which already dates it, since IE10′s Metro version will be plug-in-free.

Finally, Google and Mozilla both offer competing engines. Google’s Dart is intended to supplant JavaScript while Mozilla’s IonMonkey will further improve compiler performance.

Overall, if you’re willing to venture into relatively uncharted territory, have significant say in your deployment environment, and need as much performance as possible, this is an intriguing initiative. I just wonder how many of us developers fall into that bucket.

We all knew this was coming, but google has thrown themselves into the Flash / HTML5 fray with a fun new beta tool.  Google Swiffy

Basically, it’s a tool that automatically converts SWF to HTML5 by creating an SVG animation.

http://www.google.com/doubleclick/studio/swiffy/

And now for the bad news

It’s free to use, but it’s on a closed source license which makes it a bit  of a problem for a lot of users.

Have a Flash SWF File? convert it to HTML5 with Google Swiffy:

(Via Hacker News)

Outsource your charting to Google!  Yesterday I discussed my initial experiences with the Flot charting library.   Today, I’m going to give you a brief introduction to the excellent new Google Charting API.How it works, simply embed an image tag in your source that references the google chart API location followed by a set of parameters specifying the actual chart.  Google then renders the chart as a PNG that can be displayed in the browser.Features:

It’s already everywhere that Google is releasing a set of API”s for building applications and integrations with social networking sites (Linked in & Orkut  have alraedy signed on).  Most interesting fro those of you reading this blog is perhaps the fact that they will be entirely javascript & html based (No server side coding).  This could make hte entire process faster sand smoother for all of us.

We’ll know more tomorrow when the API is released at:

http://code.google.com/apis/opensocial