skyfire

On today's show, we rush you along so we can go watch the San Francisco Giants ticker-tape parade. But in actual tech news, Silicon Valley fails to take over California politics, Google's really sorry about the whole Buzz thing, but not in a "pay you" kind of way, and if you're a Rangers fan, we now have the technology to erase that painful memory from your brain. --Molly

Flash is still banished from Apple's iPhone, but a mobile browser is opening the door--at least partially--to the technology.

After its recent approval by Apple, Skyfire, a mobile Web browser that converts Flash videos to HTML5, hit the App Store today at 2 p.m. PT.

Selling for $2.99, the app has been awaiting Apple's thumbs-up since it was submitted for approval more than two months ago.

Skyfire uses a trick to coax Flash videos to run on the iPhone and iPod Touch. Those devices don't support Flash due to Apple's ban of the Adobe … Read more

It isn't in the App Store yet, but we got a peek at Skyfire for iPhone and iPod Touch, which the mobile browser company submitted to Apple in September.

Skyfire for iPhone looks and operates much like its Android sibling. It's built on the WebKit browser and uses the Skyfire servers to push down the Flash video that has for so long been forbidden on the iPhone. The workaround isn't and has never been perfect, but it does work. When you get to a site that plays video, Skyfire will display the usual error message or symbol … Read more

Steve Jobs says he tried to get Facebook integration in Ping, but Facebook made it too hard. Uh huh. Also, Boxee says it can price its box at $100 more and still compete. We're not so sure. In other news, Twitter plans to record all the links you click, Skyfire hopes to bring flash to un-jailbroken iOS devices (for the children!), and EULA rules fall once again.

Mobile-browser builder Skyfire is striving to make good on its vow to get a solution for streaming Flash video onto the iPhone--without breaking any of Apple's restrictions against third-party browsers.

On Wednesday, Skyfire submitted Skyfire for iPhone to the App Store, albeit five months after it had promised to follow in Opera's footsteps.

Skyfire for iPhone is modeled after the Skyfire for Android app that debuted in late April. As with that version, Skyfire's iPhone app will contain a video playback button to stream Web video through Skyfire's servers.

In order to get the video playback … Read more

Now that the dust has settled on Opera Mini for iPhone's dramatic entry into the App Store and subsequent million-download day, the browser company has gotten to work addressing some user complaints in Thursday's Opera Mini for iPhone update.

The fixes, however, are subtle. The most significant one rights a network issue that caused Opera Mini to freeze at start-up. This release also set the app's fallback language to English rather than Arabic, as it previously was (in other words, an error with a language pack will now revert back to English.) Opera Mini is now also available in Hungarian, and the company says it has fixed backend bugs and stability soft spots.

However, Opera's mini update may disappoint some users who are on the lookout for Opera Mini to adopt multitouch pinch-to-zoom capabilities, finer-detail zoom levels, improved page rendering, and support for iPhone-optimized Web pages.

The fact that Opera Mini is a proxy browser that more or less beams an image of a Web page to your screen courtesy of Opera's servers, can account for some of the user grievances. For instance, Opera Mini isn't a native iPhone app, and therefore doesn't have access to the pinch-to-zoom technology of iPhone's Safari browser.… Read more

Native Flash support for Android phones may be only a month away, but in the meantime, mobile browser-maker Skyfire presents a workaround in its brand-new beta app for Android phones.

Skyfire 2.0 beta for Android looks and acts like your typical souped-up WebKit browser for Android phones, with the exception of a tool that lets you stream Flash video--and soon Silverlight. WebKit doesn't currently support either technology.

When Skyfire detects a broken embedded video on a Web page, it signals Skyfire's servers to fetch the video and transcode it from its original format to HTML 5 video. … Read more

When Opera Software announced late Monday that its Opera Mini browser would hit the iPhone App Store, we guessed it wouldn't be long before we saw other browser-makers follow suit by producing similar efforts that get around Apple's restrictions facing iPhone browsers that compete with the native Safari.

Looks like our guess was correct. On Tuesday, Skyfire, another mobile browser maker, blogged a post congratulating Opera for its success and stating Skyfire's intention to speed up its own development for "iDevices" like the iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPad.

Of course, as a competitor, it is … Read more

It was just last month that Skyfire pushed out its latest mobile browser build for Windows phones. Now Skyfire is paying Symbian Series 60 phones their due. On Wednesday, the Opera Mobile competitor releases Skyfire 1.5 for Symbian S60 phones (third edition) and a beta for fifth-edition handsets.

It's smooth scrolling from here on out.

Like Skyfire 1.5 on Windows phones, the Symbian version takes some of the jerkiness out of scrolling up and down a page. That's in addition to giving the browser interface a fresh lick of paint, as Skyfire did with that Windows … Read more