A little over a year after it was launched, Google announced that they’re pulling the plug on their Wave product – the emailing, instant messaging, and picture-sharing progeny that was suppose to change the landscape of collaborative, online content. Google Wave allowed users to communicate in real-time and share documents, videos, and re-make epic Pulp Fiction scenes. If you haven’t heard of Google Wave you’re not alone. That’s one reason Google Senior Vice President of Operations, Urs Hölzle, cites for Wave’s fate:

Wave has not seen the user adoption we would have liked. [Google]

Though the product itself will likely be forgotten by the time Apple launches its next iPhone model, Google Wave has truly paved the way for many of tomorrow’s web apps. The principles we’ve seen with Wave will be resurfaced and the ability to drag-and-drop files from your desktop, playback the history of document changes and show real-time, character-by-character typing is just the beginning.

And don’t worry: Google isn’t sitting on their hands with rolling out functionality that proved useful from Wave. Better spell-check and drag-and-drop have already been ported into Gmail, while improvements to real-time collaboration in Google Docs seem to be happening on a very consistent basis.

Want to see a sexy, JS and CSS powered clock? Crank up Chrome, Safari or Firefox 3.5+ and point your browser here.

As mentioned, the clocks are using only JS and CSS rotation to accomplish the animation. No Flash or HTML 5 canvas tags. The way it works is kind of clever, actually… the JS takes images in an { overflow: hidden } <div> and rotates them using the proposed CSS transform property.

The author, Jon Combe, has published some other clever goodies including a function that draws world maps on the fly using HTML 5′s canvas. Pay him a visit, click around and enjoy.

This little piece of awesomeness by Ramon Cortez has been shooting up the CSS charts since he published it earlier this week and it has inspired me to get my preech on.

Passion projects such as this (and the paper bird that proceeded it) is what drives front end designers and developers to invent new forms of web interaction. Many of us with day jobs and families don’t often find the time to experiment with CSS or other DOM scripting but I believe it’s uber important that we strive to make that time. Google’s “20-percent time” for their engineers has proven effective — leading the way for big ideas like Orkut and AdSense to come to life — but why are we so reliant on our companies to set up these types of policies? It’s easier, by far, to make this a lifestyle change on our end while at home.

So, I’ve officially committed my Saturday mornings to doing just that. 2 hours of uninterrupted time on whatever shiny new project UI/UX and design related ideas that come to mind. This Saturday: jQuery to make Ramon Cortez’s CSS Coke can 1) zoom into view,  2) auto-scroll and 3) consider similar applications. Next week: Cinema 4D text experiments. Proper.

Here’s another goodie from Ramon Cortez: Pac-Man CSS!. It’s not 100% in terms of the original game play, but it further illustrates the potential of tapping JS to turn CSS powered designs into engaging pieces of multimedia gold.

2009 showed us the potential and promise of HTML5 and it seems 2010 has already started delivering in a big way — starting wth YouTube. Last week, YouTube announced that users will be able to watch some of the site’s videos without a Flash plugin using the video and audio playback support included with HTML5.

Want to check it out for yourself? You can do so via YouTube’s TestTube site. To get the new player to work be sure to use Chrome, Safari, or ChromeFrame on IE. I should note that this functionality has not been rolled out all of YouTube’s videos. It seems you can only watch videos that aren’t being monetized and haven’t been annotated. Nonetheless, I’m excited to see a “mainstream” media outlet take such a big step towards moving HTML5 into the lime light.

After testing it myself I did experience one bug using Chrome for the Mac (clicking full screen crashed my browser) but the only way I could truly tell it wasn’t a Flash player was by right-clicking and not getting the “about Flash…” dialogue.

All of this got me wondering: Is Adobe freaking out by the idea of media sites no longer relying on the Flash plugin to deliver content? Are they already planning for any kind of revenue loss from multimedia developers shifting focus to doing what they do using HTML5? Probably not, but 2010 should offer many insights into what kind of impact HTML5 will have on content delivery in the long run.

And here’s more than a dozen reasons why: 14 Outstanding jQuery Navigation Tutorials. (via Queness.com)

I’ve become a huge fan of jQuery over the past 6 months or so. Prior to that, I was using a combination of Scriptaculous and Prototype (with a tiny bit of mootools for good measure) to do what I consider some pretty slick stuff. Since making the switch and playing with jQuery in my spare time, I’ve found the best thing about jQuery may be the way it’s structured — providing various JS design patterns to be rendered shorter and simpler when you compare it to the Prototype framework.