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New York City's Metropolitan Transportation Authority finally joined the smartphone era today by releasing an iOS app showing train arrival times for seven subway lines.

Available for the iPhone, the iPod Touch, and the iPad, MTA Subway Time will display train arrival times for 156 stations on the 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 lines and the S shuttle line. Though officially in a test version for the time being, the app will use the same arrival times shown on station countdown clocks and on the MTA's Web site.

"The ability to get subway arrival time at street level is here," said MTA Chairman and CEO Joseph J. Lhota in a statement. "The days of rushing to a subway station only to find yourself waiting motionless in a state of uncertainty are coming to an end."

According to the statement, the app can handle up to 5,000 incoming requests per second. The information comes from a feed that can be accessed by developers for other mobile operating systems.

Though the MTA has existing apps for bus arrivals and the drive times on its bridges and tunnels, this is the first time that the country's busiest transit agency has d... [Read more]

VP9, the successor to Google's VP8 video compression technology at the center of a techno-political controversy, has made its first appearance outside Google's walls.

Google has built VP9 support into Chrome, though only in an early-stage version of the browser for developers. In another change, it also added support for the new Opus audio compression technology that's got the potential to improve voice communications and music streaming on the Internet.

VP9 and Opus are codecs, technology used to encode streams of data into compressed form then decode them later, enabling efficient use of limited network or storage capacity. Peter Beverloo, a developer on Google's Chrome team, pointed out the new codec support in a blog post earlier this month.

Releasing VP9 gives Google a chance to improve the video-streaming performance and improve other aspects of VP8. That's important in competing with today's prevailing video compression technology, H.264, and with a successor called H.265 or HEVC that also has the potential to be attract broad support across ... [Read more]