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Comment by jasonlotito | Hacker News Reader

What's up with the latest posts claiming JQuery plugins when they aren't. It's using Flash.

Javascript can't capture the user's microphone directly. So Phono uses a tiny Flash or Java widget to do that part. The rest is all JS.

We're heading an HTML 5 working group on voice in the browser, and once HTML5 has mic support, Phono will use it.

Any guess as to when the <device> element (or api - Berjon vs Hixie?) will be adopted by a shipping browser so we can have this all-js microphone (and camera) access without a flash shim?

My bet is Android webkit first (ericcson closed source webkit proof of concept already exists); a timeline would be nice though.

Any implementation right now would be pretty early. The live media capture parts of HTML5 aren't fully-speced out yet.

http://dev.w3.org/2009/dap/camera/

With any luck, some browsers will form a defacto standard that solves the outstanding questions long before the HTML5 group finishes.

Furthermore, what exactly is the point of making it a jQuery plugin?

"Phono is a simple JQuery plugin and JavaScript SDK [...]"

It's using Flash but it's still a jQuery plugin. Perhaps incomplete but not inaccurate.

Claiming it's a "simple JQuery plugin" is disingenuous at best. The critical component is Flash. JQuery is merely the wrapper around it. Without Flash, the JavaScript is worthless, and the application cannot work.

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