The upcoming Firefox 3.6 release will include a number of interesting new features. One of them is support for machine orientation information.
What’s that? Think iPhone with its ability to detect which direction the device is held in and if it’s moving (for gameplay and for browsing).
The same tech will now be available for desktops, but not all desktops and with good reason. It’s a hardware dependent technology.
A number of different phone vendors have the technology but what about desktops? Apparently Macbooks and a number Lenovo Thinkpads expose machine orientation as well.
The way Firefox 3.6 will handle the machine orientation info is by way of a simple javascript API that developers can access. The new javascript event enables developers to listen for changed in orientation and have their application respond accordingly.
