I am an avid follower of tech news. It seems that as of late, the Adobe Flash Player has been taking a lot of hits in the tech press. I’m now writing to defend it.
Criticism of Flash reached a head last week when Apple announced their new iPad. As everyone knows, the iPhone OS does not support the Flash Player. Apple’s lack of support for Flash on their mobile devices is quite deliberate. The general consensus is that Apple hates Flash and wants to use the iPhone and iPad as weapons to try to kill it. This irks me.
The exclusion of Flash on the iPhone and iPod Touch is understandable, but I believe that the lack of Flash support on the iPad is a huge mistake. I don’t want to buy the iPad, but if I were interested, the lack of Flash would be a deal breaker for me. Far too many websites rely on the richness that Flash provides. Sure, YouTube videos play on the iPhone and iPad via H.264 video support in a dedicated app. However, web video isn’t the only area where Flash is popular.
Websites for musicians and restaurants are two areas where web designers lean heavily on Flash. One can complain about that fact all they want, but it is a reality. I personally have no problem with it whatsoever.
In addition, most all of the web-based games on the Internet are played within the Flash Player. Think of the gaming destinations Pogo, Kongregate, Farmville, etc. People enjoy playing these games. To simply not include them in a product that is designed to browse the web is totally unacceptable.
Flash has been a standard on the web for a very long time. More than a decade ago, it brought static web pages to life with animation, sound, and interactivity. I’m tired of hearing the growing calls for the format to be abandoned.
The anti-Flash camp contends that the Flash Player is a slow, buggy resource hog, often hitting 100% CPU usage and crashing web browsers. I have never noticed this on any of my computers. I can stream Flash video and multitask on my aging machine without issue. In fact, I have a decade old IBM Thinkpad that sports a Pentium-III processor with 512 MB of memory. That Thinkpad plays Flash perfectly fine, without struggle, overheating, or 100% CPU usage. When you consider that modern computers have dual and quad-core processors, what difference does it make if Flash is heavy on system resources?
To conclude, I have no problem with the Flash Player. I’ve never noticed it slowing down my computer or crashing my web browser, even once. In my opinion, Macromedia and Adobe have historically done a pretty good job at maintaining the Flash Player across all platforms: Windows, Mac, Linux, and Solaris. It is ubiquitous, and it just plain works. So I say this to everyone who is bitching and moaning about the Flash Player: Get over it. If you don’t like it, uninstall it. See how great your web experience is after you do that.
In my city of Raleigh, the capital of North Carolina, there are a couple of lame traditions that I have to call out as being stupid. Here goes.
Every New Years Eve, while the partygoers in New York City are living it up in Times Square waiting for the ball to drop, another copycat tradition is underway in downtown Raleigh. In Raleigh, we have the acorn drop. Yes, you heard right. It is a large acorn on a pole that they lower at midnight to celebrate the new year. Lame. What is the point of this? New York is in our time zone and people who actually have a life can celebrate the real ball dropping, in real-time.
Even more stupid is the fact that the acorn is dropped early every year at 8:00 PM so that families and small children can witness the drop, chiming in an hour that is absolutely meaningless to all parties involved. To artificially celebrate the new year before midnight is a complete disgrace. Let’s just do away with this. I’m embarrassed.
Today is Groundhog Day. Up in the city of Punxsutawney, PA, the famous groundhog comes out to see his shadow. Don’t get me started on how silly the tradition is. If you look at the historical records, you’ll find that ole’ Phil sees his shadow like 95% of the time. But I digress on Phil. My real complaint is that Raleigh, NC has to copy this tradition as well. We have our own groundhog celebration, except our groundhog bears the eye-rolling name “Sir Walter Wally.” Give me a break.
I’m curious if other cities and states have similar events to those I’ve listed above. All I can do is shake my head at what a complete waste of time and resources all this crap is.
Rabbit Rabbit! Today is February 1st, 2010. A few months ago, my longtime good friend Chad made a Facebook fan page for the act of saying “Rabbit Rabbit” on the first day of every month. I’ve posted on this topic before. To date, we have 14 Facebook fans on the page. Both Chad and I are the two page administrators. Become a fan and receive good luck. Hehe!
Most of central North Carolina experienced significant snow and ice over the weekend. We got a good covering in Clayton. We got a few inches of snow that fell Friday night, then a layer of sleet and freezing rain on top of that which fell all day Saturday. The snow fall was nothing close to what was predicted, I have to say. I heard numbers in the 10″-12″ range when I was at work Friday. I knew better. Still, we got enough white stuff, and the scenery has been beautiful.
Over the weekend, I have deployed a new visual theme for this website. I may tweak the theme slightly over time as I get everything in place. I love the new look. My new theme is called Vigilance and is a theme from The Theme Foundry (formally called Jestro Themes). I am a Pro member. Enjoy the new look!
Check out this awesome font that will save you money on costly printer ink. It’s called the Ecofont. It prints small empty holes in the outline of each character to save ink. You can download the font for free.
On January 27th, Apple announced the iPad. I watched in amusement the flood of hype and rumors that led up to this announcement. As a Mac user, I’m always interested when Apple announces a new product. I just have no interest in owning a tablet computer, or an e-book reader. I wasn’t going to buy one regardless of what Apple unveiled two days ago, but I enjoyed following the coverage.
The problem I have is that this isn’t a tablet computer. It is basically a giant iPod Touch. I already own an iPod Touch, and I don’t need a larger one. The iPad runs the iPhone OS. I want to see a tablet that runs full-blown Mac OS X and is a fully functional computer, complete with USB ports. I thought an Apple tablet would have Mac OS X at its core. After all, Apple invested a lot of time in writing Snow Leopard (10.6) to use less space and system resources. I figured all of that work would have coincided with developing a product like the iPad.
The iPhone OS, as it exists in version 3.x, does not allow multitasking (beyond the iPod feature and push notifications). That seems very limiting on such a large and capable device as the iPad. In addition, there is no Adobe Flash for the iPhone OS. Steve Jobs said that the iPad delivers the “best” web experience. How can that be true if it doesn’t have Flash? What about all of the Flash-heavy websites out there, not to mention all of the fun Flash games on the web? Also, the majority of online video streaming today requires the Flash Player. The only videos you’ll end up watching on the iPad are those you rip into iTunes yourself, YouTube videos, and those you rent or purchase from the iTunes Store. Of course, I am aware that the future HTML5 is going to eventually provide video streaming without Flash, but that isn’t quite reality as it exists today.
As for the rest, I can say that the iPad looks pretty. I do think there is too much bezel around the frame, however. I’d like to see the screen reach all the way to the edge. This device would be great for college textbooks. Little was said about that during the product announcement, however. The iPad should have a camera for video conferencing, and the lack of one is a little puzzling. I imagine that the next version of the device will add a camera. I’m also surprised that we didn’t see a 128 GB version of the iPad.
On another note, I was also disappointed that while doing their iPad product announcement, Apple did not announce the rumored multiple carrier support for the iPhone, or any mention iPhone OS 4.0.
It will be interesting to see all of the apps that will be developed for the iPad. I believe the product will be a success for Apple, but it falls short of a game-changing announcement, in my opinion.
I have added a new page to my blog, called iPhone, that summarizes my favorite iPhone apps.
One of my favorite iPhone games of all time is Doodle Jump. The simple vertical-scrolling gameplay is fun for hours of entertainment. This game is incredibly addictive. This is a must-have for any iPhone or iPod Touch user. You’ll love it!
Last night we watched the blu-ray director’s cut of Drag Me To Hell. When the movie arrived, I was made less excited by the movie description on the disc sleeve. I’m glad we gave it a chance. We really enjoyed it!
The movie has good casting, and the story is good as well. But what takes the cake is the sheer amount of over-the-top gore and gross-out scenes in the movie. Some of the gore may have been available only in the director’s cut, I am not sure about that. If you have the option, I’d watch this version of the movie, since the gore is so much a part of the overall charm of the movie.
If you like horror/suspense films, I’d guess that you’d like this one. Without giving away any spoilers, I’ll say that the parking garage and cemetary scenes were my two favorites. Add this movie to your list of rentals for sure.
Tonight, for the first time in the 2.5+ years that I’ve owned my Mac Mini, my entire OS X 10.6 crashed top-to-bottom. WTF? I’m awe struck.
The above text was my post to Twitter this evening. It’s true. I woke up my Mac Mini tonight and in the middle of writing an email on Gmail.com in Safari, the entire OS failed, resulting in a dimmed, dark screen saying to power off my computer and restart. I’d never seen that before in my life. A report was sent to Apple. What in the world could have happened? I only had three open programs at the time. Let’s hope I never see that message again.
I snapped a photo of my screen with my camera for evidence, but I’m not going to include that photo in this post because the screen showed information in my Gmail account with too much personal data.
I’ve been searching far and wide for a great free text HTML editor for the Mac. After several attempts, I have been unable to find one. So many of the programs I found were either discontinued or vastly underpowered.
On my Linux laptop, I’ve taken a strong liking to Bluefish. Bluefish is a great free, open-source text editor for programmers of all types. Unfortunately, the latest version of Bluefish that can be installed on Snow Leopard involves jumping through several hoops to get it on the system. Totally unacceptable.
My favorite Mac text editor for HTML and CSS is Taco. I used the 30-day trial and really enjoyed using it. In the end, I purchased the full version at a cost of $25. I believe that is a reasonable asking price for such a useful and well written piece of software. If you use a Mac and don’t want to fork out the money for far more expensive programs such as Dreamweaver or BBEdit, then Taco is the answer.
