Categories
Software

Loren Brichter On Tweetie

Loren Brichter is the author of the popular Twitter application Tweetie, an iPhone only application until the Mac version was released on Monday. MacWorld has a great little interview with Loren. One thing I really admire is that Loren really understands how to build a good application. Performance, ease of use, simplicity are all taken into account. Not just features and toys.

I thought this particular nugget was the highlight though:

..AIR apps are like modern day Java applets… sure, they run on every platform. But they also suck on every platform.

I’ve yet to find an Adobe AIR application I like even though several have great ideas behind them. Even on Windows, where I presume AIR has the biggest market share they all look strange, the UI is garbage and the performance is abysmal. On the Mac it gets even worse. Creating a Mac theme won’t help as my expectations for a Mac UI are different than they are on Windows or Linux. Java apps have the same issues.

I think this is why more and more “applications” are becoming web based. If your going to feel awkward and unnatural to the user anyway, why even bother with the installation barrier? Why not just be web based so you don’t have to download and install. As awkward as they may be, those that add Adobe Flash tend to make the problem worse by adding more strange feeling UI to their application. Adobe Flash does do good video, it’s a big reason YouTube became popular, but it’s really no replacement for user interface. Hopefully in 2017 when HTML5 is wrapping up we’ll have this problem solved.

Categories
Audio/Video In The News Politics

The Crisis Of Credit

The Crisis Of Credit

I meant to post this over a week ago but just left the bookmark on my desktop. Here’s a great visualization of the current credit crisis. Simplifying something and having it still make coherent sense and still stay true to the real story is nothing short of an art. This one is a real work of art.

Categories
Mozilla Web Development

Rebreaking The Web

It’s happening again. Once upon a time, browser vendors started adding their own features without consulting with each other and agreeing upon standards. What they created was a giant mess of inconsistencies across browsers and platforms that is still in effect today. Ask any web developer and they can tell you of the pains that they have suffered trying to make seemingly trivial things work everywhere consistently. It’s no easy task. Before IE 7, even an ajax required something along the lines of:

var httpRequest;
if (window.XMLHttpRequest) { // Mozilla, Safari, …
    httpRequest = new XMLHttpRequest();
} else if (window.ActiveXObject) { // IE
    httpRequest = new ActiveXObject("Microsoft.XMLHTTP");
}

That’s right, IE 6 didn’t support the native xmlHttpRequest object (more here). This is just one of many examples in JavaScript and CSS. document.all anyone?

The end result of this problem became to be known as the “Web Standards” movement. Simply put it’s an idea that code should follow a standard that results in consistent output across all browsers on various platforms. Write once, run anywhere. While it’s taken years for this to manifest, it’s slowly become a reality. Firefox, Safari, Opera have fairly consistent rendering (at least in comparison to the mess of just a few years ago on the browser scene. IE 6 was fairly poor in terms of modern web development, but IE 7 made progress, and IE 8 is Microsoft’s greatest effort to date to bring their browser up to speed.

Categories
Apple

No Flash For The iPhone

Via TechCrunch I noticed that there won’t be flash player for the iPhone anytime soon. I’m not surprised. I said this before.

Apple doesn’t want the iPhone to get the reputation of having poor battery life. Apple is said to have avoided 3G thus far because of power consumption reasons, instead opting for a lower powered EDGE chip. When Apple moves to 3G later this year, they will want to at a minimum keep the same battery life. Having Flash on the iPhone will mean a likely drop in battery life. Something they don’t want.

I suspect in 12-18 months when H.264/AAC is a more common encoding scheme, I think we’ll see a Flash component for QuickTime that can take advantage of the hardware on the iPhone. Right now there’s too much vc6 stuff out there.

Apple doesn’t want anything released to drain battery life or it will be accused of misleading consumers about average battery life. Keeping the CPU idle will help keep that time up.

I suspect the SDK will have some limitations on CPU cycles an app built can consume before it’s throttled in some way. For the exact same purpose. That’s fine for most things, most users won’t notice, but for video, any slowdown or bottleneck becomes very visible.

Categories
Apple

Flash For iPhone

Gear Live is reporting that Flash for the iPhone is coming. Given how many times rumors like this come around, I’m slightly skeptical until I actually see confirmation for myself.

That said, if there is an implementation, I suspect it will be a special mobile version, and very MPEG-4 centric. By that I mean H.264 as the encouraged (if not only) video encoding, and AAC as the preferred audio format, with MP3.

There’s a simple reason for this. AAC, MP3, and H.264 can be processed using hardware decoding. This means the CPU isn’t needed, resulting in lower power consumption. Many mobile devices have specific hardware for this reason. There is unknown hardware in the iPhone, which may very well be for hardware decoding.

By leveraging hardware decoding it allows Apple to offer things like video without sacrificing thermals or battery life. Since Flash can now use H.264 as well, it could offload some of that complicated processing. The CPU itself contains PowerVR MBX 3D graphics.

This could allow for most Flash to work, with much lower power consumption. The downside to this is that VP6 encoded video wouldn’t be able to use hardware decoding. For many online video sites (which use VP6 since H.264 is still very new) you’d have to run off of the CPU meaning more thermals and power consumption. A notable exception is YouTube, which thanks to Google’s work with the Apple apparently uses H.264 by means of a custom application.

Categories
Mozilla

Unable To Update Flash Player In Firefox?

Seems there might be a problem updating the Flash Player in Firefox. The CNet Defense Blog has some more information on the issue. Anyone else seeing this? Seems windows specific. Remember to keep Flash up to date as there are some security issues with older versions.

Categories
Software Tech (General)

HD Photo Now JPEG XR

Back in March I mentioned that Microsoft is trying to standardize it’s HD Photo format as the official successor to the ever so popular JPEG format. Well it’s now looking to become JPEG XR.

Suprisingly it’s still not listed on Microsoft’s Open Specification Promise where Microsoft lists things it won’t sue over. Hopefully they will update that soon. My understanding from what I’ve read is that’s the intent.

It’s a pretty interesting thing going on. Video on the web has improved by leaps and bounds over the years from a tiny grainy video object that took a decade to load, to instantly loading and still improving quality Flash / Windows Media / QuickTime. Photos on the other hand have been using JPEG for pretty much a decade. Most photography buffs don’t seem to fond of JPEG because it can degrade picture quality, but still love services like Flickr.

Will JPEG XR spark a photo revolution by allowing better quality?

Categories
Mozilla

Blocking Firefox

There’s recently been a lot of buzz about a list of sites that make Firefox sad. Having written reporter, I’ve done a fair amount of monitoring in this area over the past few years. Overall I think the scope of sites that still block certain browsers/OS is declining. By scope I mean quantity of sites/popularity of sites. More and more often the sites are less and less popular sites. Often they are either financial institutions (known for being the last to update their tech) or media related (and dependent on Microsoft Windows Media DRM). That’s not to say the landscape doesn’t need to improve. From where I sit, it says the landscape is improving. More and more websites are realizing the need to work anywhere. No site is happy with a 5% drop in traffic. That means they can’t afford to ignore a browser with even more market share.

Things are looking a little brighter. While it’s still not good for the web, Silverlight and Flash seem to encourage much more compatibility across browsers/platforms than Windows Media Player ever has. Flash has been a major win for Firefox. Flash is rather consistent across browsers making it a popular choice for media (think YouTube). It’s leveled the playing field, since lets face it, Windows Media historically has been lacking in Firefox, though recently improving. On Mac OS X it is awful at best. h.264 support will make Flash even more attractive to content providers in the near future who are still holding out because of quality.

An interesting point made by that list is a lot of sites are “IE only” because of buggy navigation menu’s, typically due to flyout and drop down menu’s. It really is too bad. Most of those implementations aren’t even search engine friendly (they often store the entire navigation in a JS array). You’d think that would be incentive enough to change.

So those are my somewhat random thoughts on the topic for the moment.

On a sidenote, other content of the site includes a how to on Firefox pencils that look pretty cool.

Categories
Apple Web Development

Safari On The iPhone

There is a message on the Surfin’ Safari blog about the new iPhone, but it doesn’t say as much as I had hoped it would. I want to know the following as a developer:

  • How close is Safari on Mac OS X 10.4 to how the iPhone renders? Are they the same version of WebKit or a fork? How can developers test without an actual phone? Is any Mac with Safari a good method? For the Blackberry we have the simulators. How does it differ?
  • What if any plugin support exists? Does it support QuickTime? Flash? Acrobat (or Preview.app)? Can it handle attachments? Can users download third party plugins? Or are they limited to capabilities of the phone as it ships (or through official software updates)?
  • What will the UserAgent be? Will it be the same as desktop Safari?

The phone is touted as pretty much a full browser, and Safari is up to the task. But I wonder how well it handles rich media through plugins. From the Google Maps demo, I think it’s safe to say xmlHttpRequest is supported.

I’d really like to see some documentation on how webmasters can prepare and ensure an optimal experience on this new device. Ideally it would be given in advance so one could ensure the best experience possible.

Categories
Hardware Software Web Development

Wii Browsing

Now that the Wii Browser is available, I’m really thinking I should check it out. It’s based on Opera. In my mind they needed to have a few things in order for this to not suck:

  • Fairly good HTML/XHTML support – Opera has that
  • Good support for CSS – Opera has that as well, but available for all small-screen versions
  • JavaScript Enabled – Opera has pretty good JS support, but not always available for small devices.
  • Support for Macromedia Flash – Especially with the popularity of YouTube, it’s needed

Apparently it meets these requirements. I really need to check this out. As a web developer, seeing something like this after years of crummy non-PC based browsers could be impressive. Screenshots so far have not disappointed.