Tuesday, August 31st, 2010
Although a minority, there is still a group of people who want their iPhone experience tainted with Adobe Flash, so that they can view annoying banner adverts and watch videos buffer for 20 minutes.
HTML5 (especially for video) should be the way forward simply because, unlike Flash, it doesn’t feel like you’re wading yourself through tar. If Flash is like a dog when used on desktops, then surely on mobile platforms the problems are only going to be magnified?
I know Flash works on the Android, and it does so very poorly (it’s worth clicking the link just to see how bad it is).
Previously:
Tags: Adobe, Android, Apple, Flash, iOS, iPad, iPhone, iPod
Posted in Technology |
Sunday, July 18th, 2010
Surely the fact that I have to tediously force-quit the Flash process so often on my Mac, or that loading a full screen Flash video requires 2 minutes of the spinning wheel of death is an indication of it being an inherently flawed and poor quality product (at least for the Mac)?
How can Adobe have the cheek to complain about its exclusion from the iOS platform or the promotion of better HTML5 alternatives when they refuse to make the Flash experience adequate? What is more astonishing is the fact that there are some Mac users that still jump to the defence of the sluggish dying technology.
It is contradictory for someone to spend money and care so much about quality in buying a Mac and then to defend a product like Flash being used on the platform.
A solution is to remove Flash completely, but since some sites still insist on using the technology, the better option may be to use a Safari extension to disable Flash selectively (whitelisting allowed sites) and use HTML5 video instead (such as on YouTube). This can be done with Broken Box (which I have recommended before).
Sidenote: YouTube offers an experimental native HTML5 version of its video player but it is incompatible with some videos (such as those with annotations or advertisements). Broken Box includes an optional HTML5 video via QuickTime.
Tags: Adobe, Apple, Extensions, Flash, Internet, iOS, iPhone, iPod, iPod Touch, Mac, Mac OS X, Safari, Web
Posted in Technology |
Monday, February 1st, 2010
Steve Jobs addressed Apple employees at a town hall meeting and had some very intriguing things to say. Whilst, as TUAW mentioned, they are probably not word-perfect quotes, they offer an insight into the head of Steve Jobs and the future of Apple.
Steve Jobs reportedly said about Google:
“We did not enter the search business. They entered the phone business. Make no mistake: they want to kill the iPhone. We won’t let them.”
It should be noted that before Google decided to launch an attack on Apple by introducing themselves into a competing market, they (Apple & Google) had a very good friendship and had worked together extensively on a few projects (including the Maps application on the iPhone itself).
I don’t blame Steve (or Apple) for taking the offensive on this one and if Apple introduced a search engine of their own, it’d probably be the one I would use (assuming that their knack for design, intuitive user experiences and technology ports over nicely enough).
Steve didn’t stop there, he lampooned Adobe too:
“They are lazy. They have all this potential to do interesting things, but they just refuse to do it. They don’t do anything with the approaches that Apple is taking, like Carbon. Apple does not support Flash because it is so buggy. Whenever a Mac crashes more often than not it’s because of Flash. No one will be using Flash. The world is moving to HTML5.”
It has been a long time coming and he’s right. I hate how Adobe products (even Photoshop) seems to use their own user interfaces, despite Apple having a universal standard already. I hate how the shortcuts to hide the application are the same for everything, except Adobe products.
Adobe purposely broke the user experience because they got cocky and decided they could run things better, but they can’t. They really can’t. Their interface isn’t nicer or cleaner, it has a novelty feel which wears off very quickly. It isn’t appalling either, I’ll grant them that, but it would make sense to keep consistency within the operating system and the applications that use it.
Flash, like other Adobe products, is pretty sluggish and clumsy. It is the reason for most crashes I’ve experienced and I’m sick of it. A web without Flash wouldn’t be a bad thing for me, it’d be a better place (sort of). I get that Flash can be useful sometimes, and that is why desktops (even Apple desktops) use it. But I don’t want my iPhone crashing and losing battery over it.
Even if Adobe fixed Flash, I don’t need animated advertisement banners in my life.
As for potential, they have loads of it. They have created a wonderful tool for designing and image editing, amongst other things. Shame that they charge through the nose and shaft their customers by providing less than 100% in quality.
And while I’m here, since I’ve offered my opinion everywhere but my blog, the iPad is interesting but for the most part, just an oversized iPod Touch. I don’t think it is a flop (I blame the hype that frothing imbeciles created in the run up to the event). Eventually, the iPad, like other Apple products, will gestate into something really awesome.
P.S. I’m mourning for text-based books. I do hope they continue, there is nothing better than a physical book, in my opinion.
Tags: Adobe, Apple, Book, Flash, Google, iPad, iPhone, iPod, Mac, Steve Jobs
Posted in Technology |