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Is This Really The Future of Magazines or Why Didn’t They Just Use HTML 5?
The Wired Magazine iPad app, in my opinion, is a pretty big UI and IxD win. It’s easily the best-designed magazine to come out of the App Store since the iPad’s launch, and it is, for the most part, a joy to use. But it’s built by packaging up two PNGs for each page (one landscape, one portrait), and frankly, that’s just an idiotic and incredibly inelegant way of doing it.
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On the Android Flash demo at FlashCamp Seattle
Yesterday, I moderated a panel discussion on HTML5 and Flash at FlashCamp Seattle, a nice little event put together by the smart people at Universal Mind. It was a good time. For a web standards-oriented designer/developer like myself, it was cool to see how the other half lives and what drives them. There are a lot of good and talented people in the Flash community, and it was awesome to get to meet some of them. The panel went well, and I’d like to put together a blog entry on the conclusions the panelists were able to draw — but not today. Today, I want to talk about something else that happened at FlashCamp Seattle.
In the opening keynote, Ryan Stewart, a Flash Platform evangelist at Adobe, demoed Flash Player 10.1 running on his Nexus One phone. When I realized he was going to show it, I got excited — I’ve been wanting to see how well Flash really works on a phone for years.
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Ben Ward: Understand The Web
A pretty great piece by Ben Ward discussing “web apps,” and how much of what is being talked about aren’t really “web apps” at all, because they’re a very different beast than the “interconnected bits of information” that make up the web. I think it’s fair to say that “web app” may not be the best name for these things — although I’m not sure what to call them, instead. I’m in full agreement with most of what Ben says — but this last line just doesn’t fly with me: “The idea of undermining the core function of the web to achieve that is detestable.” I fail to see how building native-like apps using web technologies “undermines the core function of the web” at all. To me, it simply adds another function. Just as Cocoa apps aren’t part of the web, but rather tangential to it, I would say native-like apps that live in the web are also not part of the web, but tangential to it. They sit alongside it, not hurting the web one bit.
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On Flash
In the days since the iPad’s announcement, there’s been an ongoing discussion going on in web circles about what its lack of support for Flash means for that technology, for Adobe, for video on the web, and frankly, for the web as a whole. I’m not really sure why this debate didn’t rear it’s head when the iPhone was introduced, or when Android was introduced, or when Palm’s WebOS was introduced (since all three didn’t include Flash support), but whatever. The iPad is here and we’re talking about it now, so here are some off-the-cuff, not very well-thought-out thoughts on the matter.
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Mike Downey: I’ve joined Microsoft
There’s something unsettling about a guy who’s spent most of his career as an evangelist for the Flash and AIR platforms taking an evangelism job with Microsoft on the Silverlight team. Downey’s a good guy, but suddenly his evangelism seems a lot less sincere and a lot more like what he does to pay the bills.
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Photoshop for iPhone
Sweet! Via Emily, on Twitter.
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Content Aware Scaling in Photoshop CS4
Wonderfully useful feature. Want.
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Digital Web: Photoshop vs Fireworks
Nathan Smith gets input from several buddies of mine, including Anton Peck, Jared Christensen, Patrick Haney, and Jenna Marino, on their preference for either Fireworks or Photoshop. The comments are definitely an interesting read, so I encourage you to check it out. I think it’s important to keep some perspective, though: the only people who really care whether you use Fireworks or Photoshop are other designers. Clients couldn’t care less. Debating the pros and cons can be fun for us design nerds, but ultimately it doesn’t really matter what you use — keep that in mind.
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CNN thinks flash memory is owned by Adobe.
> Just how will Apple meet expectations? Using the patent application as a guide, Apple appears to be making room on the iPhone for flash memory, which means an end to Apple’s standoff with Adobe (ADBE) that’s kept iPhones from easily viewing a plethora of Internet videos. Apple has said that Adobe’s flash media player, which is on hundreds of other phones, doesn’t perform up to Apple’s standards for the iPhone.
Wow. Just, wow.
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Snook at 24 ways: Christmas Is In The AIR
My buddy Jon has a great-looking article on getting started with Adobe AIR at 24ways. I haven’t fully read it yet, but I’m anxious to, as AIR is one of the thing I’ve been meaning to make some time for.
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Photoshop’s new logo.
It’s basically and aqua button with a hole in it. And a tail.
Weird.
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Jacob Kaplan-Moss: Dear Adobe…
“Dear Adobe — Acrobat (Reader) sucks gigantic mountain-goat testicles.” Kinda hard to argue with that.
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Mark Pilgrim: Silly season
I always enjoy Mark’s posts and I generally agree with his “Apollo and Silverlight suck because they’re proprietary” sentiments — but his statement that “Apollo is based on Adobe’s own markup language” is patently false.
There is no Apollo markup language of any kind. Apollo lets you create desktop applications using tools web developers already use — HTML, CSS, and JavaScript included. Yes, you can also use Adobe technologies like Flash and Flex, but these are not required in any way. In fact, I saw a demo at FOWD of a very nice-looking RSS reader app built entirely using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript (specifically, it used YUIext). Obviously, Adobe has a vested interest in selling you Flash and Flex, but neither is required to build Apollo apps.
So while there are many reasons to be weary of Apollo, one of them is definitely not “Adobe’s own markup language.”
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Adobe Creative Suite 3
Adobe now has full information about CS3 on their website. I want, I want.
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Stan on CS3 icons: “What a Mess”
Jason calls the new icons an “utter design failure.” I don’t really agree. I think learning that Photoshop is a blue “PS” is easier than learning it’s a feather on a white box. But maybe that’s just me. Great post and great comments, anyhow. Lots to think about here.
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Now showing: The rest of the CS3 icons
I kind of suspected the PS CS3 icon was temporary. Guess not. Overall, I’m not a huge fan of the new icon scheme visually, but it definitely works much better from a usability perspective. Plus, they totally ripped off Nathan. Also, here’s more on the new Adobe desktop brand identity system.
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Photoshop CS3 Beta One-on-One Preview
Really nice (and totally free) video tutorials on the CS3 beta.
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Adobe Open Source
In the immortal word of Hurley Reyes: “Didn’t see that one coming.”
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Andrei to Warnock: Please, give us web designers some frickin’ fonts!
Andrei Herasimchuk write an open letter to Adobe’s John Warnock asking for a solution to the dismal state of typography on the web today. A large part of the problem is that we have such few quality typefaces to choose from online. Andrei asks Adobe to release a core set of fonts into the public domain. This would be a great short-term solution and I’m all for it, but I still think in the long run we’re going to need a way to embed typefaces. Adobe has already solved this problem with both PDF and Flash, so it seems like they ought to be able to figure it out for HTML and CSS, too — but do they want to?
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Adobe Lightroom
Clearly intended to be an Aperture competitor, the Lightroom screencast portrays it as an unfinished — and quite ugly — ripoff of Apple’s app. That having been said, it does appear to have screaming fast performance — and Aperture definitely does not. As an aside, it’s nice to see a product from Adobe that is Mac-first.
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I, Cringely: Killer Apps
I’m not sure I agree that Apple must buy Adobe, but they definitely must ensure Adobe keeps developing for OS X, one way or another. Interesting read.
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DF: Translation From PR-Speak to English of Adobe’s ‘FAQ’ Re: Acquisition of Macromedia
Clever and well-thought-out, as per Gruber’s usual.
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Jeff Croft
I’m a digital product designer and developer in Seattle, WA. I currently work with nGen Works, and recently co-founded Lendle, a Kindle book sharing service.
Some of my clients include Facebook, Microsoft, Yahoo!, Copious, The New York Review of Books, The Lawrence Journal-World, and the University of Washington.
I’ve authored two books on web and interactive design and spoken at dozens of conferences around the world.
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