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Smokescreen: Flash Player in Javascript
A pretty amazing piece of work, this JS Flash player looks far more advanced than the Gordon project which floated around awhile back. It’s apparently going to be open source, as well. I’m not sure something like this will work as a long-term solution, but it may be an effective way to get many legacy SWFs to play on platforms that don’t support Flash. If nothing else, it’s a technical marvel, for sure.
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Filling in the Gaps
Props to Snook for having on of the few rational takes on Flash. Much of the web standards community act as zealots when it comes to Flash, and it is, quite frankly, an embarrassing show of just how little they really know about the entirety of web development.
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Flash Works On Touch-Based Devices (Video)
Adobe Platform Evangelist Lee Brimelow shows how Flash on touch devices handles mouseover (hover) events. It handles them just the same as Safari on iPhone does — it dispatches a mouseover event on the first touch, and a click event on the second.
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Disastrous Flash demo heaps further embarrassment on Adobe
The Telegraph writes up the FlashCamp Seattle debacle with a typically divisive headline. Of all the publications that have ever mentioned my name, I think The Telegraph is probably the most widely-distributed. Crazy.
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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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Uploadiify JQuery File Upload Plugin
What it says it is.
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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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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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Authentic Jobs: Bainbridge Studios, Seattle: Web/Interface Designers
Bainbridge, a small studio here in Seattle, is looking for freelancers to do both web design (potentially with HTML/CSS work) and [Flash development[(http://www.authenticjobs.com/jobs/1576).
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Accidental APIs: NFL edition
My former co-worker Matt Croydon cleverly looks under the hood of NFL.com’s in-game update Flash app, and finds it’s powered by JSON-formated versions of the data — meaning it’s there for the taking. Makes me wonder how many “accidental APIs” are out there, if we check out the source XML and JSON files for various Flash widgets.
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Daniel Mall and Shaun Inman: Cross-Pollination: Breeding a Better Web.
Even though I don’t like the crowd-sourcing, I”m still not above suggesting everyone go and vote for this panel. I’d love to see it, myself!
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W3C: Where are the web designers and developers?
The W3C acts, essentially, as the organization which creates the tools I work with to do my job as a web designer. They create the specifications I’m supposed to code to, determine the direction future versions of these specs will take, decide what issues are important to address, and generally tell me how to do my job.
But there’s just one problem: not a single one of them are working web designers or developers, from what I can tell. Why should I take them seriously?
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Apple Profiles: Joshua Davis
I’ve always been fascinated by Joshua’s work. Can’t wait to see him at The Future of Web Design New York in November.
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FIVe3D
Open source 3D library written in Actionscript. Looks interesting!
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MSNBC.com Interactive: Nation At Risk?
A really nice interactive infographic by my friends over at MSNBC.com (why haven’t I seen you guys yet since I moved here?!).
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Basement.org: Flash Bumptop
This, my friends, is why I keep trying to tell you all not to ignore Flash as a deployment platform. Sure, it’s not for everything, but it’s obviously the best tool for this job. don’t think anyone would want to try to do this with JavaScript. :)
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Adobe Flash versus Cole Porter, songwriter
Today, while venturing into the usually painful-to-read comments at Gizmodo, I ran across a real gem. A reader dropped one of the best analogies I’ve heard in a very long time. A little context: Gizmodo ran a mildly-sensationalist story about how the iPhone’s web browser is missing some common funtionality — notably Flash and Java support. In the piece, they quoted Steve Jobs, who awkwardly had said, “Our innovative approach, using Web 2.0-based standards, lets developers create amazing new applications while keeping the iPhone secure and reliable.”
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The-Flash-Files.com
A nice interactive piece that challenges the common perceptions that Flash is inaccessible, unmaintainable, not deep-linkable, and more. I’m still astonished every day at how many otherwise intelligent web designers think Flash is a bad technology. Most people who bash Flash have never used Flash, and they really have no idea what it can and can’t do.
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Aral Balkan: Flash developers don’t know the web
The title is a sweeping statement that Aral himself admits is an attention-grabber more than anything. But, Aral’s real point is that many Flash developers haven’t a clue what’s going on in “our” world of web standards, web apps (Flickr, Twitter, Upcoming, etc.), mashups, and so forth. Obviously there are exceptions, but my experience suggests that Aral is mostly correct here. The flip side, of course, is that most of us have almost no clue what is going on in their world of brand experiences, web-based games, and web video.
That’s okay — not everyone needs to know everything. But, I do think a better understanding of the “other” technology from both camps would go a long way towards promoting a more rich web. I’ve been saying it over and over, but these two camps really need to stop being so separate and get together on things more often.
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Andy Budd suggests CSS 2.2
A great post by Andy in response to the incredibly slow pace of innovation in CSS. Most of the CSS3 modules have been more or less ready to go for five years, and yet no browser really supports them. WTF? Andy suggests an interim CSS 2.2. Personally, I’m not as interested in interim solutions as I am in solving the core problem: why the hell must we wait five years in order to use the next version of CSS?
I left a long comment on Andy’s post detailing my thoughts — which include the suggestion that maybe Flash is the way to go, if the W3C and CSS can’t keep up.
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Future of Web Design 2007: Standards vs Flash
A nice set of notes on me and Florian’s talk on standards and Flash at FOWD.
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William Woods University: Got Duck?
This seems like an awesome way to get stoners to come to your school. Fun stuff. Via Coudal.
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Scrapblog: Create a world for your pictures
A beautiful personal expression site based around the idea of scrapbooking, with a gorgeous Flash-based UI and set of wonderfully feminine default templates by the likes of Veerle Pieters and Cindy Li (and others, too). Includes spport for pulling your photos from Flickr, and several other services.
This is what happens when people take decidedly geeky things (blogs, open APIs, wizzy Flash UIs, and so forth) and mash them up with things real (as in non-geeky) people want. Congrats to everyone involved with this — it looks like a really, really impressive web application.
Sidenote: between this and Picnik, the Flash developers are kind of kicking our ass on the web app front. Where are the web standards-based apps that work this well?
Sidenote #2: Anyone know what backend technologies are used in Scrapblog?
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DOM Scripting: The Ajax/Flash continuum
“Flash isn’t a diry word. Sometimes it’s a better solution than Ajax.” A-fucking-men, Jeremy. Keep beating that drum.
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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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Modest Maps: A Clean Slate for Your Maps
A BSD-licensed display and interaction library for tile-based maps (Yahoo, Google, etc.) in Flash, written in ActionScript 2.0. Basically, this gives you a totally clean map, with no default display for markers, widgets, etc. — so that you can build the interface bits as you wish, rather than being beholden to the ones Yahoo, Google, and the others give you out of the box. Great idea.
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Dan Webb: Flash vs. Ajax: It’s time to expand your toolbox
The contingent of web standards-oriented designers and developers looking to add Flash to their bag of tricks without compromising their ideals is growing. w00t.
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Polar Clock Screensaver
Let me preface this by saying that I am not a screensaver guy. With that out of the: damn this OS X screensaver kicks ass! Beautiful time visualization. Love it. Thanks, Nix.
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Playground Blues: Make Flash and Javascript Sing
Nathan has a nice little tutorial on how to make Flash play nice with Javascript, so that you can call Actionscript functions from Javascript and vice-versa. This is exactly the type of interaction between web standards and Flash that I’ve been wanting to see. Be sure to check his example wherein a playlist in HTML triggers Flash videos to start. Rally good stuff.
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Picnik: Edit your flickr photos online
Wow, this is one of the most impressive web apps I’ve ever seen. It lets you do iPhoto-like editing of your photos in the browser (works with Flickr and other photo sharing sites, as well as with images from your computer). Fix exposure, red eye, and so forth quickly and easily. If you’re not yet convinced that there is a place for “heavy” browser-based apps, think again.
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LJWorld: Primary Election Results
Local elections may not be glamorous, but they matter a lot to communities like this one, and they deserve a good online treatment from the local media. I think Nathan Borror did it justice tonight. Nice Flash work — and the basic layout may just be another mini-preview of where we’re going, stylistically, with the LJWorld.com redesign that will launch soon.
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Mall on ALA: Semantic Flash: Slippery When Wet
Nice piece by Daniel Mall on using Flash to automate image effects (and other things, too!) in otherwise-HTML pages. I’m so happy to see more and more interplay of Flash and web standards. Us standards-aware designers really need to stop shunning Flash — it’s great technology that does some pretty amazing things for us, many of which we could never do otherwise.
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swfIR: swf Image Replacement
Dan Mall, Mark Huot, and Jon Aldinger from Happy Cog give you swfIR, a handy way of easily applying effects to images in your markup, including drop shadows, rounded corners, and rotation. I’ve been using a beta version for a week or so, and it’s very slick. Although all the effects work well, I’m especially fond of the rotation, as I know of absolutely no other way to rotate an image inline. This would be another nice example of Flash and web standards playing nice, side-by-side. Well done, guys.
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Flash Video: Sorenson vs. On2
Really nice little Flash app comparing different video encoding solutions.
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Washington Post: onBeing
I’m a little late on this one, but I finally took a few minutes to really check out the first project Rob Curley’s team has done at The Post, and I found myself very into the stories. A very cool concept, some unique Flash UI work, and genuinely interesting and real people. I dig it. As with most Post projects, it’s Django-powered. Also see the related blog post from Curley.
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A List Apart: Flash Embedding Cage Match
There are approximately 1,342,973 different methods for embedding you SWF files in (X)HTML pages. Ask web-standards oriented developers which is best, and you’ll get approximately 1,342,974 answers. This article does a nice job of breaking down the differences between the most popular methods.
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February Updates
It’s been a while since my last entry, and while I don’t have anything really exciting to say, I do have a few little things to tell you all about — so it seemed like a good time for an update.
Read on for some news on a couple of speaking engagements for me, and a new feed available for your consumption at JeffCroft.com.
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Andy Budd: HTML 4.5 Anyone?
A great post by Andy on how the web is outpacing (X)HTML and CSS development, and the current version of HTML doesn’t cut it for modern web app developers. The question is, what’s the solution? The WHATWG has a proposal, the W3 is looking at developing HTML further, and frameworks like Flex has a different approach to solving the problem entirely.
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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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