There’s been all kinds of heated debate and colorful invective surrounding the latest events in the Adobe vs Apple altercation. It’s hard for me to take sides because as a Flash developer for over ten years now and as a loyal Mac user for nearly 20 I’m finding that I do sympathise with both sides.

I find it distasteful that Apple should introduce section 3.3.1 merely days before the release of CS5 and Adobe’s new ‘compile Flash to iPhone app’ feature. It’s really quite underhand and will effect a lot of people’s livelihoods and damage business. Let’s not forget it’s not just Adobe that will be affected by this change. Unity3D and other 3rd party tools will not be able to release apps on the store. Some great apps like the ‘Star Wars Trench Run’ may need to be removed and as I understand it with my limited knowledge of these things some of the larger publishers like EA may also be affected as their games use 3rd party interpreters and tools that will be outlawed by Apple’s new rules.

On the other side though, Adobe should never have introduced this feature without the approval of Apple. They rushed this thing out and in the process have gambled with the livelihoods of hundreds of developers who have put their stake in iPhone app development with Flash.

Basically I think both parties have been very arrogant and have damaged a lot of reputations in the industry … mainly developers. We’ve got decent, honest people at each others throats when all they want to do is work together to make amazing, engaging content.

But the biggest victim in all this is the user. People buy iPhones and wonder why they can’t see the rich content they’ve come to expect. They struggle trying to view Flash content in the browser that hasn’t been built properly or they haven’t got the correct plug-in installed. What does the user want? Why is it all going wrong?

Fifteen years ago I was building CD-Rom titles in Director 3 which at the time was owned by Macromedia. We started using Flash 2 when it was released so we could include animated SWF content in our Director titles. We then started building Flash content for the web. At the time there was no such thing as ‘web standards’ … HTML was pretty basic and browsers were packed full of plug-in’s developed so you get the most out of your browsing experience. You had the ‘Real’ or ‘Quicktime’ plugin to watch video, ‘Shockwave’ allowed you to play amazing games online and ‘Flash’ exploded all over the web because it brought the browser to life and allowed us to build truly engaging rich content without loading new pages to update content.

In the present day we have a completely different type of internet. Web standards have evolved to the point that we now have a perfectly reasonable alternative to Flash integrated into the browser. HTML5 and WebGL allows us to build rich engaging content without a plug-in. In fact Flash is probably one of the few plugins people are still required to install into their browser to view a vast majority of content. And this is where Adobe have failed the user. Director died a death because people didn’t need to publish CD-Roms anymore and Flash should have evolved so the user didn’t need to use a plug-in in their browser.

Adobe should have adapted Flash so it output HTML5 and WebGL 3D content. The AIR runtime is fine on the desktop (although I will always choose a native Mac OS app) and will be just fine on the Android platform, hell they might even integrate it into their OS. But it’s in the browser they’ve failed and if they want to see Flash content on the iPhone they need to improve their tools (like Flash or Dreamweaver) so they produce standards compliant, rich, interactive content in the browser natively. This, after all, is what the user wants.

And Steve, stop being so evil. You’re forgetting what Apple was supposed to stand for. You should watch your 1984 Keynote speech every morning to remind yourself.

Some links on the subject …

http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2010/04/12/the-gradual-disappearance-of-flash-websites/

http://www.devwhy.com/blog/2010/4/12/its-all-about-the-framework.html?lastPage=true#comment8034519

http://mashable.com/2010/04/10/steve-jobs-adobe/

http://theflashblog.com/?p=1888

http://blog.codecomputerlove.com/2010/04/09/have-apple-crushed-cs5-flash-to-iphone-opportunity/

UPDATE: Apparently Flash to HTML5 was showcased during a ‘sneak peek’ session at MAX 2009 but has not made it into the new CS5 release. This is a real shame … Adobe could have made some real progress there.

UPDATE UPDATE: Apple have already started pulling apps. Scratch is an education tool built by MIT … it’s now not educating children in computer science.

Apple also banned this app for being too satirical!

Ok … so I’ve always had a love/hate relationship with Apple Mice. When Apple release a new mouse I always ‘love’ the idea of them but using them has always left me ‘hating’ myself for yet again wasting my money on a sub-standard device and proclaiming ‘why oh why can’t Apple get it right!’

Apple have not fared well with mouses, meeces, mice over the years and who can forget the absolute atrocity that was the first generation iMac mouse … my god that thing stunk! If you weren’t adjusting the thing in your hand to get it to point in the right direction you were treating the unbearable RSI that had developed in your arm within the first 10 seconds of using it.

It’s this point that is my main gripe with Apple Mice. I’ve suffered from RSI over the many years of pixel-pushing I’ve put in and the only way to use a mouse painlessly is to minimise as much as possible the movement required to get your pointer from one corner of the screen to the other. For this reason I’ve always used rather expensive high-resolution mice that I can crank up to a super-fast speed. Mac mice have never been able to match the speed I require so my wrist hardly ever has to lift off the desktop. For anyone suffering from RSI this is my top tip … go into your mouse settings and crank that speed up as fast as it will go. If you have trouble adjusting do it very gradually over a period of a few weeks but aim for the top speed that will result in micro movements of the hand with no need to lift your wrist. You may also need to purchase an expensive mouse with a high-resolution … something with lasers and shit. You might also want to stick to a WIRED solution … yes, forget the wireless option if you need very fine control. I’ve tried Bluetooth mice in the past and they are way to erratic to provide the sensitivity you need.

Which brings me to my MacBook and the fact that I’m actually spending more of my time on the trackpad that I am with a mouse and I don’t mind at all. Multi-touch on my MacBook is like a breath of fresh air and has totally revolutionised the way I use my Mac. In fact I wish I could do more with it. I love the two-finger scrolls and the pinches and stuff but I want to change spaces with swipes for instance or select text with pinches. With this in mind you can understand why I’ve been quite excited (and skeptical) about the release of Apple’s new Magic Mouse. This mouse promises to incorporate some of the great new features of multi-touch into the shell of a mouse without any buttons. Will the multi-touch be programmable and allow me to use the swipe gestures to swap between spaces? Will the sensitivity and speed of the mouse be improved? Will the swiping on the mouse cause RSI as you try to hold the mouse in position while also swiping? Will it run on my Mac running Snow Leopard without a firmware update? If it requires the firmware update is that going to kill my Mac? Hmmm … questions indeed.

Well, it’s just arrived so here are the answers …

So, there you go. Firstly I’m quite disappointed about the left & right click being a normal ‘clicky’ click instead of a ‘tappy’ click … do you know what I mean? I was expecting to be able to just gently touch to the left or right over the mouse surface to get a click but this is not the case. You can click anywhere on the surface of the mouse however but it is an actual ‘click’ lazy fingers!

My other slight gripe is the swipe action. It’s really hard to do while holding the mouse as you’ll see in my video above. I guess time will tell if I find myself using it. I need to test it in PDF docs to see if I can mimic the three-finger swipe functionality on the trackpad for paging. I doubt this will work.

Another thing that you’ll find is now missing from your life is the middle-button on your mouse. It’s now completely gone. I had this setup as a cool shortcut for ‘spaces’ so I could quickly manage my desktop. I’ve found a way around this however and here’s a screencast explaining what I did:

Overall though, a nice mouse that fits nicely in your hand, the speed has improved and the tracking seems nice and smooth. Not quite the amazing technology I was expecting but hey, what do you want?!

A Reg review : http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2009/10/23/review_accessories_apple_mighty_mouse/

Check out the guts of the new Magic Mouse : http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2009/10/22/ifixit_magic_mouse/

And here’s a history of the Apple Mouse : http://vectronicsappleworld.com/macintosh/mouse.html

UPDATE: There’s a third-party utility that will give you loads of extra gestures and control over your Magic Mouse … including the elusive tap-click and middle mouse button click. I’ve tried it out and actually I think the tap-click is a bit fiddly on the mouse. It’s fine on the trackpad where you have the entire area to tap onto but on the mouse you have to be specific about where you tap and 50% of the time your taps don’t register. Maybe Apple will get this right later on. We’ll see. Try out the software for yourself for free for 10 days here.

View on skitch.com

This is what happened when I tried to view this Silverlight port of Quake 1. I didn’t get the message for 5 minutes and then when I clicked ‘yes’ I was sent ot the site to upgrade my plugin. It told me I had the latest plugin and so I tried again. The same thing happened. I guess it may be something to do with being on a mac in Firefox but still … sort out the detection boys. Take a look at the Express-Install feature of the Flash Player plugin.

I’ve been seeing a lot of very clever spam getting through Askimet’s net lately. At first they completely threw me and I let them go. It’s only been recently that I’ve delved deeper and realised that everything isn’t as it seems. These are comments I’ve received …

is there a FREE program that i can add alpha channels to png imagesIMPORTANT: please include a tutorial on how …

and this equally baffling one …

Interesting. Not that bad as you are saying. Keep trying. Thanks

These comments were not completely out of context to the posts they were commenting on but were contextless enough to seem … well, odd.

Digging deeper (but not too deep) revealed that the authors were an assortment of retailers and services that could only have been spam clientele. You have to hand it to the spammers though, this is very clever spamming. They seem to be able to generate the comments based on other comments on the same subjects or are able to structure generic comments that fit the tone of the post.

Pearl has a similar problem and a great church sign image here.

Thom James has an interesting post on a similar and much less perceptible comment spamming technique here.

Anyway, I’ve installed reCaptcha to try and stop this. ReCapthcha has a novel way of using the data that users input …

reCAPTCHA improves the process of digitizing books by sending words that cannot be read by computers to the Web in the form of CAPTCHAs for humans to decipher. More specifically, each word that cannot be read correctly by OCR is placed on an image and used as a CAPTCHA. This is possible because most OCR programs alert you when a word cannot be read correctly.

But if a computer can’t read such a CAPTCHA, how does the system know the correct answer to the puzzle? Here’s how: Each new word that cannot be read correctly by OCR is given to a user in conjunction with another word for which the answer is already known. The user is then asked to read both words. If they solve the one for which the answer is known, the system assumes their answer is correct for the new one. The system then gives the new image to a number of other people to determine, with higher confidence, whether the original answer was correct.

I’ve just found out that Google Mail is marking email from YouTube as spam. An oversight considering they’re both Google companies don’t you think? Maybe Google themselves are equally as tired of the crap spewing out from YouTube at the moment. I really think the quality of the user-generated content presented on sites like YouTube and FaceBook is a worrying sign for Web 2.0. Really, how much more can we take? People are deserting FaceBook like rats from a sinking ship, Pirates and Werewolves jumping with them. YouTube is awash with puerile drivel, up-skirt voyeurism and random toddler beatings before you even get to the comments.

It seems that the whole Web 2.0 social networking phenomenon has proved that maybe the general public aren’t always the best people to generate content. Maybe it’s time to consider quality over quantity again.

… and then there’s Web 3.0 to save the day; the semantic web. Maybe that can filter out the crap for us? Well, without being too crude, you know the old saying … ‘You can’t polish a turd’.