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!

… so I decided to take the iPhone stencil for a spin in my Moleskine sketchbook.

Amazingly, the stencil fitted almost perfectly to the grid lines in my book. So I decided to map it out and publish it here so anyone out there using a gridded Moleskine sketchbook (let’s face it they’re the coolest) can use this guide to mock up there iPhone ideas.

You might have noticed that the stencil doesn’t fit perfectly so what I’ve done is rounded it up so you can use the grid as a reference if you don’t have one of the stencils.

Hello, I whispered. Is there anyone here? I noticed a list of contacts.
Hey, there are ‘others’ I thought. But how do I know if they are in here also?
I tried waving at one of them … nothing. I pinged one of them … and waited.

Eventually I noticed that one of my friends had replied to me so I continued the thread we had created and waited for their reply … and waited. You see here’s the first problem with Wave in these early days. It’s impossible to know if any of your Wave contacts are actually online and connected to the service. It was only after careful orchestration that I was able to converse with a friend of mine and that was after a round of emails and a couple of frustrating attempts at synchronisation.

I’m not sure why I found it so amazing that I could watch my friend as he typed in real-time. It’s something I’d seen many times before and in much richer ways. Still, it was impressive. The main thing my brain had trouble dealing with was whether the tool was an instant messaging device or an email alternative. It’s kind of both but with disadvantages in both camps. As an IM tool it is very easy to lose yourself in the thread and just as easy to insert your new messages elsewhere which completely loses the thread. For the same reasons it is confusing as an email alternative but this is perhaps where it’s strengths lie. What I mean by this is that despite being a bit confusing as an email alternative because of the way it allows you to insert messages anywhere in the thread this is why Google Wave will become a popular way to generate collaborative ‘conversations’ that sit somewhere between email and more static documents. How many times have you filled your in-box with small conversational emails between you and your friends? You could have used tweets or IM but needed a record of the thread and also needed something a bit richer … hey, who wants to see this YouTube video of a kitten being shot out of a cannon?! If this is you then you are going to love Google Wave.

There are some advancements I would like to see though. As mentioned, being able to draft your messages in IM mode would simply involve committing the draft after a carriage return instead of pressing the ‘done’ button, which is a pain when you are used to using your keyboard. Not sure of shortcuts as yet. Maybe IM mode should also prevent you from inserting messages mid-thread to maintain its temporal trait. I’d also like to be able to collapse the thread like a Tree structure. This will also help people transition to the non-linear dialogue that Google Wave proposes.

Another major headache in these early days is the lack of notification that your contacts are online. I have found a couple of options so far …

http://thatsmith.com/2009/10/google-wave-add-on-for-firefox – Thanks Chad.

and there’s an app for your OS X Menu bar but you need to build it yourself in XCode … which was great! Grab that here … http://github.com/hiroshi/unofficial-Google-Wave-Notifier/downloads

Overall I can see that GWave will definitely become an integral part of my intercourse especially in business. I can foresee a BaseCamp plugin that will allow me to publish and maintain messages and ToDo items as a Wave with annotated screengrabs and casts.

UPDATE: It looks like there will be a Google Wave extension for synching Waves to Basecamp … and it will be called ‘Campy’. All the extensions so far seem to follow this convention with ‘Growly’ also allowing Growl style notifications of updates to a wave. Read more on this here.

ANOTHER UPDATE: In answer to Seb’s question regarding new edits you can see if an edit is new and unread by the green border on the left side of the field. These tally to become the number of unread edits rather like unread emails in your in-box.

… and a link to a great extension for your mac that allows you to choose a hex in the Apple colour-picker dialogue.
Thanks Keith.

I recently discovered Skitch and have been raving about it as an Image Markup application. I’ve now also discovered that the Aviary suite also has an Image Markup tool called Falcon that works inside the browser and is coupled with a Firefox extension called Talon for quickly accessing the tools required to do a snapshot. This got me very excited as although I love Skitch for what it does and how well it does it the allure of doing the same thing completely in the browser was too much to ignore. So I’ve done some tests and here are my thoughts.

The Aviary Firefox plugin is great and allows you to launch your Aviary apps via a neat little menu bar button (although I wish it stuck to the design of the other buttons). The snapshot options allow you to choose a section of the screen, the visible area and also the entire page including the complete drop. This is also available in another plugin called Screengrab! and was a very useful way of viewing the design of a site outside of the browser. You can grab sites you admire. Like this one.

The first thing I noticed was that after selecting my snapshot area and hitting the save button it launched Aviary’s default Image editor Phoenix. I then had to save and create a file to open in Falcon. When I did eventually get to edit my image in Falcon I found it to be pretty much the same as Skitch as far as toolset and styling. Performance wasn’t as fast as Skitch overall but this is due to the Flash player and being inside the browser. Personally, this is the biggest issue though. For what I need to do with a tool like this the overall experience was too time consuming and I will be sticking to Skitch for the time being.

This is not to say that the Aviary suite will not be used. It’s important to remember that the Aviary snap will allow you to quickly get a screengrab into a very powerful suite of applications so if your work involves a bit more than just making notes and drawing arrows then this will be the better option. For example, if you were a designer working on some branding ideas and had snapped a logo you liked for inspiration you could very quickly get that snapshot into Raven (Aviary’s vector editor) and draw some curves out over the logo; rapidly generating some ideas for use later. Photographers could grab a snapshot of a photo from a site and open it in Peacock (the effects editor) so they could quickly play with some effects and ideas to use in their own work.

Aviary – I would allow users to login via the Firefox extension and set Falcon as an option when opening your snapshot.
Skitch – something I’d like to see in your tool as it stands is the ability to select an area or the entire snap and scale it up WITHOUT interpolation. I need to zoom in to show individual pixels sometimes.

Another feature I would love to see in any of these tools is the ability to draw a rect around an area of the snapshot and automatically render the rect’s dimensions in pixels next to the rect area. Sometimes I want to measure an area of the screen. The same kind of tool for stamping out the HEX colour of the pixel I’ve clicked on with an accompanying arrow or crosshair. This would be a great way for designers to deliver their designs to developers with dimensions and colour values all set out for them.

http://aviary.com/tools

http://skitch.com

UPDATE:
doodle.png on Aviary.
The plugin is available here.