Saturday 13th February 2010
Sunday 07th February 2010
With all this furore about the iPad not having Flash, I thought I’d share this screenshot. Yes Adobe, I would have begrudgingly installed your Flash drug in the past because I felt as though I "needed" it, but having been forced to give it up when I moved most of my machines to FreeBSD (which you don’t support) I was forced to get clean and as a consequence I no longer use it even on platforms you do support!
Friends, don’t let friends use Flash.
Sunday 31st January 2010
Adobe has responded to the lack of Flash on the new iPad, that Apple tablet device thingy if you haven’t heard of it because you were teleported into the future or have been asleep for a few days.
[...] without Flash support, iPad users will not be able to access the full range of web content, including over 70% of games and 75% of video on the web.
Of all the criticisms of the iPad that have been thrown around since it’s launch barely a few days ago, the loudest seems to be the lack of Flash support. I’m going to get into trouble with a lot of people for saying this, but I consider it a feature, and on par with Google ditching support for Internet Explorer 6 on some of their sites.
Saturday 21st February 2009
One of the things that dismays me about most computer software is how incrementally newer versions are heavier and larger than the number of new features and useful functions they contain could explain. "Feature creep" is a term that describes the inevitable phenomena of increased sizes as a result of new features, but we start referring to software as "bloatware" when the increased sizes really can’t be justified anymore!
Case in point, this afternoon my dad’s corporate computer died and as a result he needed to use his backup home laptop which I hastily installed his work software onto (that’s an adventure for another post!). One of the design applications he uses requires a PDF reader so it can show documents internally. I thought "easy!" and proceeded to download the Sumatra PDF Viewer, an extremely lightweight (less than 1.3MiB) and lightening fast free and open source application that I’ve been recommending over Adobe [Acrobat] Reader and FoxIt Reader for my friends on Windows for a few months now.
ASIDE: I placed the Acrobat brand in square braces because Adobe pulled a Microsoft, only instead of changing a brand by adding superfluous information (such as Windows Internet Explorer) they dropped the Acrobat name from the reader, but kept it in their professional paid products. I wish I understood why people decide to do such things.
No such luck, this particular application requires Adobe Reader, despite Sumatra PDF’s ability to read and search PDF documents. I figured the application used some APIs in the Adobe Reader which the Sumatra PDF reader doesn’t provide, so I figured I’d bite the bullet and download Adobe Reader after all.
You know you’re in for a big download when the vendor provides you with a… download manager!
Now you must understand that given I’m a Mac OS X and FreeBSD desktop guy I’ve long since been used to having PDF reading functionality in my OS and desktop software so I haven’t needed to grab the Adobe Reader in a while. I had forgotten what a pain it really was! The condensed saga in three points:
- I visited the download page on the Adobe website in Mozilla Firefox on my dad’s laptop, but the page refused to load. I turned off NoScript and part of the page loaded, but then got stuck in an infinite loop and refused to finish. No amount of page reloads or waiting solved the problem. Giving up, I launched Internet Explorer (sorry, Windows Internet Explorer) and the page loaded fine. Crappy JavaScript, crappy page or both? Not sure.
- Once I clicked the download it became apparent this reader I was replacing Sumatra PDF with was almost 30 times the file size! I know it can do more, but 30MiB versus 1.3MiB?
- It seemed though that Adobe recognised the large size of this file, so they implemented their own download manager which downloads and decompresses the file as it goes on. It’s also designed in such a way that if you close the browser window containing the page where you started the download, the download manager closes too. Brilliant!
I’ve never really liked Adobe or their software, in fact I’d probably use Windows Vista or Windows 7 loaded up with Microsoft Office and Windows Internet Explorer before I touched a breathtakingly overpriced and bloated Adobe application. And believe me I have plenty more stories!
As for my dad’s laptop, he now has a functional replacement system which is slower than his work laptop was when it worked, but let’s just say it runs rings around it now that it’s not functional at all. Oh come on, you try and be funny when you’ve been traumatised by software! Reckon Bill Kurtis could still pull it off.
Tuesday 25th March 2008
While reading a fascinating interview with senior contributors about the improvements in FreeBSD 7.0 at the OnLamp BSD Dev Centre, I couldn’t help but notice a certain problem with the page:
Can you see it? I’ll give you a hint: it starts with an "A" and ends in a "dobe"! Yes, Adobe is advertising their Flex framework, on a website dedicated to an operating system they refuse to support!
Just for more fun, if you click on their advertisement on your trustworthy FreeBSD box as I did, you’re told you need to download Adobe Flash. Clicking on that link takes you to a page where they tell you that "We are unable to locate a Web player that matches your platform and browser".
Little hint Adobe, don’t advertise your products to people who can’t use them, even if they wanted to.
Friday 14th December 2007
When I published my last post here on my experiences with Snitter including it’s new Leopard skin, comparing it’s advertisement free interface to Twitterrific, and being a bit critical about about the Adobe Air platform it was written on; I had no idea that it would be the latter point that would generate feedback!
Today Daniel Dura posted a comment on my aforementioned weblog post:
Ruben, I am a platform evangelist at Adobe and also work closely with the AIR team. You say:
“Snitter is of course an Adobe Air application which means it’s really clumsy to install and upgrade, and doesn’t work the same way native Mac applications do.”
Would you mind clarifying this a bit? I know Jonathan provides an install badge on his site. Using that badge, you should only be 2-3 clicks from installing the application. If you had issues with the install or other problems, let us know.
I will do my best to answer your query! There are several serious problems I have with the Adobe Air platform, including the fact the applications don’t integrate well with the desktop systems they’re running on, they don’t install correctly when you use restricted operating system accounts, and it’s not open source.
Firstly, as web applications masquerading as regular applications, they don’t do a very good job with integrating with the desktop, especially on Mac OS X. For example, the OS X convention for small windows with rounded edges is that they can be moved across the screen by clicking and dragging any portion of the window. If you do this on all but the title bar in Air applications they don’t move, but rather unexpectedly select text and elements in the application.
This behavior really is maddening, especially for a messenger-like application which you may be attempting to scroll through or move around a lot during the course of a day.
Secondly, if for security reasons you use a limited or standard account on OS X for day-to-day usage and only uses the administrative account as a way for the machine to ask for confirmation and a password before you install software or modify settings, the Adobe Air runtime installer and any Air applications you attempt to install simply fail.
I’ll explain what I mean with an example: to install most software on Mac OS X, you either run the installer or drag the application package over to your Applications folder. In both of these cases if you are running in a limited account it will prompt you to enter the username and password of an administrator. In this way you never actually have to log into the administrative account because, just like in UNIX with sudo, you’re only using the administrative account to authorise actions. It’s the best of both worlds!
Adobe Air doesn’t do this on OS X. When you attempt to install the runtime, it automatically assumes it’s running as an administrator, then proceeds to crash when you try to install. The exact same thing happens when you use the "install badge" such as the one on the Snitter page.
The only solution is to physically log out, log in as the administrator, install the runtime, use the install badge to install Air software, log out and log back in as a limited user. This is the virtually the only software on Mac that requires this, and you even need to do it every single time an application is updated and requires an upgrade!
And finally, the little alert light started flashing in my head as soon as I read that Adobe Air uses Flash. I dislike Flash because:
- It’s not open source so requires the purchasing of proprietary and very expensive Flash authoring software (in terms of resource use and financial cost) that Adobe doesn’t bother making available for Linux or BSD.
- As a user of FreeBSD and NetBSD as well as Mac OS X, Adobe really rubs me the wrong way when they refuse to even acknowledge the existence of these operating systems let alone provide official clients for them. Adobe letting us users know we’re not worth their trouble.
- Previous bad experiences with Flash, as well as Ajax.
So even if all the above criticisms about desktop integration and access control were addressed and I could breathe in Adobe Air goodness, the fact is I could only use applications I write in it on only a small fraction of my machines. For a company that generates as much revenue and holds such a strong position in it’s respective markets, there is really no excuse other than arrogance I can see for maintaining this position.
I appreciate Adobe’s efforts to create a system for web developers to create client side, desktop applications and am glad that it’s providing competition to Silverlight and JavaFX which hopefully will help consumers, but these shortcomings for time being mean I won’t be paying too much attention to it, which is a shame.
