Friday 21st May 2010
Saturday 03rd April 2010
From the very beginning of the first iPhone I defended Apple’s position against adding Flash support, and the same went for the iPad. Now it seems their position has finally started to pay off, and you won’t even need to be an Apple customer to benefit.
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.
Friday 11th September 2009
It’s been another very busy day today, though admittedly not as bad as yesterday. While waiting in a queue to have my teeth pulled and to deal with a banking teller (I forget which one ended up happening) I was using the Backgrounds application for the iTelephone that does exactly what it sounds like it does. Normally I uninstall anything with advertising on it in a heartbeat, but I enjoy Backgrounds too much. If they had a paid version without advertising, I’d buy it.
Now here’s where the silliness starts. While looking for some nice scenery images I came across a page that had a series of night time shots, and below in the advertising slot there appeared a link to a website on sleep. For the first time in many years (at least 5+) I thought an online advertisement looked interesting, so I clicked on it. It took me to a website that was completely designed in Flash.
If the penny hasn’t dropped yet, the iPhone does not have Flash… thank heavens! And yet here’s a company with a website that’s completely Flash driven advertising in a Google Mobile advertisement box that’s intended for an iPhone.
It’s like when I’m asked if I want new carpet or a patio extension when I’m living in a rented house, or when I visit a social anxiety support group website and the advertisements are for party organisers.
Saturday 07th March 2009
Because of some poorly formed intranet pages, I was only able to view them in Safari this morning for some reason. Because I already had that browser open I started opening several tabs and going to news sites etc. I clicked on one link and the above error message appeared after a few second long delay where the browser seemed to have completely crashed. Needless to say, it scared the heck out of me!
As a guy who usually uses Mozilla Firefox with more security plugins than ASIO or MI5, I’m used to strictly not having any dynamic content such as JavaScript, Flash, ChuckPeddle or even cookies load, execute or save data without my explicit permission: full stop, put the book down, have a cup of tea. The downside to doing this is a tiny percentage of pages break quite badly, but often adding them to your whitelist or temporarily allowing them in NoScript and the like will fix the problem.
People have told me I’m paranoid, but this little episode shows there really is value in doing this. If Adobe hadn’t included this check, personal information could have been transmitted to a third party. In fact, I used a web browser even as late as last year that didn’t include any of these security and privacy features, so for how long was I loading Flash files that could transmit information without my knowledge? I’d rather not think about it.
I talked about the Firefox privacy and security extensions I use in a previous post this month.
If you’re using my beloved Camino, as far as I know you can’t selectively add sites to a JavaScript whitelist, (hence my heavy hearted decision to move back to Firefox), but you can go into the Preferences pane and disable Flash. Don’t worry, if you go to a site like YouTube that needs it, you can always click the little Flash logo over the blocked content to view it.
Friday 25th April 2008
Despite having reached version 1.0, Adobe Air on Mac OS X still has some glaring usability issues.
When you load your Air application, instead of displaying what you told it to, Air prompts you with an update screen… almost every time. What if I have a good reason for not wanting to update yet? And not only that, but if you’re using a limited account for security reasons, as usual you enter your username and password for you administrative account, and as usual Air hangs during the update and you have to force quit. Adobe Air is the only application which requires me to log into my administrative account at all, just to update it and log out again.
You could say that I’m bitter than Adobe still refuses to release a 64 bit version of Flash, or any version of Flash on FreeBSD at all. That’s probably true. But I can confidently say that I’m only putting up with Air because Twhirl is the best graphical Twitter client. I certainly won’t be developing anything serious with it myself, nor will I be actively looking for more Air apps.
Adobe’s idea for a cross platform application framework that’s friendly to web developers was a great idea, but alas it seems to have failed in its implementation.
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.
