Rubénerd Blog :)

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.

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.

Read this post >

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.

Read this post >

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

In follow up to my previous post AJAX: repeating past mistakes where I discussed my views on why AJAX was heading down the same path as Flash, I found an article over on the Flash Magazine site entitled The hidden power of flash.

In the introduction, Barry Munden explains why he still uses Flash for his sites:

I was missing out the true strengths of the .swf format. The stuff that makes it, in many ways, far superior to other web-based design solutions.

And his secret for using Flash for his clients’ sites when he admits that on the mention of Flash said clients “run away screaming.”?

I don’t tell anyone I’m using Flash. Even more to the point, I build websites in Flash that a non-developer would never suspect were even made in Flash. There is no fancy animation, no music, no admonishment to download the latest version of the plug-in, no loading bars…just a simple, clean interface with attractive, readable buttons that behave predictably. Nobody knows it’s Flash and nobody cares because it does what it’s supposed to.

Smooth… don’t let the client know what you’re getting them into ;)!

I digress. The fundamental problem with Mr Munden’s entire article is he makes several assumptions:

1. Everybody is using the internet on a desktop or notebook computer with a standard display
2. Everybody is using a Flash-enabled web browser and operating system
3. Everybody is accessing web sites in the present, not the future
4. Everybody likes grilled cheese sandwiches

While it is true the vast majority of people do meet the above criteria, to simply target one segment of the web browsing public and ignore the rest reeks of late 1990’s thinking when people would only write their sites for Internet Explorer or Netscape Navigator and only for certain resolutions. It is now generally accepted knowledge that completely ignoring certain users is unacceptable.

Here’s an example. I run FreeBSD on my main production desktop machine, an operating system which Adobe/Macromedia has yet to support with their Flash plugin. If I were to use this system and access one of this writers’ sites, I would have to download a Linux version of Firefox, run it in FreeBSD’s Linux compatibility layer, download the Linux version of the Flash plugin, and cross my fingers that it works without breaking. And what if I were running another OS that didn’t have a compatibility layer at all as well as not being an officially supported platform for Flash?

Here’s another example. Say I have a shiny new mobile phone or PDA that allows me to browse websites. If I had one of the few phones or PDAs that support Flash at all, I would launch said browser and point to the writer’s website. Provided all the Flash files didn’t clog up my small browser’s cache and freeze it up completely, I would probably be presented with a page I would have to scroll for tens of screens across just to read sentences which wouldn’t be wrapped to fit the screen like regular text would.

I could go on and describe the real dangers of creating files that can only be read by proprietary plugins such as future readability and so forth, but suffice to say even if you were to believe the above examples are rare cases, they would be non-existant cases if as a designer you created web pages in the markup that the world wide web was designed for: HTML.

Fortunately like some sort of mind reader he anticipated my exact response and sought in the next paragraph to alleviate my fears:

OK, I can hear you choking. Cough it up and bear with me. You are probably thinking, What’s the point? Why use this nifty animation tool to build a humdrum interface that any geek with an HTML editor could replicate?

Because they couldn’t. Not one that downloads this fast. Not one that appears exactly the same in every single browser and monitor it appears on. Not one that prints clear and crisp and without cropping. And, for all of that, is a breeze to maintain. Try it yourself and see.

What’s that term that describes someone who sounds like they’re trying to convince themselves they made the right decision after they discovered they were in error, to make themselves feel better? Damn it, it’s on the tip of my tounge!

Anyway, those arguments are all pretty weak; he concedes it himself when he says “any geek with an HTML editor could replicate”. The fact of the matter is it is possible to do all of the above with HTML and CSS instead of Flash, and not only will the results work on more devices, platforms and in more applications but it will be in a standardised markup that, by it’s open nature, will still be readable in the foreseeable future by newer devices. Sure it may take more work, and let’s face it CSS compatibility can be a bit frustrating at times, but it’s the standard, and it’s what they’re paying you for as a web designer.

There’s an old adage in the BSD world: It works, so it must be good is flawed, it should be it’s good, so it will work. Just because you can generate the same content in Flash doesn’t mean Flash is as good as or better than the methods you replaced it with.

I do agree with the last line in his post though:

It can be pretty without being pretty complicated. Think about it.

True. Stick to plain old HTML and CSS ;).