Nestle here in Singapore has launched yet another new flavour of Kit Kat, this time targeting overworked students and reminding us to chill during our exams.
Nothing like concern for people's well being laced with trendy Japanese themes and… unabashed consumerism ;).
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:
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 ;).
Read in the Straits Times today that Tony Snow, the United States' Press Secretary has been having some pretty rough times medically over the last couple of years, times which got a whole lot rougher recently when it was announced the cancer he had been treated for in 2005 had metastisised in his liver. It literally made my blood run cold for a second, because its that exact condition that my mum is being treated for.
Metastasis occurs when tumour cells spread to other parts of the body and, as my family has felt first hand, is infinity more terrifying than the initial test results showing cancer; it means the dangerous cells have the ability to migrate. Essentially my mum will be having tests for the rest of her life because we can never be 100% sure the cells will ever be completely destroyed.
Let me make it clear, I think George W. Bush (along with my home country's Prime Minister John Howard) is a war criminal and that his administration is dangerously incompetent when it comes to handling world and domestic affairs, and I agree with virtually nothing that Tony Snow has said or apparently believes. But I can imagine what his family is going through, and I would not want anyone to have to live through that. Nobody deserves it.
I wish you and your family the best Mr Snow.
Follow up from original post: The Hinton Train Disaster
Sometimes when you have a weblog you stray from what you normally type about and end up learning something in the process. In my case, last year I posted about the Hinton train disaster that occurred in Canada in 1986. Even though I watch a lot of disaster shows on both Discover Channel and National Geographic, I must admit that this particular program left a real impression on me.
Looking back now compared to some of the other disasters I've watched documentaries about, this one in particular seemed on the surface to be so tragically simple: a freight locomotive failing to break in the designated overtaking side rails resulting in a head-on collision with a passenger train. The resulting investigation afterward though showed the problem was anything but simple: whether it was into driver fatigue resulting from unpredictable and drawn out shifts, signals that were neither large nor clear enough, the inherent risks involved with having freight and passenger trains sharing a single railway line…
I guess the reason this particular documentary has really stuck with me over any of the others was beacuse of the human element. An aeroplane with a failing engine or faulty rudder, or a train crashing as a result of bad weather are clearly no less tragic than a head on collision with a train, but in these cases it's safe to say they're outside human control; I guess the old adage was "an act of God". By contrast, the Hinton train collision was entirely the result of humans, which has brought up more questions since I watched the show. With all out technology, are we losing or forgetting the human element? With all our sophisticated machines nowadays, are we forgetting that humans are still ultimately the ones controlling them?
I've received a lot of feedback in the form of comments and emails from people as a result of my original post, including a very friendly post from Mrs Heyd who's husband survived the crash.
Who would have thought a quick dinner break on a weekday would have such a huge effect on how I view the world?
I have a lot of data. The fact I've used computers since before I could talk and have never deleted anything (and I mean anything, I have a picture of a horse I drew in Windows 3.0 Paintbrush dated 1990, which meant I was 4!) means today I have gigs upon gigs of stuff.
So yesterday to ease the latest squeeze on my three external hard disks (an Iomega 160GB, a Western Digital 320GB and a Western Digital 160GB) I purchased a Seagate 400GB one-touch external hard disk. I got the Seagate because it was the most affordable external hard disk that still has FireWire 400, a port which you are no doubt aware is becoming increasingly rare these days.
So I plugged in my new Seagate external hard disk into the FireWire 400 port on my MacBook Pro and proceeded to the Mac OS X Disk Utility as per the instructions in the manual (IRTFM), only to discover that not only was there no new device detected at all, but I smelt the telltale smell of electrical smoke. I panicked and pulled out the FireWire plug.
Since then I've tried to plug in my other external FireWire 400 hard disk and my old third generation FireWire iPod and neither are being detected. And I don't mean they're not being mounted, I mean they're not being detected. A check in System Profiler shows that there is nothing being detected on the port at all:
I've gone to the Apple support website and have read the FireWire troubleshooting article, reset the "Pro System Management Controller" (SMC), reset the PRAM and NVWAM without any success leading me to one conclusion: what I smelt was the smoke coming from my toasted FireWire controller or port.
Oh but it gets better! Because I got my MacBook Pro in March 2006, the warranty has expired. The FireWire port in the MacBook Pro is part of the motherboard, so I will have to have the whole board replaced which could cost an absolute fortune.
I'm not a lawyer and I'm not studying law at university, but I know that it's not my fault that my FireWire port is now dead. I used the Seagate external hard disk exactly as the instructions said, no funky business, and now I have a dead FireWire port and possibly a dead external hard disk. I know it's my right to demand a new hard disk from Seagate, but what about my damaged motherboard in my MacBook Pro?
If I was the kind of person who didn't use FireWire that much I could probably just ignore that port and get on fine without it, but I do video editing, I have a FireWire-only iSight and another external FireWire-only hard disk which I use because it puts less strain on the CPU than USB 2.0 does under very heavy loads… this port is critical to my studies and to my work, and it's completely dead.
And what about my other external FireWire drive? I have no way of getting the data off that until my other computers are unpacked from our move which won't be for another 5 weeks!
What do I do? :(
Looking for more information regarding VMware's Fusion product for Mac I came across a comment on a page on the MacWindows.com. See if you can see where the problem is.
Peter Mitchell of Adelaide, Austria uses it with iSight:
You asked to hear about the VM fusion beta. I have been using the VMWare Fusion Beta alongside Parallels Workstation and it goes well. It does some things that the Parallels program does not. It can run an iSight driver so that you Skype in Windows. (I haven’t tried MNS Messenger yet with the iSight.)
Another person mistaking Australia for Austria. I mean, I can understand how you can confuse them. Just for starters: one is huge island with vast deserts, one is is a mountainous temperate landlocked country; one is in the Pacific, one is in Europe…
Come on guys, it's not hard. As my grandfather (who lives in Australia) says: sheeeeesh!
Here's a little guide to help you remember: this is the region where you can find Australia:
And this is the region where you can Austria:
There. See? Wait a minute.
One of the biggest fads of the Web 1.0 days was the use of embedded Macromedia/Adobe Flash for web content. It made the websites that utilised it render painfully slowly, it prevented people with disabilities from accessing content, it completely stuffed up the bookmarking, text highlighting, back and forward functionality of web browsers, it made saving local and legally legitimate copies of online content next to impossible… I could go on all day. Today it’s largly been relegated to the displaying of videos and animation, which in my mind was what it was actually designed for in the first place!
Now in the Web 2.0 days I fear we’re making the same mistakes with AJAX.
AJAX stands for Asynchronous JavaScript and XML and in the simplest terms allows websites to send and receive data from a server when a web page has finished loading. Unlike Flash though which requires a third party, proprietary plugin (I’m on FreeBSD, when are you going to support me Adobe?) it uses the built in XMLHttpRequest API of compatible browsers, and displays the results as regular xHTML.
Problem is, with all these improvements AJAX is still really just an elaborate hack that twists the web to work in a way in which it was not intended. While it addresses many of the problems we had with Flash in the Web 1.0 days (any website using Flash for navigation or primary content display these days is just a joke, plain and simple), it still has many painful shortcomings.
I strongly believe the primary strength of AJAX; the ability to re-render web pages on the fly without a page reload; is also it’s greatest weakness. By removing the idea of a fixed, predictably reproducible state from a web page, it makes indexing, searching and bookmarking of pages infinity more difficult, if not completely impossible. As with Flash it also makes it much harder for people who use screen readers to access content, it stuffs up on the fly language translation services (which already have enough trouble as it is), not to mention all the work involved in creating pages that gracefully fall back to plain xHTML when an incompatible browser is detected.
Perhaps these problems can be addressed, perhaps they already have been and I’m just typing garbage here, but the point I’m trying to make is that AJAX by its own definition introduces some of the same usability problems as Flash and makes what should be simple tasks on websites that much more complicated to create and maintain.
So for the time being, my websites will be using tried-and-true CGI generated XHMTL with hyperlinks, you know, the stuff web browsers and us mere mortals know how to use!
Originally posted on my assessed study blog.
This morning over an Americano and an almond biscotti at the Coffee Bean I was reading the Straits Times (Singapore's main newspaper) and came across an article originally published in the Vancouver Sun by Michael Geller:
While we often hear people ridicule the country for its public prohibitions – new chewing gum, no spitting, no littering – Singapore has to be the cleanest country in the world.
During my stay I did not see any litter on the streets, despite the daily handout of flyers and the presence of numerous fast-foot outlets.
There is no graffiti; the streets are beautifully landscaped and maintained. Singapore is also one of the safest cities in the world. I think there’s a connection.
He goes on to talk about the automatic electronic toll systems, urban planning and so forth; suffice to say from the viewpoint of someone who as lived here for more than a decade nothing that was said surprised me, but it made me think a bit more about what I took for granted here.
As with the article on the opposite page about New Yorkers and Londoners having a low environmental impact because of their use of public transport, I believe a large part of Singapore's success stems from it's very dense urban structure. As a country with less land than my grandfather's rural town in northern New South Wales, planners here didn't have the luxury of sitting back and allowing urban sprawl because every square kilometre is valuable. The potential opportunity costs for each parcel of land are enormous, and each decision as to what should be done with a parcel of land must be given far more thought.
The end result of this dense urban structure is efficient public transport is made possible, and the micromanagement of public grounds that would be ridiculously expensive in an urban sprawl setting are economically feasible; not to mention the provision of utilities, internet access and so forth.
Singapore and Manhattan are restricted by their physical land space, London by its green belt and government control, and other very densely occupied cities for their own reasons by their very nature work because they allow people in a small amount of space to get about their business with much less effort and environmental impact. There's no need to drive for hours to get from your suburban homes to work or shops, because you're living right where your work is!
Some may argue that high density living isn't really living; my father for example longs for the days when we had large houses in Australia, but I for one much prefer it. I'm 21 and I'm still on a learners driving licence, but it by no means restricts where I can go here.
I guess I'll always be a city slicker ;).
I miss watching David Letterman :(
Well here it is past 1am here in Singapore and I have to get up early to go to the hospital again tomorrow so I should be going to sleep now right?
Right?
Anyway despite my best intentions of keeping this blog a strictly professional endeavour and keeping personal stuff down (hasn't worked out so far!), I couldn't resist doing this. I was looking at Julee's blog on my Bloglines account and couldn't help noticing she had done one of those "Top 10 things you don't know about me".
So while it's really early in the morning and not having slept for two nights therefore my judgement is more lax, here are 10 things you may not know about me… in perfectly formatted, W3C XHTML 1.1 Strict compliant markup of course!
