Thoughts on Flash
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Mike Mullikin wrote:
The simplicity and order of Mac OS X and iPhone OS development appeals to me these days.
Golden... my thoughts exactly :) -- Rogelio
RogelioP / BASIC-Pascal-C-Logo Spoken Here wrote:
The simplicity and order of Mac OS X and iPhone OS development appeals to me these days. Golden... my thoughts exactly
Well the simplicity and order of communism and socialism has appealed to many millions of people as well.
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RogelioP / BASIC-Pascal-C-Logo Spoken Here wrote:
The simplicity and order of Mac OS X and iPhone OS development appeals to me these days. Golden... my thoughts exactly
Well the simplicity and order of communism and socialism has appealed to many millions of people as well.
andrewjcarlson wrote:
Well the simplicity and order of communism and socialism has appealed to many millions of people as well.
And socioeconomic models are related to software development... how? :confused: -- Rogelio
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That move was done to stop Adobe's attempt to get Flash on the iPad. If Adobe had gotten it on, a lot of lazy programmers would have ported every flash based app they could and even browser plug ins would have been submitted. That would have ruined their attempt to push the standards. The point was to have developers not be subject to 3rd party adoption of new stuff. If Monotouch failed to update something for months after Apple did, the people depending on it would be stuck. What about when they make an update that takes advantage of some new tech and that 3rd party toolset no longer works because they haven't coded for it? This same update could break your App and you would be unable to respond. How many customers would that cost you? What about if a 3rd party stops supporting the toolset altogether and you now have to redo the entire thing if you want to put out an update? How much development time is lost? So which is looking out for developers more? Allowing some other company to drag their heels and cause your product to suck because of it, or having you always have the stuff you need when the implement it? The model is not perfect. But they seem to have the developer in mind as well as their own interests.
ragnaroknrol wrote:
So which is looking out for developers more? Allowing some other company to drag their heels and cause your product to suck because of it, or having you always have the stuff you need when the implement it?
Having you always have the stuff you need? At any point in time, Apple can jerk what you need out from under you. I develop with third party tools. Only rarely did I not get great support and a faster time to release for using it. For a very long time the debate in the microsoft world over silverlight involved the fact that so many more people had flash. Downloading yet another player could be a show stopper. (this is kind of bogus unless your talking enterprise customers) I look forward to porting our hand held device products to the new Windows Embedded platforms and using xaml based tools for doing it. I also look forward to the third party tools that will make my life better. I'm personally happy that microsoft doesn't threaten me with suddenly killing my product because it competes with them. I also am a fan of Google Voice. Thus I use Android and life is good.
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People don't hate CSS because there is a better way (i.e. cluttered HTML markup) - they hate CSS because it's a friggin mess when it comes to cross browser compatibility. Yeah, it's the best we have right now, but that doesn't make it good. HTML+CSS is fine for simpler layouts. It get very hairy very fast if you want to do tabs, custom ad rotators, dynamically resizing popups, etc, and actually have it work on every commonly used browser. Most of our website development time is spent finding CSS hacks to work around browser compatibility issues, because we happen to work on dynamic sites that require such things. Don't get me wrong - the IDEA is great. The implementations suck megaballs and have no consistency.
Mike Marynowski wrote:
People don't hate CSS because there is a better way (i.e. cluttered HTML markup) - they hate CSS because it's a friggin mess when it comes to cross browser compatibility. Yeah, it's the best we have right now, but that doesn't make it good.
It's not the fault of CSS. Most of my browser compatibility issues are due to how poor IE handles CSS. So, I put the blame where it belongs, and as such I hate IE but not CSS. :)
Jeremy Falcon
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andrewjcarlson wrote:
Well the simplicity and order of communism and socialism has appealed to many millions of people as well.
And socioeconomic models are related to software development... how? :confused: -- Rogelio
People have often used metaphors and analogies to compare the structure of a business and its philosophy to politics. In the very popular piece Jon Stewart did on the Daily Show, he referred to Apple becoming "the Man", which is a comparison to heavy handed government agencies, and referred to Bill Gates as "Commandant Gates". These are political comparisons designed to illustrate his point that there are similarities between the business models and government models. So to clarify, one of the main reasons for the popularity of communist and socialist reformations was that the previous institutions had left a bad taste in the mouths of people in those countries regarding corruption and heavy handed dictatorships. So, in an effort to rectify past failings of governments, the simplicity and order that comes from those government models were highlighted. So the idea behind the comment is that often, while it is a simpler and more ordered model for the average citizen, a great deal of power soon belongs to a select few, who then use it against their own people. When businesses create "simple order" as you state, it is not based on true simplicity and organization, but on enforced restrictions and limitations. To be a "citizen" you have to grant all the power to the select few in control. While other paradigms have their own flaws, the perception of liberty and freedom on other platforms has a strong appeal to many.
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Mike Marynowski wrote:
People don't hate CSS because there is a better way (i.e. cluttered HTML markup) - they hate CSS because it's a friggin mess when it comes to cross browser compatibility. Yeah, it's the best we have right now, but that doesn't make it good.
It's not the fault of CSS. Most of my browser compatibility issues are due to how poor IE handles CSS. So, I put the blame where it belongs, and as such I hate IE but not CSS. :)
Jeremy Falcon
If you read my post, I said the idea is good, but the implementations suck. IE/FireFox/Webkit are the implementations. While IE is pretty bad when it comes to following the standard, all the browsers, including WebKit and FireFox, have major gaping bugs. Firefox/Webkit at least TRY to follow the standard instead of making their own, but inconsistencies and problems in the form of bugs make it just as hard to work with CSS on those platforms. I'm not saying its the fault of CSS. I'm saying that working with CSS sucks because of the implemetations. If I have a great idea for a franchise and it should be awesome, but the owners of the franchise locations are all idiots and can't make my idea work, then my franchise still sucks regardless of how good the idea is.
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If you read my post, I said the idea is good, but the implementations suck. IE/FireFox/Webkit are the implementations. While IE is pretty bad when it comes to following the standard, all the browsers, including WebKit and FireFox, have major gaping bugs. Firefox/Webkit at least TRY to follow the standard instead of making their own, but inconsistencies and problems in the form of bugs make it just as hard to work with CSS on those platforms. I'm not saying its the fault of CSS. I'm saying that working with CSS sucks because of the implemetations. If I have a great idea for a franchise and it should be awesome, but the owners of the franchise locations are all idiots and can't make my idea work, then my franchise still sucks regardless of how good the idea is.
I can see your point, but after having using CSS for over a decade I think you're exaggerating on just how difficult it is to work around these bugs you speak of. Yeah, I hit a snag every now and again, nothing anywhere near the magnitude of what you're implying. If you know what you're doing it's not difficult - until you open up IE that is (and I'm not talking about just its box model either). And really, in my experience those that knock it the most are those that know it the least.
Jeremy Falcon
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MonoTouch C# code get converted to Objective-C code which links with mono touch library to generated the executable. Flash CS5 for iPhone Flash Code and Flash runtime gets combined into a application package. At runtime, the flash runtime runs the flash code.
Rama Krishna Vavilala wrote:
C# code get converted to Objective-C code
Then I don't think mono touch C# would technically qualify as "originally written in Objective-C, C, C++, or Javascript". And as long as the Flash runtime was "originally written in Objective-C, C, C++, or Javascript" who cares about the Flash Code, which effectively amounts to nothing more than data feeding the Flash runtime. Apple needs to get over itself.
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harold aptroot wrote:
Which is an other way of saying that it's dead.
Not according to the facts: http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/index.html[^]
harold aptroot wrote:
Remember almost every site used to have a Java applet even if it was just to make a funky menu that took an hour to load?
That's a different market.
Jeremy Falcon
Jeremy Falcon wrote:
Not according to the facts: http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/index.html\[^\]
I wouldn't call that site "facts". A wild ass guess is more like it. Read some of the methodology (if you could call it that) near the bottom. WTF is "Go" and why is it so high in the list?
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I can see your point, but after having using CSS for over a decade I think you're exaggerating on just how difficult it is to work around these bugs you speak of. Yeah, I hit a snag every now and again, nothing anywhere near the magnitude of what you're implying. If you know what you're doing it's not difficult - until you open up IE that is (and I'm not talking about just its box model either). And really, in my experience those that knock it the most are those that know it the least.
Jeremy Falcon
No, I'm not exaggerating, CSS has been the bane of my company's existance for the last few years. For "most" sites, CSS is fine. Complex layouts cause neverending headaches. I work with highly styled applications where every element should have a certain look, and the pages involve hover menus, popups, tabs, etc. Whether CSS is an issue of not depends how you choose to develop your sites. If you stick with the styles that come default with these controls (i.e. tabs and popups from the jQuery UI library), then you are fine because they already did the painstaking work of ensuring cross browser consistency. The jQuery UI themeroller also does this for you. But that's not what I'm talking about. When we develop sites, we craft a vision of how we want the site to look/feel/act, and then I try to make that happen. The "easier" approach is designing based on "how will CSS let me make this site look/feel/act", but that tends to be a restrictive view. If you are fine with those restrictions, CSS is alright. If you prefer to think "how do I want to make this site look/feel/act" then you are in for a world of hurt. Firefox bugs are just as annoying as IE inconsistencies. I've uploaded an old build so you can see the glory of incurable FireFox bugs (the site obviously isn't live yet): http://www.lotsofpizza.com Put in any postal code (it doesn't matter, A1A1A1 works) and click OK. Now, the two tables on the bottom of that page - hover your mouse over them and move the mouse around for a few seconds, and you will see FireFox inexplicably completely massacre the table layout. With the rewritten site we managed to avoid those bugs while maintaining the look/feel/functionality, but that's only because we are using a different framework and different libraries. If we had stuck with ASP.NET and ASP.NET AJAX, there was no easy workaround for the problem, and required hacking the crap out of the HTML. IE8 has a CSS bug for button:active where it offsets the background by 1px. There is NO reliable fix for this bug, we've tried everything. We just decided to live with it and put a 1px transparent border around each "frame" of the buttons. I can keep going on and on, but it doesn't really matter. CSS for complex site layouts is a bloody mess. We run into CSS problems all the time, not just snag every once in a while. It's not a matter of understanding, it's a matter of designing the sites based on how they SHOULD look, not how CSS will let us do it easily. I don't like to compromise on design,
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People have often used metaphors and analogies to compare the structure of a business and its philosophy to politics. In the very popular piece Jon Stewart did on the Daily Show, he referred to Apple becoming "the Man", which is a comparison to heavy handed government agencies, and referred to Bill Gates as "Commandant Gates". These are political comparisons designed to illustrate his point that there are similarities between the business models and government models. So to clarify, one of the main reasons for the popularity of communist and socialist reformations was that the previous institutions had left a bad taste in the mouths of people in those countries regarding corruption and heavy handed dictatorships. So, in an effort to rectify past failings of governments, the simplicity and order that comes from those government models were highlighted. So the idea behind the comment is that often, while it is a simpler and more ordered model for the average citizen, a great deal of power soon belongs to a select few, who then use it against their own people. When businesses create "simple order" as you state, it is not based on true simplicity and organization, but on enforced restrictions and limitations. To be a "citizen" you have to grant all the power to the select few in control. While other paradigms have their own flaws, the perception of liberty and freedom on other platforms has a strong appeal to many.
I couldn't agree more with your point stated. People, be aware of simplicity. Those who forget the past are prone to commit the same mistakes again Apple's new line of products beginning with the iMac, their software basis has been marked with one noticeable characteristic, RIGID simplicity, which is very appealing for people who does not know much about IT. For those of us who know better and live by words like customization, scalability, portable we require flexibility. How would you as a developer would feel if your ideas and ingenuity could not come to fruition due to inflexible points of view from revenue hungry companies like Apple? Basically, if we look back in tech history Apple has never drop the prices on customer. If they had monopolized the market back in the 80's we would still be paying over 2 thousand dollars for a single PC!
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Thoughts on Flash[^] by Steve Jobs Love him or hate him but IMHO he's got this one right. Thoughts?
For a prime example of how crappy Flash is, just look at where Silverlight is and how long it has taken to get there. It is gaining traction all the time and is incredibly stable. Flash is now being pushed by Silverlight and imo it is a good thing. I have researched and used HTML5 extensively and would still argue that it is still lagging well behind the capabilities of the plug-in marketplace. For content rich sites, Silverlight and Flash are still going to be around for a long time, HTML5 hasn't even been endorsed fully by the W3C. HTML is such a sloppy language and browser rending is not an exact art, so until those things are fixed, I vote for plug-ins that are consistent in their functionality and rendering.
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Thoughts on Flash[^] by Steve Jobs Love him or hate him but IMHO he's got this one right. Thoughts?
I agree with a lot of it, but... "By almost any definition, Flash is a closed system." - Except there are open source actionscript compilers. "Apple began with a small open source project and created WebKit" - Weasel words. I think Webkit is great, but they forked it from KHTML and didn't play nice with their developers. The ending is pure spin, Apple doesn't want Apple hardware turned into a commodity, easily replaced by cheaper, better hardware and software. Makes sense from their perspective, but vendor lock-in sucks for everyone in the long run. New Apple is the old Microsoft.