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56k Modem?

June 23, 2010 0:16:11.024

Those guys at Adobe are keeping up with the latest trends:

But what if I hadn't moved up from 28.8?

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posted by James Robertson

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This Can't Please Adobe

June 21, 2010 6:34:37.497

There are plenty of pragmatic reasons to avoid Flash right now - using a more neutral format gets you on the iPhone and iPad, while not leaving you off Android and PCs. However, it also looks like there might be more tangible benefits - witness Scribd:

Over the last few months, user engagement on Scribd has surged, according to CEO Trip Adler, thanks to its transition to HTML5, the introduction of the iPad, and Scribd’s Facebook integration. Of these three factors, Adler says the conversion from Flash to HTML5 was by far the greatest driver for his document sharing company. According to Scribd’s numbers, time on the site has tripled in the last three months

That kind of response gets noticed.

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posted by James Robertson

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Will This Make Site Design Less Relevant?

June 5, 2010 18:30:16.413

I noticed an interesting feature for the upcoming Safari 5 - one that, if replicated in Chrome, FF, and IE, will make web designers a little less relevant:

Safari Reader: Click on the new Reader icon to view articles on the web in a single, clutter free page

Most sites have a header, footer, sidebars, and, with ads, all manner of annoying tactics to get your attention. If this catches on, it could do for typical web advertising what the web did to classifieds...

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posted by James Robertson

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Where is the Web Going

May 7, 2010 9:02:10.000

Tim Bray has an interesting post up on where the web is headed, and he starts off with this as one of his points:

The HTML specification process is controversy-laden , immensely ambitious, and is attempting to boil at least one ocean. There is no guarantee of success, no matter how you choose to measure it.

I'd suggest reading the whole piece. This assertion in the middle deserves some thought though:

The discovery, in the early Web browsers, that reasonably-typeset text which embedded simple forms and hyperlinks, and came equipped with a “Back” button, hit the biggest 80/20 point ever in the history of User Interfaces, couldn’t have been predicted by anybody; but it’s as true today as ever.

That was certainly true once; it's getting to be less true all the time. A ton of the apps I use don't work with the back button well (or at all) - Gmail being one of them. The dividing line between "web app" and "app" has been blurring for some time, and it's getting more blurry as time goes by. I expect HTML5 (or whatever comes down the pike) to continue that trend

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posted by James Robertson

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Flash - Not in the Majority Anymore

May 2, 2010 7:18:34.000

It looks like Apple has been quietly winning the battle against Flash:

As the chart [link above] shows, in the past four quarters, the H.264 format went from 31 percent of all videos to 66 percent, and is now the largest format by far. Meanwhile, Flash is represented by Flash VP6 and FLV, which combined represent only 26 percent of all videos. That is down from a combined total of 69 percent four quarters ago. So the native Flash codecs and H.264 have completely flipped in terms of market share (Flash also supports H.264, however, but you don’t need a Flash player to watch H.264 videos)

Wow, I had no idea. I thought Flash was still the biggest player - but it looks like Apple has already won that battle. As one of the folks on the Smalltalk IRC channel pointed out: "h.264 won the day that youtube started using it"

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posted by James Robertson

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Flash Not Dead: Film at 11

April 30, 2010 8:34:01.000

While Apple has unloaded on Flash, YouTube has quietly unveiled a new flash player for the site:

YouTube has started to roll out a new Flash video player across its site that features not only a completely new design, but also offers some nifty bits of information about the performance of the current video.

However this plays out, it is not going to be a quick thing...

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posted by James Robertson

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How Did People Survive Before Firebug?

April 23, 2010 16:05:33.770

I spent a large part of the day updating the look for the media landing pages on the CST website - like the Smalltalk Daily one. It had been using the look we had before the last update, and I hadn't gotten around to changing it. It wasn't that hard; I had a template provided for me, and I only needed to make a few tweaks to the content and stylesheet.

The bigger issue was figuring out what needed to be changed where - and for that Firebug was a lifesaver. Seriously, what on earth did people do before that tool arrived?

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posted by James Robertson

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Very Enterprisey

April 14, 2010 14:05:56.814

Maybe Oracle needs to get fewer experts building out their website. I've tried to download their database (I've got valid OTN credentials) with the following results:

  • Chrome (Mac) - general failure to progress past login
  • Firefox (Mac) - initiated a download, saved 0 bytes
  • IE (Windows) - failed to login
  • Safari (Mac) failed to login

And people wonder why alternatives are so popular - at least you can try them out without first sacrificing a few goats...

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posted by James Robertson

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Geeks Vs. Everyone Else

April 10, 2010 12:38:04.685

I think Dare Obasanjo nails it in discussing the new official Twitter mobile clients:

As an end user and someone who works on web platforms, none of this is really surprising. Geeks consider having to wade through half a dozen Twitter clients before finding one that works for them a feature even though paradox of choice means that most people are actually happier with less choices not more. This is made worse by the fact that in the mobile world, this may mean paying for multiple apps until you find one that you’re happy with.

The The Paradox of Choice thing is real - there's actual research on it.

This move by Twitter is a rational business response to that dilemma - given a plethora of choices, most people will bail rather than wae their way through client after client, looking for the best one. If instead, the first hit in the app store (et. al.) is "The Official Twitter Client", that will make most people happy, and end their search.

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posted by James Robertson

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Embedded Video Works Again

April 7, 2010 12:16:13.407

Apple applied some awesome to the web today, breaking every single embedded Quicktime video out there. It took me a bit to figure out that it wasn't something I did; there's a lively forum topic on this over at Apple.

I've applied the workaround (fortunately, I use an include file for the embedded library - otherwise, it would have been hundreds of posts to script an update to, and then undo once Apple came to their senses.

In the meantime, here's a question: doesn't anyone at Apple test? It wouldn't be hard; just bring up an embedded video and watch the broken behavior, across all browsers. Someone at Apple needs a severe slapping around.

Oh, and I have a timeline of what I was investigating over on my Cincom blog

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posted by James Robertson

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