In face of all the hype, fear, confusion related to HTML5 vs Flash I wanted to come up with a reasoned list of why I think flash is still the right choice for building many types of web applications. This is a list of things I could think of and find that highlight some areas where Flash has innovated ahead of where the HTML5 specs and implementations are at currently.

1. Touch interface support

Despite what Apple says, flash applications that were designed to work with rollovers work really well when used on a touch based interface. (see video here). Apple neglects to mention that rollovers are super common with HTML/js sites now and none of the mobile web browsers handle them particularly well. In addition, Flash ships with a full API for multi-touch that developers can use. HTML5 multi-touch support is still being worked out and is in very early stages of being implemented.

2. More Audio Codecs

Flash supports ADPCM, HE-AAC, MP3, WAV, Nellymoser, and Speex codecs. HTML5 defines an audio tag and leaves it up to the browser to decide what Codecs to support. Where does that leave you? As of this writing, Firefox will be supporting OGG and WAV, Chrome supporting OGG and MP3, IE supporting MP3 and AAC. To build a site with HTML5 you will have to choose your codecs carefully and make sure that users are using a compatible browser. As an aside, it is also possible to write pure AS3 decoders, so there is an OGG vorbis player written completely in Flash.

3. More Video Codecs

A lot like the story with audio, Flash supports multiple video codecs (On2 VP6, Sorenson Spark, and H.264). HTML5 leaves it up to the browser to support codecs so as a developer you have to know what browser your user is using and choose an appropriate codec. Encoding your video twice once for Firefox and once for IE is going to be painful. Even sites that are moving to HTML5/H.264 are using Flash as a fallback for browsers that don’t support H.264.

4. Color Correction

This doesn’t mean a whole ton to me, and might not to you, but there are people out there for which color correction is a very big deal. If you were building a workflow application for professional photographers for instance, having built in color correction could make a ton of difference.

5. Manipulate Binary Data

Actionscript 3 is capable of manipulating raw binary data. This enables you to do things like extend it to handle more file formats, network protocols, or media codecs. Javascript cannot yet handle binary data and I don’t see a proposal anywhere that would enable it to do so.

6. Peer-2-Peer

P2P is in the HTML5 spec but as of this writing isn’t implemented in any browsers. Flash supports P2P out of the box with frameworks to assist in helping you build applications that use it. P2P enables you to have end users send data to each other without a need for a central server. For example, if you had a video chat service, you wouldn’t want every user to stream their video to a central server to be connected. The load on your central server would be huge. You would instead have users that are communicating with each other connect directly to each other to transfer the video.

7. Binary Network Sockets

Like P2P, Web Sockets will take care of most of your networking needs, but it can’t handle binary data (or work over UDP). This limits the type of applications you can write. Also, as of this writing, Web Sockets is only implemented in Google Chrome.

8. Use the Webcam or Microphone

The Device APIs and Policy Working Group is supposed to be working on a recommendation for this, but there goal is to deliver a standard by Mid 2011. Once that is complete, browser makers can begin conform to this standard. If you want an application where users record photos, audio, or video – Flash is still your best choice.

9. Video Streaming

This one seems to confuse a lot of people that I talk to because they don’t realize that Flash has two mechanisms to service Video/Audio. You can host your media on a plain old web server and have it play as it downloads, or you can host it with an RTMP server and have it stream to the user. Streaming allows you to do things like bitrate adjustments (adjusting quality depending on the user’s speed) and jump around in a file. For example, when you click in the middle of a 2 hour long movie on HULU, the player jumps right to that point and starts playing. If you had this long movie hosted on a normal web server for download you would have to wait until the entire video up to that point has been downloaded.

HTML5 only defines the HTTP download type as part of the standard. There are specs out there for getting progressive streaming working with HTML5 but they aren’t all completely implemented and aren’t part of the core HTML5 standard.

10. Media Digital Rights Management

There are tons of different solutions out there for better protecting your content with Flash. I haven’t yet seen any DRM methods that work with HTML5. When I bring this up with discussions I get an earful about how DRM is evil and who cares if it isn’t supported. I tend to agree that DRM has issues and I’m not thrilled to have to use it, but try telling that to your boss who owns the content. Wether we like it or not, DRM is a requirement for many people who are serving up the content wether we object to it or not.

11. Built in Accessibility support

Developers often overlook accessibility but anyone who has worked on a site for a large corporation knows that this is a real concern since having a website that is not usable by disabled users opens them up to lawsuits. Flash supports Microsoft’s Active Accessibility (MSAA) API. As well as TimedText closed captioning for video subtitles.

Critics have rightly complained that this support only works on windows but the number of screen readers on OSX and Linux is limited and less standardized, so I see Adobe’s choice here.

I don’t see any mention of Accessibility in any of the HTML5 proposals. (let me know if it is there). I’m sure it will be trivial to write javascript that parses TimedText and syncs it with video but I would really have liked to see something about CC in the specs.

12. Massive community supported library set

This is an area where HTML5/javascript is catching up, but it is still a long way off. The flash community is massive and has tons of open source libraries for building almost anything you can imagine.

13. Full screen mode

Late Entry: 5/27/2010
HTML5 prohibits browsers from making any way to programmatically enter full screen mode. It allows browsers to provide a way to view video full screen but not other elements. With Flash a user click action can trigger full screen of any content. While some talk, legitimately, about security concerns – this feature is used successfully by many sites out there to deliver a better user experience. Full screen mode is used not just for video viewing, but for Kiosks, presentations, and many multimedia rich sites I’ve seen. I have also not heard of any nefarious sites in the wild using full screen to try to trick users. The combination of click to activate and escape to exit seem to do a pretty good job of offering an okay balance of security and utility.

There you have it

There you have it, 12 things I can think of that continue to make Flash the right choice for many projects. I’m going to keep the list titled 10 because some people will complain that #12 isn’t a feature of the platform and who makes lists of 11 things.

For the record, I’m not an HTML5 hater. I use whatever technology is best for any given job. I look forward to more standards, more openness, and more cool new tech. On those fronts HTML5 is looking more awesome by the day, but if I want to write an app now and now next year, it isn’t the right choice for everything.

Some quick CLI commands I use all the time but forget the exact syntax for.

Find all files that have been modified in the past 7 days

find . -mtime -7

Find all JPEGs that have been modified more than 30 days ago

find . -name \*.jpg -mtime +30

Move all JPEGs from the current folder (recursively) that are greater than 40k into the folder /tmp/2

mv `find ./ -name \*.jpg -size +40k` /tmp/2

Tell me info about files in the current folder

file `ls`

Tell me info about all of the mp3 files in this folder

find . -name \*.mp3 -exec file '{}' \;

Clean subversion metadata out of a directory

find . -name .svn -type d -exec rm -r '{}' \;

Use the above to make an export of a working copy by doing:

cp -R ./working_copy ./working_copy_export
find ./working_copy_export -name .svn -type d -exec rm -r '{}' \;

Any command that is deleting files will prompt you for each file. to go through them all without prompts, just run the command as root

sudo find ./working_copy_export -name .svn -type d -exec rm -r '{}' \;

You are receiving this email because you have a login, ‘terrencecurran’, on the Apache JIRA installation, https://issues.apache.org/jira/

On April 6 the issues.apache.org server was hacked. The attackers were able to install a trojan JIRA login screen and later get full root access:

https://blogs.apache.org/infra/entry/apache_org_04_09_2010

We are assuming that the attackers have a copy of the JIRA database, which includes a hash (SHA-512 unsalted) of the password
you set when signing up as ‘terrencecurran’ to JIRA. If the password you set was not of great quality (eg. based on a dictionary word), it
should be assumed that the attackers can guess your password from the password hash via brute force.

The upshot is that someone malicious may know both your email address and a password of yours.

This is a problem because many people reuse passwords across online services. If you reuse passwords across systems, we urge you to change
your passwords on ALL SYSTEMS that might be using the compromised JIRA password. Prime examples might be gmail or hotmail accounts, online
banking sites, or sites known to be related to your email’s domain, approachingpi.com.

Naturally we would also like you to reset your JIRA password. That can be done at:

https://issues.apache.org/jira/secure/ForgotPassword!default.jspa?username=terrencecurran

We (the Apache JIRA administrators) sincerely apologize for this security breach. If you have any questions, please let us know by email.
We are also available on the #asfinfra IRC channel on irc.freenode.net.

Regards,

The Apache Infrastructure Team

I can’t remember my password! doh!

Google Chrome is awesome. There don’t seem to be many people out there that will argue otherwise.

One of the things I like best about it is that they seem to willing to do whatever it takes to make the best user experience out of their product. They aren’t worried about the politics or competing interests that seem to plague progress on Firefox.

In my opinion, one of the best feature of Google Chrome on OSX is that it violates the Apple Human Interface Guidelines.

Apple has very strict interface guidelines that developers by and large tend to stick to. Partially because of Interface Builder, partially because of the community, applications on OSX tend to look and behave the same. This is in contrast to Windows where Microsoft can’t seem to settle for a single Widget toolkit for their own applications. So the guidelines are great, except when they are not.

Tabs in the title bar

The most obvious violation is related to tabs in the title bar of the UI.

from the guidelines:

The only controls that belong in a title bar are the close, minimize, and zoom buttons. If a title bar is combined with a toolbar, the unified area can contain the toolbar control and the toolbar customization contextual menu (these controls are described in “Title Bar Buttons”). Do not place other controls in a title bar.

This is in some ways just a nicety, but it is a new way to think about how to group information. It separates the tabs and makes it much more clear to a user that the back, forward, and URL controls are specific to the content in that tab. This also has the added benefit of making it possible for windows to be dropped into other windows to be merged or split.

Control focus when tabbing on the keyboard

According to the guidelines, controls should only receive focus if they are text entry fields. This means that hitting tab on a form will always tab over a drop down box.

from the guidelines

In default keyboard access mode, focus moves only between fields that receive keyboard input.

Anybody that has entered an address on a website knows what a pain in the ass it is when it tabs right past the state drop down field.

Apple suggests that application designers avoid this problem by limiting popup menus to be used only when you have short lists of items.
from the guidelines:

Use a pop-up menu to present up to 12 mutually exclusive choices that the user doesn’t need to see all the time. Sometimes a pop-up menu can be a good alternative to other types of selection controls.

Good in theory, but this isn’t how popups are used. Not in applications, and especially not on the web. Chrome tabs to select boxes on OSX like it does on other platforms. Google has decided that the web is their operating system and is using the same UX design across platforms accordingly. Perhaps it is time for companies to come together and come up with some cross-OS UX behaviors.

*This is actually one of my biggest pet peeves with the apple UI guidelines. They were set in stone many years ago and very rarely change. I understand the need for consistency but I think things like tabbing to all controls on a web-page need to be addressed. Perhaps they are long overdue for a review and overhaul. Apple, after all, is notorious for violating their own guidelines.

This morning I needed to connect IDE (IntelliJ Idea) to a FishEye/Jira server that had a self signed security certificate. Since IntelliJ (or at least the Atlassian plugin) uses Java to connect to https, it fails because of the JVM’s strict security checking.

Normally when this happens, it is just a matter of installing the certificate into the JVM keystore. There is an article and code that does this for you here. This blog post even has a nice bash wrapper that will download and compile this code for you on OSX.

When I tried to do this today, I got this error every time I tried to run this tool:

java.security.UnrecoverableKeyException: Password verification failed

After a lot of digging on google. I finally found the problem.

On Java for OSX 10.6 u1 and 10.5 u6, Apple changed the default keystore password from ‘changeit’ to ‘changeme’.

Such a trivial change, but annoying because changeit had been the Sun default forever. There is a funny post on the Apple Java mailing list where an engineer at Apple apologized and just sort of said they didn’t think it would be a big deal for anyone.

This post from Matt Fleming, has some more info as well as how to change the keystore password if you decide you don’t like this change:

sudo keytool -storepasswd -new changeit -keystore /Library/Java/Home/lib/security/cacerts -storepass changeme

I had some javascript that I couldn’t get to run in IE. It was driving me nuts. I spent a few hours slowly reading every line to make sure there were no stray commas or anything else IE doesn’t like.

After two wasted hours, I went to twitter.com, and it kindly informed me that javascript was disabled.

Except it wasn’t.

Another half an hour of google searching and I find out that I need to re-register the javascript dll.

Run this command from the start menu or command dialog if this happens to you:
regsvr32.exe jscript.dll

Windows is so dumb.

So In yesterday’s post, I posited that a custom chip from Apple might make it impossible for people to port other operating systems to the iPad hardware.

It turns out, according to this artice over at Bright Side of News, the A4 is simply a system on a chip. It is an ARM Cortex-A9 MPCore CPU mashed together with memory and other functions.

Porting something like linux to the iPad won’t be easy but it should be possible. As far as I know, no alternative operating systems have been successfully run on the iPhone and the iPad will probably have a very similar story. Theoretically, iBoot from the iPhone Dev Team is close to getting an Linux to load on the iPhone. Let’s hope they can bring some of the same know-how to the iPad.

wow. months of the blog world’s seemingly un-ending speculation finally ended with everyone feeling a little disappointed. The iPad is here, and we are all once again, wondering what we will use it for. I wasn’t going to post about it but there are a few things I think people are overlooking.

A4 Processor. whaaa?

We knew apple bought a processor manufacturer so this isn’t a total surprise but it is a big move that I think will impact things more than people realize.

First, apple is now in the business of once again using proprietary technology instead of off the shelf components. While it may be totally awesome now, Apple runs the risk of chips from other companies getting way faster quicker than their own and users waiting years for upgrades like in the PowerPC days. Luckily Apple has gone through processor switches before and knows how to package binaries that work on multiple architectures.

Second, and I think perhaps more significant, using a custom processor could stop the porting of other operating systems dead in their tracks. If apple doesn’t provide the right specs or compilers, it could be forever before we can see Chrome OS or any other Linux running on their hardware, which is too bad.

Missing Features

All the tech blogs are hard and fast complaining that there is no SD Card. personally I don’t think people will give a shit. Most people who have SD slots in their phones or Netbooks never use them.

No Camera – sucks. video conferencing and even (choke) A.R. would be cool on it.

No GPS – As far as I can tell there is no GPS receiver. This is too bad. It would make a great co-pilot tool on road trips. I guess with gsm you can get psuedo gps but it’s not quite the same.

Awesome Features

USB Charging – You can charge the iPad with USB. This means car charging. The thing I miss most about my tiBook was being able to use it in my car without killing the battery.

GSM unlocked. Yeah, AT&T sucks. everyone knows that. With an unlocked device, it opens up the possibility not just of other carriers supporting it, but perhaps real price competition. If this thing sells as many as they hope it would be a prime opportunity for T-Mobile to offer the same data plans for $10 cheaper.

Hopes for Accessories

I think the right accessories could save the iPad for me, here is what I would like to see:

DSLR Tether – If I could plug it directly into my camera and get shots full screen as I take them, it would be amazing for studio shots. Even better if I could use it as a remote while the camera is on a tripod. This should be possible with the SDK: so Nikon, Canon, get to it! I would switch to Canon if they pull this off first.

A really good, accurate, stylus – yeah, finger touch is great and all. but as @thisIsStar said on twitter earlier, it isn’t a Wacom killer. There would be a certain awesomeness to be able to sit on the couch and work in illustrator or photoshop with precision. I don’t know if the touchscreen is sensitive enough for good fine control, but maybe it is, and maybe they could do it with some sort of add on.

We’ll see

Anyways. I have no doubt apple will sell a ton of these things. At $500 bucks I’ll probably get drunk and buy one eventually.

oh. and yeah. did I read that correctly on the tech specs page? The OS still can’t read iCal .ics files sent as attachments in email? WTFx1000? My windows mobile phone from 8 years ago can do that.

The very first domain name I ever bought was tacoland.com. I accidentally let it expire and it was registered within days by a link farm company and then later sold to BuyDomains. man I hated them so much. Five years later I did some work for BuyDomains. I probably could have gotten it back cheaply, but I realized it was a stupid site anyway.

A few weeks after tacoland, I registered GrilledCheese.com, a site I still like but haven’t updated in like 9 years. Ah well.

It’s been about half a year since Apple announced that they would be allowing 3rd parties to develop integrated hardware/software applications for the iPhone. Here is a roundup of what has come out so far.

In my opinion, the most exciting announcement made at the 2009 WWDC was that the 3.0 version of the iPhone operating system would support integration with 3rd party hardware. Considering the number of stupid docks out there, I fully expected there to be hundreds of new accessories for the iPhone by the end of the year.

Here we are, a little over six months out, and I decided to dig around and see just what 3rd party hardware is out there with iPhone integration goodness.

L5 IR Dongle
Turns your iPhone into a universal remote.
link to site

WowWee Cinemin Pico Projector
Small projectors are being touted by tons of hardware manufacturers. I have yet to see anyone buy one but maybe since this one works with the iPhone it will be the first.
link to site

WakeMate
This is an armband that monitors your sleep to wake you up at exactly the right moment in your cycle. Even more compelling to me than the waking up is that it monitors your sleep and makes nice charts of it on their web site.
link to site

PedalBrain
This is appealing because rather than try to invent new proprietary hardware this good looking bicycle mount reads data from standard Ant+ sensors on your bike to track everything you would want to know about your riding. The mount is carbon fiber which pretty much ensures it will cost a ton but also that I will buy one.
link to site
Ant+

iCarte RfID Reader
This one doesn’t get much press, but a cheap reliable RfID reader could be just what the RfID industry needs to get their technology into smaller businesses and retail shops.
link to site

Square
Square is getting a ton of press despite their newness in the industry and the fact that their dongle looks like absolute crap and plugs into your microphone jack. Of course, their software looks tip top and the company was started by Jack Dorsey of Twitter fame. I won’t be impressed until I see one work in person or they beat out the wikipedia entry for the word “square” in google rankings.
link to site

Verifone Payware Mobile
A much better looking accessory from a proven player in the payment processing biz, the press is largely ignoring these guys because they are all in love with Square. What will probably kill these guys is the fact that they are a very 1.0 company and generally a pain in the ass to buy services from.
link to site

Nasa Chemical Sensor
As far as I know, this one isn’t available for sale but it is very cool to see that those way smart folks at NASA are out hacking up their own accessories. I recently watched a documentary about the Apollo Space program and wondered if you could now replace the 1975 NASA Central Command Center with a good iPhone app.
link to site

This is a good start, but I really hope and expect to see some crazy and varied 3rd party hardware add-ons this year.

• A real barcode scanner, you know with a lazer and not trying to make the camera do something it doesn’t want to.
• A voltmeter
• An oscilloscope
• Still no Dj accessories? Despite the billion iPod mixers, you guys can’t make an auto-tune mixer or something?
• Um, lazertag guns
• Expensive home automation systems, so people on MTV cribs can replace all the light switches in their house with iPhones.
• Something that plugs into my power tools. Don’t know how, but surprise me. Chainsaw hero?