Archive for the ‘Technology’ Category
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Apple vs Adobe
As a web designer, I’ve been following the spat between Apple and Adobe over Flash with interest. So how do I feel about the spat between Apple and Adobe? Whose side am I on?
Well, I’m happy that Flash isn’t going to be such a crutch anymore. If a concept for a site can be executed with HTML instead of Flash, it should be built in HTML about 99% of the time.
Right now though, a lot of developers don’t do that though because they like making things in Flash more than they like coding with HTML, CSS, PHP, JavaScript, and so on. To them, the important thing is the final product, and if they think it’s easier or more enjoyable to do it in Flash, and if Flash is perceived as an acceptable standard on the web, then that’s what they’ll use.
But now that their sites flat-out fail on the iPhone, they’ll be forced to build in HTML again. Frustrating for a lot of developers, but in the long run, it benefits consumers since they’ll get faster-loading, less buggy web sites. In the short run, it frustrates consumers too, but there hasn’t been much of a revolt since Flash web designers have always been supposed to at least build really simple non-Flash versions of their sites.
The trouble is that there’s a lot more than just web sites on the web, so while I’m happy to see this put the upcoming HTML5 into such a great position, HTML5 is just for building web sites while Flash isn’t. All the other things that Flash can do—programs, games, interactive animations, and so forth—aren’t really answered for by HTML5 because that’s not what it’s for. Sure, programmers can build programs and games for the iPhone, but what a hassle for all the people who learned to be Flash developers. It’s easier to make programs and games in Flash, and when completed, they’d work on any device that had a Flash plugin without any more work. I don’t consider myself a Flash designer, but I do feel a little sorry for my friends who are.
I can’t help but think that the biggest winners are people with phones running Android, WebOS, and other alternatives to the iPhone. They get to have their cake and eat it too. They’ll enjoy all the benefits of a web that’s built more on HTML5, and if Adobe’s latest press releases about plug-ins coming soon for them are to be believed, they’ll also get to keep enjoying all the cool things that will only ever be made in Flash. In other words, they get to eat the fruits of Apple’s labor while still being pampered by Adobe. And so to them, I say enjoy it.
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A terrifying adventure on my last day.
I had the last class of my freshman year on Friday. It started out absolutely awful, but by the end of it, I was definitely on cloud nine.
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Effort management, part 2.
I promised to take a look at a bunch of productivity applications last week, and now is the time where I deliver my reviews.
First off, here’s a reminder of what programs I looked at:
And here are their icons on the dock in the order they were mentioned:
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Effort management, part 1.
I’m not a Getting Things Done goon or a Zen Habits zealot. Last semester though, I used my Google Calendar and iCal (they’re very easy to sync with Calaboration) to help keep track of my assignments. Before that, I’d gotten by just fine by making mental notes, except for some cheap agendas my middle school forcefed us. So, it was my first real baby step into the world of using tools and strategies to manage time and work, and it surprised me that I liked it.
That’s not exactly what calendars were designed for though, and I don’t think I’d ever want to live according to a productivity dogma like some people choose to.
That said, there are programs that are designed specifically to make time management easier. They’re like self-organizing to-do lists, and the most important thing about them is that they have to save you more effort than you would spend without them, or else there’s no point. They must be mindlessly simple, trivially fast to use, and they have to actually be helpful even for the most casual users.
In short, they should enable people to be lazier without anybody else noticing. It’s as much about effort management as it is about time management if you ask me.
Since I enjoy experimenting with new programs, I’ve decided to demo several such programs. Here’s what I’ll be looking at:
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My recommended Mac programs.
Recently, I got one of the brand new MacBook Pros. Even though I had been planning on this for a long time and waited patiently for the new line to start selling, it surprised some people since I’m mostly known for being a Linux guy. I guess they didn’t know that my first computer was a Mac, I never stopped using Macs, I have always said that I like Macs, and that this doesn’t mean I’m abandoning Linux (you better believe I already put Linux on here).
Anyway, before it even arrived, I had spent almost a week just diving into various articles about Macs so that I would know all about the obscure, power-user programs that the savvy users had. I’m a geek like that. Then when the Mac actually arrived, I immediately grabbed all the programs that I had marked and began to test them and tweak them.
One of my friends also recently got a MacBook Pro, and he asked me to post up the results of my experimentation. So that’s what this blog post will be. You’ll notice that these are all free and most are open source too, so enjoy them without inhibition.
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