I don’t want to bore you guys to tears, but Apple’s latest move to not support Flash (and thus 99% of web video) on the iPad is very disturbing.
The facts are simple:
Millions of web pages with Flash content will break on iPhones and iPads.
Like it or not Flash is ubiquitous.
Flash is controlled by Adobe but free to anyone to write code against.
Apple is doing this to try and control content distribution – IMHO.
HTML 5’s video support is years away from being an option to use on commercial web sites.
Since Flash is not supported by the iPad or the iPhone and since the vast majority of web surfers don’t have HTML 5, if we want to deliver video on the Web, we have to support two methods of delivery.
… Just like it was during the 1990’s browser wars, where we had to write code for IE and code for Netscape. Thanks Apple for bringing back the good old days! Jerks.
Apple has to stop being a bunch of iJerks and support Flash.
It seems that Apple wants to start a new 1990’s style browser war – this really sucks!
Instead of the war being centered around HTML and the DOM, Apple has decided to make it about rich media delivery – Apple does not like Adobe Flash and they are not supporting it on iPad and iPhone.
… Hey Apple, did you hear that Flash IS THE Web standard for rich media?
Because everyone uses Flash to embed video and audio on the Web today, blocking Flash on the iPhone and iPad (with special exceptions made for Youtube of course!) … is NO DIFFERENT than the proprietary tag wars of the 1990’s between Microsoft and Netscape.
In the original browser war’s, it was all about the software, Netscape vs. Explorer … this time the browser is the physical device .. iPad and iPhone vs practically every other device in the world that can surf the Web. Man this is really beginning to piss me off!
With the HTML/DOM browser wars, in the end, everybody lost … and I lost a lot of hair trying to build cross browser compatible websites!!
The iPhone and iPod Touch were the first devices to popularize surfing the Web from a small screen, using multitouch input to allow users to zoom in and out of Web sites that were originally designed to be seen on larger screens. But the iPhone and iPod Touch don’t support Flash, which is widely used for online multimedia content, and Apple hasn’t signalled that it’s interested in adding Flash support to its line of mobile devices.
… This doesn’t solve our web browsing issue but at least we can enjoy the creativity of the millions of Flash developers out there on the iPad and iPhone – something Apple does not want it seems.
Over the last 15 years, I’ve noticed that artist (including web designers) develop or adopt a distinct and consistent style that rarely changes.
… It seems that like leopards, artists can’t change their spots. It’s as though the brain gets hardwired.
We are not alone .. we lowly web designers stand with giants …
Consider some of these big (huge) names:
The Beatles
Charles and Ray Eames
Pablo Picasso
In the above, we have incredibly talented people who each defined a recognizable style. What’s interesting, is that once you’re familiar with say the way the Beatles sounded, you didn’t have to know the song to know it was the Beatles.
… The most recognizable style for me though, is probably Picasso’s … some weird looking stuff!
My point: Though these iconic artists were incredibly talented, like most artists, they had a style and they carried that style to the end.
I don’t have a crystal ball, but I do have an eye on things OUTSIDE the web design world … I pay attention to the stock market. Anyway, according to analysts who follow Adobe for investment purposes (Adobe is a large publicly traded company) Adobe should be releasing the CS5 suite of products by second quarter 2010.
… For non stock nerds, that means about mid 2010.
About the Adobe CS5 product line
Adobe (as is usual) will be releasing Photoshop CS5, Dreamweaver CS5, Flash CS5 and all the other CS5 updates at the same time. And from the previews I’ve seen, it’s going to be a big update in terms of the new capabilities CS5 brings to the table:
Flash will have 3D physics – totally nuts!
Photoshop has new crazy powerful cloning tools.
Dreamweaver will make it really easy to insert live data into web pages via AJAX.
… And I’m sure a heck of a lot more.
We will have many videos and articles covering these new products when they become available.
Every now and then I post a blog entry based on emails that I get. This time, someone asked a bunch of questions about SEO and gaining organic position on the search engines.
Because I am a lazy guy, I am just writing the answers to the questions … I think you can figure out what the questions were.
My ‘killer’ SEO reality-check tips:
Hi Wendy,
No one can guarantee #1 listings … not even Google! There is constant competition and thus positions will shift with time.
…. But, you can improve your positions on the search engines with proper SEO and web marketing efforts. In todays world, where there are a lot of websites to compete against … it takes work.
Are there ONLY three people in all of Australia who know how to position sites on Google properly? I doubt it … and I think there are probably more. On the other hand, there are a lot of people who CLAIM they know what they are doing yet they have nothing to show for it!
Would you need to rebuild your website completely – to be search engine friendly? Probably not, but you may have to restructure things if it is a really big mess SEO wise.
I just made a blog post on killerphp.com about the Killersites University, you know … a little shameless self promotion to stoke the flames of capitalism.
Anyway, within minutes of making the post, Google emailed me an alert (a ‘Google Alerts’) about the post I just made – I’m talking literally 2-3 minutes!!
… Google is getting to be hyperbolic fast – jacked up on search engine roids or something!
😉
What are Google Alerts?
Just in case you don’t know, Google has this service called Google Alerts, where you can ask Google to send you emails about any keywords you want to spy on. For me, I track the term ‘killersites.com’ to see who’s stealing my content and to track what the general buzz is, if any, on what I do here.
What can I say … Google kicks ass. Good luck to Bing and Yahoo.
We just launched the our video tutorial subscription service (Killersites University) about a week ago and we are getting very positive feedback so far:
I am getting through them easier than I thought…up to the second CSS lesson. Great site, by the way. I ALMOST signed up for a college/university course. Very glad I didn’t. Thanks for getting back to me so quickly.
Mike Ouellette
Provincial Student Information Systems Consultant
And about our PHP training video courses:
Great!!! I am just getting started learning Php so I had purchased the book “PHP and MySQL Web Development – great book but I found your videos much easier to understand. Thank you for making PHP alittle easier to comprehend : ) I know I have alot to learn ahead of me though.
Sincerely,
David
… There’s more, but you get the idea.
More video added to the collection
As promised, we already added new content to the University – about 40 minutes of video on basic web design, WordPress and embedding videos with Youtube. Not a bad start, but we are just warming up … our authors are working on new content (videos and articles) and so you can expect much more to come out soon.
