The Apple v. Flash plot thickens
An interesting security advisory appeared on Adobe’s support site this week:
The summary is as follows:
A critical vulnerability exists in Adobe Flash Player 10.0.45.2 and earlier versions for Windows, Macintosh, Linux and Solaris operating systems, and the authplay.dll component that ships with Adobe Reader and Acrobat 9.x for Windows, Macintosh and UNIX operating systems. This vulnerability (CVE-2010-1297) could cause a crash and potentially allow an attacker to take control of the affected system. There are reports that this vulnerability is being actively exploited in the wild against both Adobe Flash Player, and Adobe Reader and Acrobat. This advisory will be updated once a schedule has been determined for releasing a fix.
Now, the timing of this is mighty nice for Steve Jobs who’s under fire for not supporting Flash on the iPhone and iPad. But as someone who has to (try to) develop for Flash I can say I’m not surprised. Not by the security advisory nor by Jobs’ and Apple’s position. Flash player always crashes on me and it cranks up my CPU meters more than anything other than video conversion.
Don’t get me wrong, I love Adobe products – Photoshop, Illustrator, Acrobat – I don’t go through a day without them. There was a time when Flash was also one of my main axes. But no more. JavaScript libraries like jQuery can do many (if not most) of the things Flash has been used for up til now. Flash is a nightmare to develop in and lacks the immediacy of a true scripted environment (you have to compile the movie to see if it works).
Should Jobs have allowed Flash onto Apple’s mobile devices? From a pure market-share perspective: yes. But I can see where he’s coming from and being able to see some Flash-based sites at the cost of having your mobile device crash or lock-up isn’t a trade-off I’d really want to make for people.
Google Font API
Google added something new and slick recently – the ability to embed non-standard fonts in web pages as a web service called the Google Font API. It’s pretty easy to tweak a CSS file and your page headers to use this and there are about 15 or 16 font families to choose from ranging from fancy cursives to old-English style text. I added the following to my headers on my GonZoville site:
1 2 | <link href='http://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=IM+Fell+English'
rel='stylesheet' type='text/css'> |
and then changed the CSS for the various headers to include:
1 | font-family: 'IM Fell English', arial, serif; |
and voila, I have nice old-world style text in my article and sidebar headers. Awesome. For headers and the like this is a great way to do something fancy and/or unique without relying on a Flash-based plugin or off-screen rendering techniques.
Carbonfin Outliner
One of the first things I set about finding when I switched over to the iPhone was an outliner. As a developer-slash-designer-slash-consultant-slash-CTO I spend a lot of time making outlines of notes and tasks for things I’m working on. If it’s a “to do” I use a to-do manager, but if it’s something that’ll take weeks or months, I have to capture all of the steps and know where I am.
I settled on Carbonfin Outliner as it did everything I wanted and nothing I didn’t.
For starters, the outliner works great. It has all the standard means of moving things around. Items can be just an outline bullet or have a check-box on them, to mark off tasks as they get completed. Even cooler on the check-boxes is that the parent item turns into a disc which gets more complete as you check things off. I’ve seen outliners that have the checkboxes, but you always have to expand a parent task to see how far along you are.
Coda & Espresso
Coda
Espresso
Mac Dev Tools Worth Having
For a lot of people, the Mac is seen as the PC for a “creative person”. Very “artsy.” Now, I’ve spent years (decades) developing code on Sun workstations, DEC equipment, and PC’s – the Mac, and the tools that are available on it beat all that stuff by a wide margin.
For starters, Mac OS X is itself a Linux environment. So no more shoe-horning a WAMP environment onto a PC. It’s not needed (although I do use MAMP for the Mac because Apple chose not to install some of the standard PHP extensions as standard, but for most developers this may not be needed).
But what IDE does one run? Sure, you can install the ever-present Eclipse platform. Which is capable of pretty much anything and everything if you locate/install/configure/incant the right stuff. For me, Eclipse was just too much work to get running, too slow, and too idiosynchratic to use on a daily basis.
Thus enters Coda, by Panic. Coda combines a solid code editor, a rock-solid FTP client, a terminal, a CSS editor, Subversion, and site management in one package. If you code in Rails or work with CMS-based sites, the inclusion of a SSH terminal which remembers passwords is a life saver. No more neededing to reach for Terminal or iTerm when you need to launch mongrel or change some folder protection – just open a tab, hit the button and you’re in.
Social Networks 2.0
A question was recently posted on Linked In about the future of Social Networks. And not a week goes by when someone doesn’t ask me about building on of these behemoths. It’s hip, it’s trendy, and “everyone uses FaceBook or MySpace.” Lets ignore the business aspects of this for a moment – which drives much of the interest, anyway – and look at where this whole deal is heading.
When one steps back and looks at Facebook and MySpace, and view it as a “network” one can indeed see that it is a vast set of connections from one person to another, or many others. It is a network much like the streets of a city … it provides the means to get something from one place to another; or like a phone book … you can look up anyone you may want to find and contact them.
This is basically a “passive” network. When you really boil these services down, they are a place to put “stuff” where other people can find it, and a place to find other people’s “stuff.” Anyone who uses these still needs a phone, email, IM, TXT-messages, RSS readers, a Twitter client, and so on. So, the actual real-time networking between people is actually carried out outside of the social networking sites.
