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.
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.
ShoveBox
If you’re doing code development on a Mac, especially if you’re bouncing onto your web server a lot, there are a lot of little commands and passwords that you need to keep track of. SSH passwords, SVN passwords and accounts, commands for SVN, Rails, Apache, mysql, etc. This is on top of the snippets of text for running the Mac itself and all the various signatures, quotations, recipes, contact information and other endless pieces of data you not only need to store, but be able to quickly retrieve but paste quickly into a browser, email, or shell window.
Enter “ShoveBox“, a great little menubar utility which keeps all this stuff close at hand. There are a lot of clipboard managers, but ShoveBox’s “Organize” window makes the difference. It allows all the clipping to be organized and colorized any way you like. This makes it real easy to track down that Subversion command for creating a branch you only use once or twice in six months – and then just drag-paste it into your terminal window.
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Macintosh: The Underdog Strikes Back
Many years ago I was a heavy Mac user, as well as a Mac developer. Then I was more or less forced to adopt the Windows PC – partly for economic reason, partly because I entered the PC game industry.
Recently, though, I acquired a MacBook Pro and am loving it. Not just for the fun of using a Mac again, but also for the fact that it makes a great development machine for web applications. So the site will be adding reviews and articles about the Mac, and using the Mac for software devlopment.
