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.
Treatment-Programs.com Launched
This week we launched the latest follow-on to find-a-therapist.com: treatment-programs.com.
This was an 80% rewrite of the old code-base. Some thought was given to going to a full-fledge PHP framework stack, but instead we opted to keep things light and simple. The Smarty template engine was used to handle the “V” side of an MVC application. This also benefited the application by providing a nice view-caching mechanism to increase performance.
Adodb’s ActiveRecord implimentation was used for the “M” part of the design. This put everything on a nice, solid database model which would also allow for migrating to some other platform should the need arise.
Throw in a splash of JQuery here and there, and some other JavaScript controls and voilà.
WordPress Conversion Underway
WordPress 2.5 2.6 was released this week and it was so nice that I decided it was worth converting my old Joomla installation over to WordPress for the main Silicon Chisel site. Another incentive is that my personal blog is also in WordPress – as well as a few other sites I manage, so it just generally eases the maintenance load.
The first cut over went pretty well, aided by the “MAMBO2WORDPRESS IMPORT WIZARD“ script by Rodney Blevins which – with some modifications for table names and the like – at least allowed me to get the primary content into WordPress.
It will likely take another week or so to get everything settled in, and finalize the plugins – but then I should be able to get back to writing about technology. Some topics I plan to cover soon include:
- Reviews of the Mac web design packages RapidWeaver and Sandvox.
- A look at the “big three” content management systems – well, at least as far as I see it, anyway – Drupal, Joomla, and WordPress.
- Some of the new Web 2.0 sites I’ve been beta testing.
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.
