I’ve been thinking a good bit about the predicament for Flash and it isn’t pretty.

I’ve been building Flash websites and applications for 10 years now.  I started right at the time when Flash 5 was arriving (I never really used TellTarget much, thank goodness). When I really got going building Flash stuff, I would say it felt “hot”.  There was no end of inquiries and the ability to make stuff move around on screen made people pretty giddy.

But what turned my Flash skills into a career was the fact that there was an overload of terrible Flash hitting the web.  The fact that Flash was so “easy” to produce, made every web shop around think they should use it, just because they could.  For this reason, Flash got a pretty bad name in a lot of circles.  But as I’ve always said, it isn’t the tool’s fault, its the untrained artists who were using it.  In any case… it created a nice landscape for me to stand out, so that worked well for a good long time.  It was exciting.

Platforms a-plenty

Cut to today.  JLOOP produces web applications of all shapes and sizes.  And Flash has become only one component of what we do.  We still produce full-Flash websites, and Flash is used to some degree in almost every project we work on.  The main difference here is that we never ever utilize Flash without providing an alternative.  With tools like SWFObject, it is so easy to provide a non-flash alternative in a seamless way… there really is no excuse not to.  Of course it gets more complicated when you are doing full-Flash websites, but the onus is still on us to provide a reasonable experience for users across the many platforms there are in use now.

Which brings me to the real point of this post.  Without getting on a soapbox about how things have changed… its safe to say that we are seeing more “fracturing” of the internet landscape than ever before.  And that trend will only continue.  Here are a few facts that point at this trend:

• We used to test on IE on a PC (back in the day).  Now we test on IE, Firefox, Safari, and Chrome on both PC and Mac (at bare minimum).
• We never used to test on mobile devices unless we were specifically working on a mobile application.  Now we always do some sort of testing on the iPhone browser.
• Video online blossomed via the Flash Player.  Today you can watch online video through applications on mobile devices, xboxes, silverlight, and HTML5 just to name a few.

We expect this trend to continue.  New browsers are entering the market.  IE6 is dying (finally!).  And new standards are emerging.

A new playing field

I believe that Apple has forever changed the game.  (I do not believe it is a game that will be “won”, however.)  Apple lovers & haters aside, the iPhone was the most significant change to the online landscape (beyond just mobile devices and phones) in the last few years.  And the exclusion of Flash on the iPhone cannot be ignored as a major turning point for Flash.

First let me say that I LOVE the iPhone.  I love the phone itself.  And I love developing for it.  I feel that same excitement I felt about Flash 10 years ago.  Apple has done so many things right and the platform delivers on a new set of promises that Flash is not ready to embrace.

It is not a random occurrence that Apple succeeded where Microsoft failed in the “smartphone” market.  Apple has created a closed and controlled platform – and it is because they understand users better than anyone else.  We don’t care WHY our phone crashes… we just find it completely unacceptable when it does, and we will blame the phone.  Apple has vigorously protected the phone in every way – from their SDK, to their control of distribution, to their (oft maligned) approval process.  I am one who believes that they are more RIGHT than they are wrong.  And they are winning because of it.

And I hate to say it, but having learned what I know about how the phone works and the rigors of developing for iPhone… I don’t see how Flash can meet the standard.  Not without a major shift in the platform.

If I put the Flash Player on my iPhone, I could then write a Flash file in about 10 minutes that would crash the phone – guaranteed.  That, to Apple and to me, is unacceptable in this environment.

But Adobe has a conundrum.  I believe that they have slowly been developing the Flash platform to a point where it is much more rigorous and standards based.  It is much more rigorous to write ActionScript3 than it is to write AS2 – and that is the trend they have been been pushing.  But Adobe’s biggest coup is also their biggest problem – every version of the Flash Player is completely 100% backwards compatible.  That means that Flash code I wrote in 2001, using simple ActionScript 1, will still run in Flash Player 10.  If they ever break that backwards compatibility, the platform would be in major trouble.

But the reality is they may not have a choice.  To me, the signs point to the fact that Adobe will be forced to deliver a new standard – more likely closer aligned to AIR than to SWF that will enable some sort of Flash capability on the Apple platform.  And its the iPad that clinches it for Apple.  IF the iPad is successful, and I believe it will be, Adobe will be forced to bifurcate the platform.  They have probably already lost the war in terms of video.  All video platforms are already working on HTML5 alternatives and I don’t think Adobe can counter with a Flash Player that works better and has less overhead.

I can see a path where a new Flash Player is introduced for mobile and “intermediate” platforms like the iPad.  One that no longer supports legacy Flash – but requires ActionScript 4 (hee hee) and a more rigorous standard of code development.  One that has more built-in control for runaway processes and crash-inducing code.  (the old “this flash movie is looping uncontrollably” pop-up has got to go.)

So where does this go?

Short Term:  I think Adobe must be working on a path forward and an announcement may come soon.  But the true short term test will be the success of the iPad.  If it really takes off, Adobe’s hands will be tied to providing some sort of Flash Player that passes muster.

Long Term:  I am very confident Flash will continue to exist.  It just works too well for the simple experiential design element, interactive piece, presentation, etc for it to go away entirely.  But all signs point to complication for developers such as myself.  JLOOP is taking strides to make sure we can deliver solutions for all platforms that have traction… now and in the future.  This will mean we need to be able to develop for the mobile world as well as the traditional browser-based web.  The app culture is here to stay.  But its not the only game in town.  For better or for worse, we have to be ready for anything.

This solved the conflict issues we ran into when needing Ajax/Prototype but also jQuery.

Just ran into one problem today though, I no longer was able to make Auto Updating Divs with remoteTimer function as that was left out from the new ajax helper.
With a little searching I found a jQuery addon: http://github.com/ncr/at_intervals/blob/master/jquery.at_intervals.js and then made my own remoteTimer function in the helper. Here is the first draft of it working for anyone who might have a similar situation.

and an example from my view:

There is some redundancy that can be cleaned out but for now its working and I like it.

Fancybox is a really nice jQuery plugin that gives you some handsome options for the div overlay.  We are using it in a new project, but needed to call it from Flash, and there was really no documentation for how to do this.  Hopefully our solution will help someone else.

Here’s the really simple javascript function we added onto our page:

<script type="text/javascript" >
function callFancy(my_href) {
var j1 = document.getElementById("hiddenclicker");
j1.href = my_href;
$('#hiddenclicker').trigger('click');
}
</script>

Now somewhere on the page we had to add a “hidden” <a> tag that we could manipulate with javascript like this:

<div id="hidden_clicker" style="display:none;">
<a class="overlay-flash" id="hiddenclicker" href="#" >Hidden Clicker</a>
</div>

The tag is wrapped in a div tag that has a display:none set so it doesn’t show in the browser.

Next part is the ActionScript. We embedded the SWF using SWFObject and can call the javascript function just like this:

getURL("javascript:callFancy('/linktopage.html');");

That’s it. Hope it helps someone out there.

UPDATE 8/18/09:  I neglected to point out that the A class assigned to our “hiddenclicker” div is a custom javascript implementation to launch a certain window.  Here is the code we added to an included .js file:

$(document).ready(function() {
 $("a.overlay-flash").fancybox({
 'padding'                : 0,
 'zoomOpacity'            : true,
 'zoomSpeedIn'            : 500,
 'zoomSpeedOut'            : 500,
 'overlayOpacity'        : 0.75,
 'frameWidth'            : 530,
 'frameHeight'            : 400,
 'hideOnContentClick'    : false
 });
});

Sorry for the omission…

On this particular site we had set some styles for floated images that would add margins around them to give some space between the image and other content.

.left { float: left; }

img.left {
margin-right: 15px;
margin-bottom: 10px;
}

For some reason, it appears as if those styles are getting applied to the image in the Lightbox photo gallery, causing it to have a bottom margin that overlaps the ‘Close’ link – and only in Firefox and Safari.

So we just added a new line in our lightbox.css file:

#imageContainer img { margin-bottom: 0; }

But if I’ve been having this problem this long I have to believe there are others.  For the last two months, I’ve been completely unable to browse the magentocommerce.com website in Firefox – major pain, considering I’ve been working on two magento projects.  Every time I visited I would get a “400 Bad Request” error.

I tried turning off all my Firefox add-ons – to no avail.  Finally figured it out.  It was a bad cookie that somehow the site had stored on my machine.

I used the Web Developer Toolbar to clear out all the site cookies for magentocommerce.com and that did the trick.  Hope this helps someone else from pulling all their hair out.

This hack adds the ability for users to subscribe to comments as well as posts for specific categories.  We’d love to see this added to the core functionality of Subscribe2, but in the meantime, here is our hacked version of Subscribe2 4.15.

Kudos to Mike for this hack.

Internet Explorer cannot open the site: http://www.yoursite.com.
Operation aborted

After much frustration, turns out it’s a conflict between SWFObject and Lightbox 2. Explanation is available here.

In short, you just need to add the

attribute to the SWFObject <script> tag… Beautiful!

1. http://www.ecamm.com/mac/iphonedrive/ : iPhoneDrive allows you to store files on your iPhone like a typical iPod
2. http://automator.us/iphone/ : allows you to remotely retrieve files from your Mac  to your iPhone via email message rules
   

 

Here’s how it works: Search for a business, like a hardware store, on Google Maps, and click the ‘call’ link next to its phone number [insert link of live example]. Then, enter your phone number and click ‘Connect For Free.’ Google calls your phone number and automatically connects you to the hardware store.

There are two things that I really like about this. The business’s phone number is automatically stored in your caller ID so you can easily call back in the future. And by checking the box to save your phone number, you can make future calls from Google Maps with just two mouse clicks (after you pick up your phone, of course).

We’re offering the ‘call’ link as a free service to all businesses. These aren’t ads and don’t influence the ranking of businesses in the search results. We foot the bill for calls (local and long distance), but airtime fees or other mobile fees will still apply if you use a mobile phone number. Currently, the calling feature works if you live in the U.S. and are looking for a business located in the U.S.

(Via)

Try it out, looks pretty awesome.

Jay, they saw your coming. Link

Pretty crazy to see the way they compliled all this together. I’m not a C programmer, but like any good language the logic is universal, in this case it’s just madness. Check out this snip from FDISK:

yikes, and I thought my AJAX spinny-loader thingy was tech. hehe.

Long story short, after no luck in embedding, setting content types and tweaking the heckout of flash, I found this post on php.net that saved the day.

Example usage:

Thank you anonymous friend, you are my hero.

You figure it was only a matter of time before someone got the brilliant idea to take two Monopolies, both of which dominate over their competitors and see how they can further push the cool factor. I like the idea, makes me wish I was a runner. But I will give it to them for integrating the ability to upload the data to the community-based website where you can share your geek-ish running stats with your friends.

The iTunes plug for sports icons was only a matter of time, and come to think of it, was probably the reason they introduced this anyhow. Seriously, do they really need a reason to entice you to buy more $0.99 tunes from celeb playlists?

Nike has announced that it will make running shoes that will tell the wearer how far and how fast he or she has run and how many calories they have burned. The instant information will come from a miniature iPod, made by Apple Computer, and a new wireless system called Nike iPod.

Nike shares rose more than 2 percent after the announcement Tuesday that it planned to capitalize on the popularity of iPod portable digital music players with runners, 75 percent of whom already listen to music while they exercise.

The Nike iPod Sports Kit, which is expected to sell for about $29, will use miniature versions of the iPod to provide audio data on time, distance, pace and calories burned through an attachable receiver that will get the data from a sensor embedded in the insole of special Nike shoes.

The new Air Zoom Moire line of running shoes – priced at $100 – are the first to have space for the sensor, but others will follow, Nike said. The removable sensor, about the size of a piece of chewing gum, can be used with any compatible shoe.

…

Apple, which has shipped more than 50 million iPods, controls 77 percent of the U.S. market for portable digital music players, according to the market research firm NPD Group.

…

Apple will also include a Nike Sport Music section on its iTunes music store, which will feature playlists by well- known athletes like Armstrong, the companies said.

The Nike iPod system will let runners call up a favorite song instantly as well as upload their workout information to a Web site, www.nikeplus.com, where they can share the information with their friends.

Those of us who appreciate the WYSIWYG will be able to view their flash files again.

CSS Organization