Archive for the ‘Adobe’ Category

The announcement of the iPad has set off a huge Flash v. Apple the rest of the world debate.

I happen to think reasoned thought should take effect, hence I agree with the John Nack.

Flash is the closest thing we have to a consistent rich browser frame work. That is why I wrote Lifetick in Flex. I have thought about moving it to HTML only, but I don’t want to do it just yet.

Well, not until we have a richer html/javascript/css world – with a broad range of native gui controls (and which 99% of the world’s internet users have a compatible browser – no IE6, 7 or 8). Standards take time to create, to be agreed on and adopted by the masses.

However, my support of Flash has been tested, I have dropped my Flash blog, and you are now reading this in HTML. In my mind, Mac performance has never been more critical to the future of the Flash player.

btw, I find it laughable all those people who criticise Flash web ads… what do you think advertises will do if people all have flash blockers?They will make the exact same ads work in javascsript, which if written just as poorly as their flash versions, will screw up your browser just as bad, and you can’t separate that cpu thread out, or block an individual execution of javascript if it all goes bad or you want to block it. Think about it, those ads will not go away, even if Flash did.

My personal take on Flash on the iPad… Yes I would like to see it. Flash on the iPhone – I doubt it would work performance wise.

Tonight I relaunch my website as a HTML wordpress template for the first time. For the last 5 years or so I have always run a Flash based website. I even sold the flash wordpress template to lots of other enthusiastic people (note: still for sale).

So why have I gone HTML? Several reasons;

1) Mac performance. After upgrading to Snow Leopard, Flash’s performance on OSX sucks. Infact I haven’t seen it this bad since I ran Flash 7 back in 2005. The truth is Flash had come a long was, versions 8 and 9 made huge performance improvements. However these gains have been lost and it makes it difficult, if not impossible to create large scale flash sites for the Mac.

It’s not impossible though! I also develop Adobe Flex applications and they are ok. Whilst it might take 80% CPU to run a YouTube clip, a Flex application I developed (Lifetick) runs at about 13% CPU and performs quite well.

If Adobe want to keep Flash as a viable development platform, they have to address this issue quickly.

2) The Flash IDE sucks. It’s too clunky, slow and just painful to use. The transition to AS3 was a nightmare (and I was familiar with AS3 already  from working with Flex… go figure). I was able to put together this new template in just 2 nights (there is still more work I want to do to refine it) but all the work I did was done in TextMate, a fantastic powerful lightweight text editor which does heaps with out all the pain.

3) CSS3 and transparent PNGS. Advanced CSS and using transparent PNG graphics allowed me to create this template faster. In particular the Navigation bar owes a lot to this. None of this might be terribly new, but my eyes are opening up to the possibilities.

It really pained me to write this, I get really annoyed when I read people putting Flash down, they mention stuff like no deep-linking (solved, check out SWFAddress), and terrible user experience (Flash doesn’t create bad websites, people do!). Whilst my love of flash websites has taken a hit, my love of Flex is only stronger. I still consider it the best way to create a rich web based application. My day job revolves around developing a HTML base application, but my spare time is spent working on a Flex based application. And I fell like I work faster in Flex, and deliver far better results.

So I don’t want to see Flash die, I want it to get stronger, I want Flex to get more acceptance in the Web-apps developer sphere. But most of all I want Adobe to work on the Flash player’s performance. Seriously guys, you are running out of time before too much damage has been done and your technology is worthless.

I have installed Snow Leopard… and now the Flex compatibility results.

Flex Builder 2 – FAIL.
Changing some configuration files did allow me to open Flex Builder, and I was able to compile some apps, but my large app with embedded images failed to compile.

Flex Builder 3 – SUCCESS
Unfortunately I had to buy Flex Builder 3… anyway… it appears to be fine.
On a separate note, when I tried to compile an app using the version 2 SDK, it put a Charting watermark on my app. Not happy considering I have the full version.

Flex Builder 4 Beta (latest) – SUCCESS
I didn’t try for long, but all appeared successful.

I just found out that you can’t run Flex builder on OSX Snow Leopard. That SUCKS!

Adobe please fix asap!

mmm. this sort of thing makes me nervous about a proprietary platform (flex sort of is, especially if you want an IDE). Maybe I should look closer at using the SDK on its own.

I am currently running Flex Builder 2, but am keen to hear from any who has been able to get any version of Flex builder running on Snow Leopard, and how good the performance is.

UPDATE: Well, there have been a couple of encouraging comments from people who have got it running. Thanks guys!

Perhaps Adobe should come out and clarify their position.

UPDATE 2: See the results: here

Finally Fireworks CS4 is updated with a fix for the annoying text position bug. I have only had the update for a day but it appears to be working fine. More info @ the Fireworks blog.

Hi all,

After several months of working in my spare time, I have finally launched a new version of my website, this time based on Actionscript 3.

I still have more work I want to do on the site before I am happy with it. Both visually, and behind the scenes.

Converting my website to AS3 was more difficult than I ever imagined. I have written a lot of stuff using Adobe Flex (see Lifetick’s app) and am very familiar with AS3 but in the Flash IDE it was very tough.

Flex builder is based on Eclipse and it is a very strong coding environment. For a start, all classes are automatically imported, there is great code completion (including completing your own classes, variables, function etc…) The debugging is excellent, including debugging from the browser, and it will not even compile if you have a problem in your code (flash sort of did this, but too many mistakes went through with out identification)

The problems with Flash CS4 are too numerous to mention. Aside from Performance, the workspace layout feels too complicated and cluttered. The new motion editor for tweens seems great, but just makes it harder to do simple tweens (maybe I need more time with it) The debugging was very difficult. As I said before, you could not debug from the browser only from a stand alone swf (if I am wrong about that, please correct me in the comments with instructions), The connection between classes and movie clips feels disjointed, movie clips are not as strict as classes but it feels weird to code, plus I didn’t seem to be able to override a function of the class my movie clip is based on.

At the end of the day, I didn’t enjoy making this new version of my site, I felt I battled with Flash the whole time, everything was a struggle, and it left me wanting to return to Flex as fast as possible. If you do any application building, you must try Flex, and leave flash behind, you will not believe the difference.

ps: I have removed the AS2 version of my template from sale, I hope to make the AS3 version available for sale at a later date.

I have the same text rendering problems as described on these sites:

- Website #1
- Website #2
- Website #3

It is embarrassing to think the product was even released in this state.

Just some random thoughts after my first real day working in CS4.

I was doing some designing in Fireworks today, when I kept feeling unhappy with the colour choices I was making.

I thought the colour was fine the Mac osx colour picker (opened from Fireworks) however, when I select the colour and it is used in Fireworks, it is the wrong colour.

Fireworks appears unable to get the right colour from the Mac OSX colour picker.

Am I going mad or is this happening to other people too?

I am running Fireworks 8 on Mac OSX Leopard. (with an External monitor.) Also, I selected different colour profiles from the picker with no luck.

When Designing Websites and Application Concepts I always use Adobe Fireworks.

I think its great, or was great. Let’s Face it, it hasn’t seen a proper update for far too long, especially on the Mac.

I recently tried Fireworks CS3 and it was embarrassing, I can’t believe they released it with a new number.

So I was thinking, there must be an alternative to Fireworks (not Photoshop), one that runs on the Mac.

If you know one, please post the details in the comments.Thanks.