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The new flash player 10.1 on Windows and Mac breaks embedded font rendering. See image below.

This is very disappointing. This is going to affect my customers badly, and there is nothing I can tell them. Just another reason to be very nervous about the future of Flash.

Before 10.1 on the Left, After 10.1 on the right.
Hopefully there will be a fix for this soon.

Interesting read, unfortunately there is no stand out winner.

Fireworks alternatives on trial

I guess I will be waiting for the upcoming Fireworks CS4 update…. finally!

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.

I love taking pictures, just check out my flickr page. The one place I love to sit down and browse over every week is the New York Times Lens blog.

It generally features photos of the day from various news happenings from around the world. I am usually completely transfixed by the amazing imagery and at their implications. A large percentage of these photographs are from the world’s trouble spots and it is humbling to see how difficult and dramatic the world can be.

I had given up on the idea of buying an iPhone app to monitor my internet download allowance or even my mobile phone allowance.

That was until I saw Consume (iTunes link).

It just looks incredibly awesome!

It’s made by an Australian company, but they have good international support too. The app can track ISP usage and Mobile Phone usage for heaps of providers.

This is hopefully the first in a regular series of blog entries I plan to do about cool and interesting sites I visit regularly.

The first entry is for Smashing Magazine. This website posts about all sorts of Web development topics, from tutorials, design trends, galleries of cool sites and general articles. I find myself continually bookmarking pages from this site.

I particularly like the tutorials as they are often fast, well written and have lots of visuals to get the point across quickly. I used some of the tutorials as a reference when creating this new template, it is often easy to forget a CSS selector type and a quick search on their site revealed the answer. (check out this one about advanced css selectors)

Smashing Magazine recently updated their website to include content from 3rd party sites, which I have quite often found interesting. This content is towards of the bottom of the front page.

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.

Here is some interesting performance observations I have mad since installing Snow Leopard.

Flash 10 in Safari appears slower.

However, if you are using Camino, Flash performance is significantly better. (maybe better than Leopard – just a feeling)

Firefox, seems about the same as before, although I don’t really like using it. Chrome is the same as Safari.

If you work with a lot of Flash apps and need the best performance, switch to Camino

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