Reason No. 1: Flash's sub-pixel resolution and anti-aliasing: Seriously?
Yes.
Seriously?
but I cannot say that the flash player keeps crashing on me. But perhaps it is just me.
Yes, I think that's just you. Or maybe you're running Windows and the couple of times that Flash has crashed on you, you've blamed the browser.
Try rendering something complex with it and then try indexing the resulting code.
We're talking about fonts, so I assumed it'd be obvious that I was talking about the text displayed on your site, and not the actual code running your site. If you're putting your website's text into Flash, you're doing it wrong. I don't care how fancy it makes your fonts.
This is pure B.S. If flash doesn't play well on a device, it is very unlikely that the same device will have enough muscle to play the equivalent HTML5 animation.
Well I don't believe that will be universally true for all Flash content. For example, my phone can play native video fine, but stick the same video into Flash and it stutters and crashes. But a couple of things here:
A) At the very least, it shows that Flash is not "write once, play anywhere". The Flash on my phone doesn't work well. The Flash on my Mac crashes constantly. My Linux distribution doesn't come with Flash, and when I tried to install it it said it didn't support 64-bit Linux. There is no Flash on the iPad.
B) One of the benefits of HTML is that it's generally a semantic markup language and the browser can decide what to display and what not to display. Good developers design their pages so that they can fall back to other displays of the same information in various cases. For example, you look at things like, "What happens to my site if someone is looking at in in Links? What happens if the user disables javascript? What happens if the user looks at the page without the CSS?" I'm not worried by the idea that a device that can't display a fancy animation doesn't display that fancy animation. The important question is, what does the page display instead?
Oh ok. So having commercial support is a negative now?
No, but lacking open-source enthusiasm is a negative, and Flash certainly doesn't have the level of sharing and enthusiasm that HTML and CSS have.
Also, lacking multiple competing implementations is arguably a negative. While Google, Mozilla, Apple, Microsoft, and Opera are all competing for the best HTML5 implementation, Adobe is developing Flash all on there own.
IE9 is supposed to come out soon, and it's supposed to support HMTL5. Of course, I'm saying "supposed to" because it's MS and so it's a pretty safe bet that something about it will be broken and non-standard.
I just mean that, for example, the grocery store doesn't get upset that they're not "capturing" all the value that we derive from having food to eat. Or at least, I'd think it was crazy if I heard a grocery store owner complaining about how I get a lot of value from not-starving and he's being "screwed" because he only gets paid based on the price of the food itself, and does not get a cut of the "value" created by that food.
AT&T provides a service. Businesses normally only get paid for the service that they provide, and not for the value created by that service.
Still don't see the point. You could say, "My website has infotext and infographics on it, and I make money through running infoadvertisements." Or what happens if your graphics are also entertaining? Do you need to call them infotainmographics?
Or how about graphics are "graphics" and maps are "maps"?
If they succeed in "capturing" all of the value created by their network, then we no longer have any reason to tolerate them because they won't be contributing to the economy. Economies grow specifically because companies don't "capture" all of the value that they create, and so you get genuine win-win situations.
Reason No. 1: Flash's sub-pixel resolution and anti-aliasing: Seriously?
Reason No. 2: Flash beats Canvas: Ok, I bet there are still some things that Flash does better/faster. But complaining that HTML5 sometimes has bad performance isn't too compelling for me, since Flash constantly crashes on me. Further, the idea that HTML5 is bad because some browser might work a little different doesn't quite work for me since: (A) HTML5 is new and not complete, and it will take a little while to work things out. (B) At least I have the option of different browsers; if Adobe Flash Player isn't working for me, there's not really too much I can do.
Reason No. 3: Flash's good developer tools: Fair enough.
Reason No. 4: Flash's supercool fonts: Better support for custom fonts is being built into HTML5/CSS3. Flash shouldn't really be used for rendering text on websites anyway, since it interferes with searching and linking and indexing.
Reason No. 5: Flash is write once, play everywhere: More like write once, play anywhere that runs Flash. That means play anywhere on Windows desktops, kind of play on Mac and Linux but not well, and then barely play on some mobile devices.
Reason No. 6: The Flash commercial ecosystem: Ok. I don't know if this is an actual benefit, or if you lose more support through being semi-closed than you gain by having some commercial support.
Reason No. 7: Flash's game engines: I don't get it. Why is he talking about "Born to Run"?
Yeah, I looked at the article, but I don't buy it. I mean, sure, if you really *really* have a duopoly where there's no kind of collusion, and each company is really out to beat the other guy, and everyone acts in the mathematical way that an economist might assume, I can see it working out.
But the reality is you have big companies with crazy exclusivity deals and lock-in and deceptive practices and lobbyists pushing for favorable laws. And then you have a bunch of consumers who make decisions based on emotional attachment to branding as well a price. And I think there's a case that you do have some kind of collusion between these companies, even if it's not explicit. There's no real reason for SMS messaging to be so expensive outside of any kind of price-fixing.
...If they are getting effectively screwed now (by all the value being created by their networks which they can't capture)...
Well that's a mighty big "if", isn't it? Who the hell says they're supposed to "capture" all the "value" created by their networks? Why isn't it enough that they're making money by providing a service?
Of course you're assuming that the carrier market will behave like a free market and you'll see real competition. It doesn't necessarily work out that way when you have a handful of players and a high barrier to entry. When you have two companies running the entire market, it's not unthinkable that they could informally negotiate some kind of uneasy peace between them where neither company fights too hard to outdo the other. They don't even need to talk overtly about it. Each side can just know that, if they start outbidding the other, they'll start a price war which will end in both companies making less money.
And that's ignoring the possibility of outright talks behind closed doors and price-fixing.
Yeah no...I get it...free and cheap is nicer...but I'd rather have the tiered data plan then have them go out of business and have nothing.
What makes you think that was the choice? Is AT&T on the verge of bankruptcy and I haven't heard?
I'm a bit tired of people implying that we should sympathize with these companies by saying, "But they had to screw our customers and engage in shady and unscrupulous behavior! The only other option is to give everything away for free, and they'd go out of business!" Meanwhile these companies are raking in billions of dollars in profit.
Instead of trying to force people to have fewer kids, we could focus in building up cities. They're more efficient and they seem to naturally discourage people from having kids.
Or I've also heard that population growth levels off when infant mortality drops. So in one sense, thought it's counter-intuitive, if you want to slow population growth or reverse it, you might want to provide better health care.
That's part of my point though. Obviously Omnigraffle is not going to be banned by Apple.
Part of my point is that, if the reasons for banning an application are arbitrary and unclear, then we can't say "obviously Omnigraffle is not going to be banned". I have no idea what's going to be banned.
But lets be realistic about what these apps were. It was an image under a few simple data feeds. What bugs exactly would there be?
I think you greatly overestimate the competence of some developers.
It's not like there are a ton of features to be added.
I think you greatly underestimate the cleverness of some developers.
I don't think the apps they ban necessarily make the app store "risky" for the end user.
Well it depends on how widespread and arbitrary these sorts of rejections get. My point was that rejecting an app before it gets put on the store makes development a bit risky, since you might put a lot of money into developing an application that will never be permitted to be sold. However, rejecting apps *after* they have been put on the store makes it someone risky for users to invest in buying apps. Let's say I buy something like OmniGraffle, which is $50 for the iPad (IIRC). I start using it a lot, build a nice little workflow around it, and put a lot of data into the OmniGraffle file format. Suddenly, Apple decides they want to reject that app for some arbitrary and unclear reason, and OmniGraffle can't be updated anymore. Since there's no possibility of support, it's probably a good idea to look for a new alternative. If I find one, I have to spend of bunch of time and effort converting my files and building a new workflow, on top of which I've essentially lost the $50 cost of OmniGraffle.
Yes, I could just continue to use the application that I bought, but as I general rule, I try not to invest in any application if there's not even the possibility of support and updates.
Oh, thanks helpfriendinator. Without your inforeply I wouldn't have been able to think outside the box to architect a synergistic model of Web 2.0 paradigms that enable me to comprehend the emergent properties of the cloud.
But of course, the web browsing experience on a computer is quite different, so finding applications is a different experience on a desktop than on a phone. Besides that, computers have long had trouble with Malware, and many people feel that we can't afford to allow the same kind of problems on cell networks.
It seems to me that this is troubling for the developer, but it's also troubling for the customers. It means that users have bought applications that suddenly have no possibility of being maintained properly. Bugs will never be fixed. New features will never come. It turns iTunes into a fairly risky marketplace.
Well right, PDFs can include text. They don't necessarily, but if it was created with a tool that will include the original text or you run OCR on rasterized text, you can have text in a PDF, which allows displayed text to be selected, copied, and pasted. However, the ability to include text in PDFs is largely to allow copy/paste and to allow searching. It isn't designed for variable display size and text reflow.
PDFs also aren't designed to allow semantic markup the way HTML/XML can. For example, in HTML, I can designate that a section of text is specifically a quote, and then the viewer can decide how to display it. Ultimately this is a very handy feature for cases where you don't know what the display device will be. If a PDF is structured to distinguish different sections or different types of information by using different fonts or different colors, it won't really help me on a monochrome device with limited font support. However, if I simply mark a selection of text as "h1", then many different viewers and devices can decide how to represent that distinction appropriately.
In short, there's a reason we use HTML for so many different things. PDF was designed with different goals in mind, and it's not a good replacement.
When you create a PDF, you specify a particular size of the output. It makes sense since PDF was designed for print documents, and print documents are designed for a specific size of paper.
So if you want to use PDFs, then you're going to want to standardize ebook screen sizes and resolutions. That's going to cause lots of problems. Also, if you want to resize the text in a PDF, you need to shrink/grow the entire document since text in a PDF is not designed to reflow. The only way to reflow text in a PDF is to hope that the text is actually embedded and display the text instead-- at which point your pretty much treating the PDF as a plain-text document and losing all the benefits of using a PDF in the first place.
Its a much better idea to use a modified for of HTML (or something similar, designed to be displayed on-screen, to be screen-size independent, and to allow reflow).
Slashdot Mirror
Whitelists work because spammers often don't know which "from" address to spoof.
Oh, I thought they just mean that you couldn't get reliable reception with the AT&T data plan.
Also, do you have to buy a separate electrical plan per each appliance, and then get locked into a 2-year deal with your electricity plan?
Oh, and also electricity is heavily regulated because it's a utility. Are cell phone carriers prepared to be treated that way?
Yes.
Seriously?
but I cannot say that the flash player keeps crashing on me. But perhaps it is just me.
Yes, I think that's just you. Or maybe you're running Windows and the couple of times that Flash has crashed on you, you've blamed the browser.
Try rendering something complex with it and then try indexing the resulting code.
We're talking about fonts, so I assumed it'd be obvious that I was talking about the text displayed on your site, and not the actual code running your site. If you're putting your website's text into Flash, you're doing it wrong. I don't care how fancy it makes your fonts.
This is pure B.S. If flash doesn't play well on a device, it is very unlikely that the same device will have enough muscle to play the equivalent HTML5 animation.
Well I don't believe that will be universally true for all Flash content. For example, my phone can play native video fine, but stick the same video into Flash and it stutters and crashes. But a couple of things here:
A) At the very least, it shows that Flash is not "write once, play anywhere". The Flash on my phone doesn't work well. The Flash on my Mac crashes constantly. My Linux distribution doesn't come with Flash, and when I tried to install it it said it didn't support 64-bit Linux. There is no Flash on the iPad.
B) One of the benefits of HTML is that it's generally a semantic markup language and the browser can decide what to display and what not to display. Good developers design their pages so that they can fall back to other displays of the same information in various cases. For example, you look at things like, "What happens to my site if someone is looking at in in Links? What happens if the user disables javascript? What happens if the user looks at the page without the CSS?" I'm not worried by the idea that a device that can't display a fancy animation doesn't display that fancy animation. The important question is, what does the page display instead?
Oh ok. So having commercial support is a negative now?
No, but lacking open-source enthusiasm is a negative, and Flash certainly doesn't have the level of sharing and enthusiasm that HTML and CSS have.
Also, lacking multiple competing implementations is arguably a negative. While Google, Mozilla, Apple, Microsoft, and Opera are all competing for the best HTML5 implementation, Adobe is developing Flash all on there own.
IE9 is supposed to come out soon, and it's supposed to support HMTL5. Of course, I'm saying "supposed to" because it's MS and so it's a pretty safe bet that something about it will be broken and non-standard.
I just mean that, for example, the grocery store doesn't get upset that they're not "capturing" all the value that we derive from having food to eat. Or at least, I'd think it was crazy if I heard a grocery store owner complaining about how I get a lot of value from not-starving and he's being "screwed" because he only gets paid based on the price of the food itself, and does not get a cut of the "value" created by that food.
AT&T provides a service. Businesses normally only get paid for the service that they provide, and not for the value created by that service.
Still don't see the point. You could say, "My website has infotext and infographics on it, and I make money through running infoadvertisements." Or what happens if your graphics are also entertaining? Do you need to call them infotainmographics?
Or how about graphics are "graphics" and maps are "maps"?
If they succeed in "capturing" all of the value created by their network, then we no longer have any reason to tolerate them because they won't be contributing to the economy. Economies grow specifically because companies don't "capture" all of the value that they create, and so you get genuine win-win situations.
Or astroturfing.
Yeah, I looked at the article, but I don't buy it. I mean, sure, if you really *really* have a duopoly where there's no kind of collusion, and each company is really out to beat the other guy, and everyone acts in the mathematical way that an economist might assume, I can see it working out.
But the reality is you have big companies with crazy exclusivity deals and lock-in and deceptive practices and lobbyists pushing for favorable laws. And then you have a bunch of consumers who make decisions based on emotional attachment to branding as well a price. And I think there's a case that you do have some kind of collusion between these companies, even if it's not explicit. There's no real reason for SMS messaging to be so expensive outside of any kind of price-fixing.
...If they are getting effectively screwed now (by all the value being created by their networks which they can't capture)...
Well that's a mighty big "if", isn't it? Who the hell says they're supposed to "capture" all the "value" created by their networks? Why isn't it enough that they're making money by providing a service?
Of course you're assuming that the carrier market will behave like a free market and you'll see real competition. It doesn't necessarily work out that way when you have a handful of players and a high barrier to entry. When you have two companies running the entire market, it's not unthinkable that they could informally negotiate some kind of uneasy peace between them where neither company fights too hard to outdo the other. They don't even need to talk overtly about it. Each side can just know that, if they start outbidding the other, they'll start a price war which will end in both companies making less money.
And that's ignoring the possibility of outright talks behind closed doors and price-fixing.
Yeah no...I get it...free and cheap is nicer...but I'd rather have the tiered data plan then have them go out of business and have nothing.
What makes you think that was the choice? Is AT&T on the verge of bankruptcy and I haven't heard?
I'm a bit tired of people implying that we should sympathize with these companies by saying, "But they had to screw our customers and engage in shady and unscrupulous behavior! The only other option is to give everything away for free, and they'd go out of business!" Meanwhile these companies are raking in billions of dollars in profit.
Instead of trying to force people to have fewer kids, we could focus in building up cities. They're more efficient and they seem to naturally discourage people from having kids.
Or I've also heard that population growth levels off when infant mortality drops. So in one sense, thought it's counter-intuitive, if you want to slow population growth or reverse it, you might want to provide better health care.
That's part of my point though. Obviously Omnigraffle is not going to be banned by Apple.
Part of my point is that, if the reasons for banning an application are arbitrary and unclear, then we can't say "obviously Omnigraffle is not going to be banned". I have no idea what's going to be banned.
Yeah, but even that is mostly a graph, I think. A clever graph. A graph with funny little things thrown in.
But lets be realistic about what these apps were. It was an image under a few simple data feeds. What bugs exactly would there be?
I think you greatly overestimate the competence of some developers.
It's not like there are a ton of features to be added.
I think you greatly underestimate the cleverness of some developers.
I don't think the apps they ban necessarily make the app store "risky" for the end user.
Well it depends on how widespread and arbitrary these sorts of rejections get. My point was that rejecting an app before it gets put on the store makes development a bit risky, since you might put a lot of money into developing an application that will never be permitted to be sold. However, rejecting apps *after* they have been put on the store makes it someone risky for users to invest in buying apps. Let's say I buy something like OmniGraffle, which is $50 for the iPad (IIRC). I start using it a lot, build a nice little workflow around it, and put a lot of data into the OmniGraffle file format. Suddenly, Apple decides they want to reject that app for some arbitrary and unclear reason, and OmniGraffle can't be updated anymore. Since there's no possibility of support, it's probably a good idea to look for a new alternative. If I find one, I have to spend of bunch of time and effort converting my files and building a new workflow, on top of which I've essentially lost the $50 cost of OmniGraffle.
Yes, I could just continue to use the application that I bought, but as I general rule, I try not to invest in any application if there's not even the possibility of support and updates.
Oh, thanks helpfriendinator. Without your inforeply I wouldn't have been able to think outside the box to architect a synergistic model of Web 2.0 paradigms that enable me to comprehend the emergent properties of the cloud.
Maps are considered "infographics"? That's crazy. Why aren't maps just "maps"?
But of course, the web browsing experience on a computer is quite different, so finding applications is a different experience on a desktop than on a phone. Besides that, computers have long had trouble with Malware, and many people feel that we can't afford to allow the same kind of problems on cell networks.
It seems to me that this is troubling for the developer, but it's also troubling for the customers. It means that users have bought applications that suddenly have no possibility of being maintained properly. Bugs will never be fixed. New features will never come. It turns iTunes into a fairly risky marketplace.
On a side note, why are people suddenly so in love with the term "infographic"? Can't we call it a "graph" or "chart"?
Well right, PDFs can include text. They don't necessarily, but if it was created with a tool that will include the original text or you run OCR on rasterized text, you can have text in a PDF, which allows displayed text to be selected, copied, and pasted. However, the ability to include text in PDFs is largely to allow copy/paste and to allow searching. It isn't designed for variable display size and text reflow.
PDFs also aren't designed to allow semantic markup the way HTML/XML can. For example, in HTML, I can designate that a section of text is specifically a quote, and then the viewer can decide how to display it. Ultimately this is a very handy feature for cases where you don't know what the display device will be. If a PDF is structured to distinguish different sections or different types of information by using different fonts or different colors, it won't really help me on a monochrome device with limited font support. However, if I simply mark a selection of text as "h1", then many different viewers and devices can decide how to represent that distinction appropriately.
In short, there's a reason we use HTML for so many different things. PDF was designed with different goals in mind, and it's not a good replacement.
When you create a PDF, you specify a particular size of the output. It makes sense since PDF was designed for print documents, and print documents are designed for a specific size of paper.
So if you want to use PDFs, then you're going to want to standardize ebook screen sizes and resolutions. That's going to cause lots of problems. Also, if you want to resize the text in a PDF, you need to shrink/grow the entire document since text in a PDF is not designed to reflow. The only way to reflow text in a PDF is to hope that the text is actually embedded and display the text instead-- at which point your pretty much treating the PDF as a plain-text document and losing all the benefits of using a PDF in the first place.
Its a much better idea to use a modified for of HTML (or something similar, designed to be displayed on-screen, to be screen-size independent, and to allow reflow).