Flash On The iPhone is (almost) Here!

My dream just arrived! Hot off the press, Adobe has announced that the next version of Flash, Flash Professional CS5, will compile ActionScript 3 Flash projects into iPhone applications distributable via the Apple Store!

Read the press release here:
http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flashcs5/appsfor_iphone/

Before you jump to conclusions, there is still no Flash browser plugin for Safari in the iPhone. So all of the websites that display Flash are still not going to work on the iPhone (yet.)

So what does this mean for Flash Developers? Well, it simply means that we will be able to create ActionScript 3 projects that can run like iPhone applications. At the moment, we have no way of knowing how much of ActionScript 3 or what techniques outside of scripting will translate to the iPhone. For example, will timeline effects and tweens all translate? Do we have to do anything to optimize graphics for the iPhone? Are their new features that allow Flash for iPhone apps to save data to the iPhone? Can Flash for iPhone apps communicate with web services and retrieve external XML data? Can Flash for iPhone apps communicate with iPhone data and services (like GPS data, photos on the iPhone, the iPhones photo and video camera, phone lists, email, etc.) There are no answers yet. And even if there were, those answers would likely change since Flash CS5 isn't even in beta yet. But this is only going to get more fun.

Recently in the news, Adobe also made an announcement that the new HTC Hero Phone running the Google mobile operating system would have Flash built into it. According to Adobe, while that is only Flash Lite right now, they are throwing their weight behind getting a full Flash player for mobile devices this next year.

It seems that Adobe is completely poised to dominate as the development platform for cross OS mobile device development and that is great news for the many people who have invested in Flash for years. If you are simply someone who is geeked about your iPhone or interactive mobile device, just wait until the Flash development community has at it.

Now, we just need to see more people embrace cloud computing and the world will truly go mobile!

Note: For those of you who start spamming about where I found a picture a Flash for iPhone version of the all-powerful Adobe Kuler application, well... I didn't... it is a mock up I threw together assuming that would be one of the first apps that adobe will likely convert for use on the iPhone. Can you imagine it? Take a picture of something and launch the Kuler application so it can inspect it and create color schemes from the photo!?!?!?

Earbuds and Sonic Memories

Over the years I have grown accustom to the headphones that come with a number of my iPods and iPhones. For that matter I have been wearing headphones on portable devices for years. I can remember laying in the back of my parent station wagon (the “L-T-D” I used to call it) and listening to audio cassettes in these simple goofy silver wired headsets that culminated into plastic-sizers as the speakers shoved these cheep foam pieces that softened the blow of unreasonably large speakers being pressed to the sides of my brain. It is surprising that I can hear anything today at all after the abuse I put my ears through as a kid.

I remember my first portable CD player. I didn't have a lot of money and I desperately wanted a portable CD player. So after much saving I finally purchased a Sanyo player. I was saving for a nice Sony player but I did not have the money or the patience to wait it out. After I got home I immediately fell in love with the CDs I owned and wondered how I ever got along without them previously.

The truth about that Sanyo portable CD player, there was nothing portable about it other than it's size. You had to carefully handle it like you were diffusing a nuclear bomb. Any tiny bump, jostle or sideways glance and the player would lay waste to your CD sending it skipping and scratching into eternity.

After a few weeks of listening I had a bit of buyers remorse because I imagined that the Sony player would have been a far better purchase. The infinitely curious boy inside me had me in my room cracking the case of the Sanyo player one afternoon. Low and behold I quickly learned a harsh lesson in marketing and branding as all of the chips affixed to the Sanyo circuit board had the word “Sony” imprinted on them. Alas, I felt fine with just enjoying the state of the art and challenging the branding machine from that day forward.

Here we are years later and while I am fully addicted to portable electronics (I am writing this on my mac book while listening to my iPhone at a Starbucks in downtown DC) I still forget the trade-offs that we sometimes make for portable convenience. For example, the fidelity of the tiny earphones that came with my iPhone, while fine enough, leave a bit to be desired. Then there is the nearly forgotten reality that average MP3-style technology trims the audible (and near-audible) range of sound files to make room for longer tracks in increasingly smaller space.

We forget that hearing the music isn't everything. Sometimes hearing and feeling music makes all of the difference. For the same reason we all still go to theaters to see movies, sometimes we need to get out of our headphones and turn the stereo up to 11. In the audible range of analog music you can hear subtleties of musical nuance. But then in the near-audible range of sound you can sometimes find the rhythm and crescendo of music drive you to your feet and make you want to sway and dance. You can't quite find that in a set of earbuds blaring MP3 tracks regardless of what Apple iTunes ads attempt to convince us.

So, go re-download the highest bitrate version of your favorite songs (or go out and buy a CD or heaven forbid- a record) and feel the music again. Hearing isn't everything.

Oh worthy of note! Before you run out and buy $400 earbuds hoping to improve your listening experience, an independent tests claim that better headphones don't ensure a better listening experience.

tech-tip: If you tend to purchase CDs and rip them to iTunes then with a little tweaking you can turn up the quality of your sonic experience.

From within the preferences of iTunes, select the import settings for audio CDs. Then with MP3 selected, pick “custom” from the list of possible bit rates. Now, you will notice that from within the bit rate list you can select more than double the rate that was likely initially selected. You might guess that by selecting the highest rate you would be ramping up the quality, and you would be correct. But you would also be cranking up the size of each MP3 file and that will effect any MP3 storage, so you have to find the sweet spot between quality and size.

So here is my recommendation: 192 kilobytes per second (kbps), with a “high” quality “Variable Bit Rate” (VBR.) VBR means that if the moment within a single audio file could benefit from scaling up to 192 kbps then it will vary the bit rate up to that value. And if the sound data won't benefit from that quality well, you guessed it, it will save some space and not crank up the quality. From what I have read, this is about as good as it gets within earbud headphones. If you are thinking of taking off the headphones and turning up the stereo, then push it on up to 256 kbps with High Quality VBR. And if you are ripping audio DVDs then take it all the way to the highest bit rate and VBR quality if you want to experience the same quality but not have to worry about playing the DVD.

Again, fiddling with these settings can increase file sizes and slow down the ripping process, but hey we are talking about a better sonic experience right? Remember, it isn't just about what you hear, it is about what you can feel.

Mac OSX Snow Leopard having a bit of a Vista moment

In my mac world I tend to live in a couple major applications:

• Firefox
• Thunderbird
• Mamp
• Flash CS4
• PhotoShop CS4
• Dreamweaver CS4
• MS Word 2008 (for Windows in Parallels)
• and OpenOffice

By far the Adobe CS4 products are my career bread and butter and I wouldn't (couldn't) give them up if I wanted to.

At the moment Apple is really pushing anyone with a Mactel (Mac computer running on the Intel architecture) to upgrade to OSX 10.6 a.k.a Snow Leopard. How are they pushing? Like a drug dealer with blowout pricing. If you've recently purchased your mac, you can upgrade for $10. And if you didn't recently purchased it, then the upgrade costs $30. For me, that would mean $30 for my Macbook Pro and another $10 for the iMac.

But here comes the Vista moment (or maybe it isn't Vista as much as it is an old-mac-moment.) Snow Leopard made a number of core changes to how stuff works in the system but boasted that any of the current apps that we running fine under OSX 10.5.x should run fine in Snow Leopard. Unfortunately, that isn't proving out to be true. People like myself who live in the CS4 applications are currently encountering so many blowups that the forums are in flames. If you are running CS3 then you might as well boot up your old Windows XP machine, because if you upgraded to Snow Leopard then it is going to be a while before Adobe gets around to helping you out.

Adobe has been saying that they tested CS4 and it is good to go, but that Adobe CS3, while important to the company, isn't getting the priority at the moment. People still using CS3 got a little heated about that and started accusing Adobe of abandoning CS3 as a result, but Adobe assured them that it is just a prioritization issue and they will be getting around to ensuring CS3 works on Snow Leopard soon enough. Little did we all know that the reality about CS4 compatibility with Snow Leopard was more of an issue than Adobe was letting on. In fact, it now appears that Adobe new there were issues and the reason they weren't focusing on getting CS3 up to speed on Snow Leopard had everything to do with the fact that they can't yet get CS4 running smoothly on Snow Leopard.

But it isn't just Adobe products. There seem to be reports of intermittent issues doing regular stuff like "opening" or "saving" file. Hello!? What else does one do on a computer?

Rest assured, I am certain Adobe and Apple will resolve this current nightmare full-stop, but in the mean time I am waiting for some funny counter-strike style Microsoft commercials that mock Snow Leopard's buggieness. "Hello, I'm a PC. And I'm a ma... Hello, I'm a ma... and I'm a...I'm sorry but a number of system plugins are not responding. Please, visit help > system to view the... hello, and I'm a mac."

I will not be upgrading too quickly. I am sure I will upgrade, but just not as fast as the gotta-have-it mac-fan-boys across the interweb that were quick to regurgitate the Apple marketing on Snow Leopard even though Apple seems to have been less open than ever in allowing news firms to get access to Snow Leopard for pre-launch reviews.

Windows 7, You Make Me Glad I Bought A Mac

I really hope someone from Microsoft reads this blog post.

Last year I invested in my first mac ever. It was a macbook pro laptop and after much deliberation I finally got the guts up and pulled the trigger and forked over the bucks for a mac. They are a bit more expensive and I was worried about the cost of converting my software over to mac but I was ready. Here is why I went mac and how looking at Windows 7 made me fall in love with Apple all over again.

About every year I blow at least a week of my life formatting my PCs. Many people do this and they do it for a number of reasons: they like to start anew with a fresh system; they need their Windows system to perform well again and Windows performance seems to degrade over time; their computer crashes and they have to start all over. Now, I am a computer programmer and while you might imagine that means I tinker with my computer and tweak it to death causing it to die annually, I don't actually do that. I try to keep it very clean and yet each year Windows just seems to take a fatal nose-dive and I have to reinstall the operating system and all of my software again.

This whole effort of reinstalling means I lose time and as we all know time is money. In 2008 I had to reformat my system twice! Before you start thinking I own some sad old machine that should be retired, it is an HP AMD64 dual core machine with 6 GB of RAM and about 1 TB of hard drive space with dual digital monitors and nearly 1GB of video RAM, so I should be good to go. Needless to say I started doing the math. If the rumors were true about Apple computers being fairly maintenance free then I would save enough time each year to nearly purchase a new Mac computer annually rather than invest that time/money into fixing Microsoft Windows. So, starting with a laptop seemed to be the right next move toward a switch.

After co-existing with Windows Vista for over a year and having the Mac book pro laptop as long, the crash happened again. At this point I didn't need to do the math again. The main computer took the final crash and I was ready to go all-mac-all-the-time. So I bought a 24” iMac and never looked back... until the new buzz about Windows 7 came out!?

Windows 7: it loads quickly, no more Vista crashes, no more constant warning message interruptions, easier user interface, tons of usability enhancements... did I go to the iMac too quickly? Should I have been more patient?

Then I hear about the free Windows 7 Release Candidate downloadable from Microsoft. It is at this time that I fall in love with my Mac all over again.

Like Charlie Brown depending on Lucy to hold the football one more time in hopes that she won't pull it away YET AGAIN just before he kicks it, I decide to waste some bandwidth and download Windows 7.

First off, you can't easily download Windows 7 in anything but Windows Internet Explorer. The Windows 7 download crashes Firefox. Next up, I have to load up my Windows Vista in Parallels on my Mac just so I can fire-up IE and download Windows 7. 3 hours later I have Windows 7 on a DVD and I am read to install.

Here is where my investment in Apple pays off and vindicates me. After three attempts to install Windows 7 which is interrupted 3 times with the installer crashing my computer, I finally couldn't boot the machine anymore. Just so you don't panic, I am not attempting to install Windows 7 on my Mac. I am installing Windows 7 on my crashed Vista computer. It was even a completely fresh installation, new partition on the hard drive and everything! To no avail could I get Windows 7 installed and running. What a piece of... crap!

Needless to say I decided immediately to sit down on my Mac and write out this blog. Ah, my beautiful, flawless and painless Mac. It runs, it plays, it works... alas it does not crash!

So Windows is no more. On the upside, I happened to burn the Windows 7 installer on a reWritable DVD so I didn't even waste the DVD. I am now about to install Kubuntu Linux on that PC and be done with it. Never again I tell you. Never again!

Apple Environmentally Friendly?

I am a mac... no wait, I am a PC... hold on,... I am a mac, on a PC, with Vista inside the mac! Yes. I am an OS-X-Vista mac-tel.

More importantly, while I am friendly to mac, is Apple friendly with the environment? Well, according to the EPA, on 23 mandatory and other optional criteria, Apple Computers is in the top 5 companies for EPA environmental friendliness. Cool huh? I think this can be explained by the fact that they have been working with Al Gore to tighten up that score. Way to go Steve and Al! You did it!

Hold on. I believe in equal time. A while back I wrote a blog entry about "green washing" which basically means performing a few tricks to qualify as green, but once under the microscope maybe it ends up only being a green hue as opposed to green through-and-through. Is Apple one of these companies? Well, Al Gore didn't just work with Apple to advize them, he became a board member. And what does that mean? Well, I have no idea, but I am guessing that their might be a small connection between Apple - Al Gore - EPA. At the minimum, Al likely showed them how to qualify as "EPA Green." Is that a bad thing? I don't think so. I encourage it. What do other "green" groups think of it? Well... a well known group called "Green Peace" also makes a list of who is naughty and who is nice, when it comes to being Green. And to be fair they measure everything from recycling to work conditions for employees in factories around the world associated with the computer creation process. On their list, compairing a large list of companies, Apple is DEAD LAST! What? That's right. The EPA says "silver star" Apple... you are green! While at the same time Green Peace says, "Rotten Apple!"

Personally, I find that completely confusing. How does EPA say they are near the top of green with Green Peace claim that they are the absolute worst (not poor or sadly in the middle... the worst!)? I don't know, but I will venture a small guess in the style of the boardgame clue... Al Gore, with an Apple, greenwashing in the bathroom!? On a more serious note, it would be nice to hear more from Apple about their Green Peace score and how or if they intended to deal with some of their recycling and 3rd world production issues.

As a side note: It wasn't too long ago, in the world of the web, that one of the largest opponents of Adobe Flash (then, Macromedia Flash) technology was explaining to the world about how non-user-friendly and clumsy Flash technology was. As a result, and a short while later, Adobe hired that same critique to sit with the designers of Flash and architect a more acceptable future. A version or so later, the world fell in love with Flash and the still-independant opponent of Flash became not a proponent, but rather a friend to the company. In a similar thread, inviting Al Gore onto the bench at Apple is like hiring the hottest baseball player to come play ball for you. Does it ensure that you are a better team? Not necessarily. But one thing is true, they did suddenly score very high on the EPA ranking system. A Silver medal is nothing to bawlk at. The fact is that under Al Gore, Apple created a friendly competition for competativeness to get high scores, but surprisingly Dell and HP received the "Gold" not silver like Al Gore's Apple. Well, that doesn't mean Apple is the worst, but it does reduce all of the buzz to, well, buzz at best. I say that because Dell and HP together had over 200 pieces of hardware under EPA EPEAT review and are both in the top 20 PC manufacturers, as compaired to Apple's 21 pieces of equipment under review. Needless to say, it seems that if you respect Green Peace and the EPA, the real winners are Fuzitsu and HP... if going green is your priority.