Archive for the ‘Apple’ Category

My Technology Thoughts for 2011

The challenges we face this year will be the same challenges we face next year. The players may change a bit, but it will still be the same.  Fragmentation has been a part of our lives as developers and designers since the computer was born.  Nothing is going to change that.  As long as Company A thinks that it can do it better, different than Company B, we’ll have different runtimes, different os, different whatever that will make our lives more challenging as design and develop.  Its our job as designers and developers to help our clients navigate these problems and provide solutions.  Bitching about them is something we can do in our free time, because there is no changing the situation.

Ok.. some quick thoughts on web and mobile for the year:

H264 vs WebM: Yesterday, Google announced they were dropping H264 support from Google Chrome.  More power to them.  They paid for and released WebM as open source, and they have a vested interest in seeing it taken up as the new web video format.  Google likes to make money (and they have lots to be made on YouTube and other areas) and not spend it.  There is a lot of distrust for the MPEG LA even though they said there would not be a license fee for end-user and only for manufacturers building encoders/decoders.  Apple and MS are firmly behind H264, and its being used everywhere.  WebM on the other hand is free, free, free.  I have no idea how this will pan out, or if it will ever.  So if you are targeting video playback everywhere, be prepared to encode and host multiple copies of your video source. And you are already probably doing that or using  Flash Player for clients that dont’ support H264.

Android vs iOS: Android will grow and grow and eventually be everywhere that iOS is not.  Does that mean Androids win?  Far from it.  iOS isn’t going anywhere, and its not like Apple is going to sit still.  Both iOS and Android will continue to “battle”, but ultimately the consumer and your clients will pick one or the other based on personal bias, whats cool, whats cheap, what has the game they want, whatever.. and you’ll be designing or developing for one of them, or both of them.  This is the new Mac vs PC.  Both have benefits, both have disadvantages, but both are viable solutions for both end user and developer.  I look at Android and iOS like having dinner at your relatives house.  Android is like eating at your cool uncles house where everything goes, but its always a bit messy. Yeah.. he’s got the cool toys, playstation, xbox, but you keep uncovering little tidbits of dirt and unpolished gunk in the corners.  Dinner with iOS is like being at your aunt’s house who is always prim and proper.  Full of rules.  You feel confined at times, always afraid to do something wrong, but when you look around, you had an awesome meal, got some culture, and still had a good time.

RIM Playbook and other tablets: Lots of cool tablets were shown off at CES this year. Most of them were running Android Honeycomb, and then there was RIM.  The RIM Playbook is very interesting to me.  Its hardware specs are very good, the price will supposedly be sub-$500, and the OS (QNX) is running Adobe AIR.  As a Flash Platform developer, that makes the Playbook a near perfect device, right?  Potentially.  However, I don’t have faith in RIM yet.  The Playbook will be marketed towards business. It has the strong suit of RIM and they have a good foothold with their Blackberry.  But I believe to be very successful, you need to embrace the consumer market, and I just don’t know if RIM has the experience or desire to do that.  Unless they are devoted to this, I don’t see it growing organically. I could be wrong, wouldn’t be the first time (or the last).  As for all the Honeycomb-based tablets shown at CES, like the Motorola Xoom, very impressive hardware and they should sell well. The total success of the tablet market will come down to apps. Phones will always sell because people need to make calls. Tablets, on the other hand, needs apps. They are mini-computers and will be used as such. If we start to see really great apps for Honeycomb that aren’t just re-sized phone apps, and start to see some big names get behind app development, then I think Android-based tablets will take off.

Apple:  I expect Apple to continue doing what its always done. Take a bold hard line approach to its design and development of new hardware and software.  You either love them or hate them. Seems most of that split seems to fall around what you think of Flash and HTML5.  Apple isn’t going anywhere, and they’ll continue to sell their products and provide a very good consumer experience.  I would have think that 2011 will bring us a new iPhone, some advancements with iOS (4.5? 5.0?), and of course, OS X 10.7 Lion.  The more I look at what Apple is doing with Lion and iOS, the more I think we’ll see a convergence soon enough, at least with software.

I love to bitch and complain about Adobe and Flash.  I do this because I’m passionate about what I do and Adobe and Flash are a big part of my professional life and I always want them to be better.  I also love my Apple products.  None of them are perfect, but I have a room for each in my career.  I see 2011 being the year that I get off my butt and start doing some real iOS development, instead of turning the work away like I had done in the past.  I also see myself continue to do Flash work for both the desktop and mobile.  All this “fragmentation” is opportunity.   Enjoy 2011.

YAFMAGHC – Yet Another Free Mac App Great Hits Collection

I’ve seen hundreds of these lists over the last few years, but I was cleaning up my bookmarks today and going through all stuff I bookmarked and tried out over the years. This is a list of Mac utlities that I use all the time and are free. Definitely not a list of all great apps out there, but just a list of what I use regularly.

Adium: The best IM client on Mac. The only downside is that it doesn’t support video, but it supports nearly every IM platform out there.

DropBox : Not really an app in the traditional sense (and available on Win & Linux), but 2 gigs of free storage that is sync’d to the cloud, provides revisioning, sharing between peers, and has proven to irreplaceable for me as I work from both a laptop and desktop, or from an office (contracting) or at home.

Linotype FontExplorer X: Manage your fonts. They’ve kinda hidden away the free version, but its the bottom link on the download page.

MAMP: 1-click solution for running Apache, MySQL & PHP locally for testing.

QuickSilver: More than an app launcher. Not be actively developed anymore. Some have recommended Launchbar (not free though). If QS stops working once Snow Leopard comes out, I may have to pay for Launchbar.

AppFresh: checks all the installed apps, preference panes, plugins, etc on your Mac and checks to see if there are newer versions out there. It will even download and install those updates.

Carbon Copy Cloner: Great utilty for cloning, syncing, and backing up your drives. I just used it recently for cloning my 250 gig startup drive onto a newer 1.5TB drive.

Chmox:Â CHM viewer.

CleanArchiver: On the surface, just another archive utility, but it strips out the .DS_Store and custom icons from your archive file. I use this a lot when sending files to clients who I know are on PC. Opening a Mac .zip file on PC can be confusing when looking at all the extra files.

Name Mangler: Awesome utility for doing batch renaming of files. Has tons of options, and can use RegEx.

The Unarchiver: Far more capable decompression tool that Apples built-in tool and has handled zips in the past that just refuse to decompress under Apples utility . Handles nearly every file format out there.

Xee:Â Â Fast image viewer and browser.

TimeMachineEditor:Â Change the default 1 hour backup interval for Time Machine.

Visibility: App for viewing and hiding invisible files in OSX. Handy when working on files like .htaccess or .profile while using GUI apps.

Mail Unread Menu: I use a lot of rules and folders in Mail. The Mail icon in the dock only shows the unread emails in your Inbox. Mail Unread Menu provides a customizable menu bar icon that can show any collection of folders in your Mail app.

Perian: Gives Quicktime the ability to play nearly ever video format out there.

iStat Menus: Great menu bar item for monitoring all aspects of your system from cpu usage, memory, bandwidth, hard drive usage, and much more.

QuickLook: Not enough people know about or use QuickLook. Its built into the Mac OS 10.5 and is awesome. If you don’t know what it is, find out about it here. Now the reason I mention QuickLook is because it is extensible and people have written a lot of great plugins for it. Two sites that I find great plugins at are: QuickLook Plugins web site & QLplugins web site.

Focus Issue: Exiting Fullscreen Flash on Mac

Not sure how I’ve never noticed this, but when existing fullscreen flash video, focus isn’t returned to the original HTML page. If you notice in the screenshots (probably way too large for this purpose), prior to clicking on the fullscreen button, everything is peachy.  After exiting fullscreen (2nd screenshot), the original window has lost focus.  This isn’t “end of the world” but it leaves the user having to click twice –and gives the appearance that the app is broken.  This appears to be a Mac-only issue and I tested it on two different Mac’s and on both Firefox 3 and Safari. It worked under WinXP under both Firefox 3 and Internet Explorer.

Is this a bug in the Flash player? or just how it is on Mac?  I can’t believe I never noticed it before.  I haven’t looked for a workaround yet. I imagine I’ll need some javascript, but odd that I couldnt’ find much online about it either.

Thoughts? Comments? Suggestions?

[Update 11PM 12/22/08 - I didn't find it in the Adobe Flash Player bugbase, so I logged it --> LINK ]

MWSF 2008: My predictions

Here are my predictions for tomorrow’s keynote by Steve Jobs:

  • Faster Macbooks & Macbook Pro’s and upgraded graphics
  • Updated AppleTV
  • new iPhone SDK w/ Flash on the iPhone
  • Movie Downloads
  • and “the one last thing” will be a ultra-portable (like the Nokia n810) with Adobe AIR pre-installed (that’s the “air” in the banners at MWSF)

[EDIT Jan 22] I guess I wasn’t too far off. I did play it a bit safe though. – John O. Â

Mac Pro — When will we see a new video cards?

With new video cards coming out all the time on the PC side, when will Apple release some new video cards? I got my MacPro w/ the stock nVidia card hoping Apple would be releasing a new card at some point. Well.. almost one year later and nothing.  It is by far the one thing that really is a huge P.I.T.A. about being a Mac user.   I don’t mind paying a little more but I just can’t see paying $399 for the ATi X1900 which is already extremely dated.

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