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  The Flash Player Secret Garden

  Tuomas Artman 20:54 on August 29, 2010 | 1 comments | Tags: Flash (83), flash player (2), flex (5), silverlight (2), Web (31)

  

  The first preview of the upcoming Flex 4.5 SDK – code-named Hero – has gone live and Deepa Subramaniam, Flex SDK product manager, just announced it. Newsworthy on Deepa’s post is that Adobe, at least for this release, has chosen to build the SDK against a future, yet to be announced Flash Player. Because of this, they have not been, and will not be able to post nightly builds, as they don’t want to give away any new features of the Player.

  At least to me, that sounds weird.

  Sure, we’re all know that companies love to control the publicity of new products, mostly to gain enough momentum to get good press out of an launch event. It sure makes sense to control product details regarding (for example) CS6, but the Flash Player is a different beast. End-users don’t care about new features, and developers don’t need to press to tell them.

  So what gives? Why hide upcoming features of the Flash Player? Wouldn’t being totally open about the future of the player be a great way of getting the community involved in the development of the player? After all, it’s developers, not end-users that you build the Player for. Wouldn’t it totally make sense to have the input of the community as early as possible and be able to act upon that feedback without an 1,5 year cycle?

  The only reason I’ve identified for this secrecy is the fear of competition (Silverlight). The introduction of Silverlight’s latest release was one of the biggest Deja’vu moments I’ve had.

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    stanar007 01:19 on August 30, 2010 Permalink | Reply
    

    Check out this link:
    http://www.bytearray.org/?p=1836

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  Web Feeds HD now available for your iPad

  Tuomas Artman 12:55 on August 10, 2010 | 0 comments

  Yay! Weeb Feeds HD has just made it’s way to the App Store. Essentially it’s a port of my Web Feeds iPhone app with some additional cool features such as sharing feed posts to all important social media services. The interface is once again modeled as closely to the iPad-native Mail-app, as I found that this approach works extremely well for consuming RSS feeds and doesn’t require the user to learn anything new. You also have to option to browse through all of your feeds in full Web-mode, where you skip the RSS summary and are taken straight to source of the post. This works fantastic with the Google News feeds, as they are linking directly to the original source. Essentially have a quick way to read through the most important news of the day.

  Check it out on the Store, and give it try. It’s only $1.99, way less than the competition.

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  Where's that Flash app?

  Tuomas Artman 09:19 on August 10, 2010 | 6 comments | Tags: app, Flash (83), flex (5), games, Web (31)

  

  The HTML5 vs. Flash debacle has all but died down. And that’s a good thing as I didn’t really think any of the argumentation was really valid. However, the whole thing got me once again thinking of how I use Flash. As a developer, I’ve started using Flash and Flex less and less. This of course is tied to my current job, where we use Flash only as small components in an otherwise HTML-based app. I’ve done my share of Flex and Flash applications and campaigns in the past, but now that I come to think of it, I actually _never_ use any application that is based on the Flash Platform. Sure, I do try out things, like Audiotool (which I think happens to be one of the best engineered Flash apps out there), but I’m not a user.

  The closest I come to being a user of a Flash Platform based  app is with (social) games. That makes me wonder. Is there really any Flash application out there that people are actually using? And I’m talking productivity or business use, not entertainment. Hit me with your comments!

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    JabbyPanda 11:38 on August 10, 2010 Permalink | Reply
    

    I like simplicity of http://www.picnik.com/, although I am not a vivid user.

    I like SlideRocket concept http://www.sliderocket.com/, but again it is not yet perfect.

    I am fun of Adobe Buzzword http://www.adobe.com/acom/buzzword/, although recently I have not heard much of it

    I am looking forward to the broad adoptation of AFCS Adobe LiveCycle Collaboration Service, I think that social browsing of web is a fture.

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    supertino 00:50 on August 11, 2010 Permalink | Reply
    

    almost every part of http://aviary.com/ is invaluable to me. audiotool is incredible but not as a serious tool(for me).

    i don’t really have an apple shaped hole in my heart (i’m not a consumerist with a fetish for shiny metal and plastic wrapped around 2nd rate kit) and i find it hard to understand the apple vs flash situation. how anyone can be in any doubt about apple’s motives is beyond me.

    the thing that a lot of people notice is the stockholm syndrome amongst people for fall for their stuff and the way that apple folk become quite tribal – you’ll turn against flash sooner or later dude – its what your dear leader jobs has decreed!

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      Tuomas Artman 08:31 on August 11, 2010 Permalink | Reply
      

      Haha, stockholm syndrome;) The hostage situation might be over sooner than later. Both the FCC and now the EU are investigating against Apple to see if they need to force them to support Flash.

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    sander kessels 00:53 on August 11, 2010 Permalink | Reply
    

    Sure there are. Many. Think about all webcam related sites, like chatroulette.com Extremely popular… Impossible to make with HTML5. Or how about sumopaint.com … Or aviary.com Just to name a few.

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      Tuomas Artman 08:35 on August 11, 2010 Permalink | Reply
      

      Sander, I didn’t want to turn this into a fight of Flash vs. HTML. Everybody who says HTML5 can do all that Flash can is wrong, ingnorant or stupid. My point here is that I’ve not found any Flash applications that I actually use (for productivity). I’ve got Photoshop, so there’s no need fot Aviary or Sumopaint. Tinychat could be something that many use for porductivity, just not me.

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    Lari Vaartio 10:31 on August 27, 2010 Permalink | Reply
    

    What about browserlab.adobe.com? Ok, it’s Adobe’s own site but still pretty useful.

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  Hello (mt)

  Tuomas Artman 22:35 on August 5, 2010 | 0 comments

  

  Just moved this blog over to MediaTemple, so there might be a few hiccups during the next few as this gives me a good reason to fix a few things here and there that have bothered me but that I’ve never had the time to fix.

  I searched quiet a bit to get an hosting provider that had a good reputation and was inexpensive, and eventually settled for MediaTemple, as there are so many developers and designers praising them and so far I’ve been happy. Access is of course a bit slow from Finland, but hey, you can’t transfer stuff faster than the speed of light. Or can you, hmm?

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  Less AS3 frameworks, more native implementations, please!

  Tuomas Artman 13:52 on August 3, 2010 | 9 comments | Tags: as3 (3), Flash (83), flash player (2), native

  

  The TLF framework is a good example of the current status quo regarding native implementations vs. AS3 frameworks at Adobe. Adobe is implementing core functionality (layout of text) through an ActionScript Framework and not as a native implementation in the Flash Player. Sure, you have the low-level text engine classes and API that let you actually use low-level layout and rendering, but Flash has for a long time implemented high-level API’s natively.

  Lets discuss the advantages and disadvantages of using Frameworks vs. native implementations:

  Advantages:

  1. Updatability. You don’t rely on Flash Player updates to deliver new functionality or bug fixes.
  2. The Flash Player download size does not increase

  Disadvantages:

  1. Speed. If you remember my recent post on our AS3-2-Java compiler, the same code run 800 times more faster in Java than it did in the Flash Player using AS3. So expect things to run three orders of magnitude slower.
  2. Bloat. The framework takes a chunch of bandwidth for every piece of SWF that uses the framework, as it’s embedded in each and every SWF that uses is (yes, there’s of course the framework cache, but still, cache misses are currently more frequent than hits)

  IMHO the bad _clearly_ outweighs the good. Heck, I would donate second testicle to have Flash run even a bit faster. Now fast forward to the days of Flex. You’ve got hundreds of components littering the screen are your CPU just screams for help. If you inspect your List-based component you quickly get dizzy with the number of UIComponents flying around. Not only is there one for each base component, but with Flex 4 you’re essentially doubling the number of UIComponents on screen as all of your skin files are based on UIComponent as well.

  Now to me it would seem logical to just implement the UIComponent natively as it does so much of an apps work (measure, layout, (in)validation, focus & input management and whatnot). At least it would be an interesting experiment on how much every Flex app would gain from a native implementation of the UIComponent (oh, and while you’re at it, put in a native implementation for Group and GraphicElement as well).

  You know, it was in 2006 when the last speed increase in the order of a magnitude was revealed by the Player team at Max 2006 2005. We need an encore! Only this time, please make that two orders of magnitude.

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    testi 16:08 on August 3, 2010 Permalink | Reply
    

    Please donate testicle. We could use the speed.

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    Benny 16:33 on August 3, 2010 Permalink | Reply
    

    Furthermore …

    Adobe advises to not use TLF on mobile devices because it’s to heavy and CPU demanding and instead use the classic TextField for now.

    I was told by a member of the TLF team that TLF releases are aligned with the release of Flash Pro / Flash Builder so advantage 1 is a theoretical one.

    On the other hand TextField suffers from various bugs which have been there since the introduction of the TextField. TLF at least gives you some opportunity to debug things yourself, so I would definitely add this to your advantages list.

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      Tuomas Artman 16:41 on August 3, 2010 Permalink | Reply
      

      Um, I don’t know if “beeing able to debug a feature which should simply work” qualifies as an advantage.

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        Benny 18:13 on August 3, 2010 Permalink | Reply
        

        true … in a perfect world … but the bugs of TextField have been bugging me a lot and it was a hell to work around, when possible at all. So in that respect I think the option to debug is an advantage in the not so perfect world

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    Paul Taylor 01:14 on August 19, 2010 Permalink | Reply
    

    Unfortunately the tactic Adobe took with Flex and now with the TLF wasn’t to add features to the Flash Player/Platform with new ideas, instead they’ve just re-implemented the respective FP libs “better.” To them, “better” means more features. To me, it means the same tired ideas, just with more bloat.

    Having extensively studied the source of both the Flex Framework and the TLF, I’d jump ship if either of the two were natively implemented in the player. Fortunately, the lower-level player libraries seem to be of much higher quality, perhaps the result of more rigorous coding standards.

    Writing a rich text framework myself, I have to say, the FTE is damn near perfect. Even if all the classes weren’t final, I can’t think of any meaningful features I’d add; text decoration/interaction/layout are completely different problems than the FTE solves, and it’s an incredibly inefficient design to solve them using the same techniques as the FTE.

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      Paul Taylor 01:19 on August 19, 2010 Permalink | Reply
      

      I’m sorry, this comment sounds amazingly arrogant and that’s not what I wish to convey at all. I like Microsoft’s ideas with Silverlight, implementing the component framework into the player itself and whatnot. But Microsoft has 1. literally decades of domain knowledge solving these types of problems, and 2. an unlimited amount of money to invest in research and development.
      Adobe has so far spent lots of their R&D money on FP features, and it’s starting to pay off in a big way. But without that foundation, I feel higher level APIs in the player would simply be DOA.

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        Tuomas Artman 09:18 on August 19, 2010 Permalink | Reply
        

        I agree to a certain extent. I definitely don’t see any point for Adobe to include the whole Flex framework into the player. If you think of how much the framework has changed over the years, that would be an awfull lot of bloat to carry around in one Player. However, I still feel that the biggest problem with the Player is it’s speed of AS execution. I wouldn’t be advocating native implementations if only the Player would be able to run AS faster. (check out JITB: http://blog.joa-ebert.com/2010/08/19/introducing-jitb/).

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          Paul Taylor 09:23 on August 19, 2010 Permalink
          

          Hell yes. Joa is a crazy inspiration to us all, and I’m excited to see all his awesome shit take off. At the same time, we can’t simply rely on faster VMs, we always have a responsibility to write efficient code and apps (noted here: http://blog.joa-ebert.com/2010/02/11/the-advantage-of-actionscript/ ).

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          Tuomas Artman 09:31 on August 19, 2010 Permalink
          

          Yeah, that responsibility is always there, no matter how fast the VM is. Anyways, I’m looking forward to using your tinytlf framework in one of my next projects.

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  Sometimes there's no correlation between a bug and a fix

  Tuomas Artman 10:15 on July 21, 2010 | 5 comments | Tags: bug, css, Flash (83), html, video (2), Web (31)

  

  A week back I took on to fix a bug on our Flash-based video-chat component on Sofanatics. The fix was one of the most unexpected I’ve yet encountered.

  While testing we found out that our video-chat component had a fatal flaw with Mac Firefox-browsers. When we initiate a chat-session, the component asks the user to gain access to his camera an microphone through the standard security dialog that’s presented by the Flash Player. For some reason, whenever this dialog came up, it did not accept any input. The user could not accept, dismiss or change the tabs on the dialog, so the client was essentially stuck.

  Quickly playing with the wmodes for embedding the client it turned out that wmode opaque was the culprit. With wmode window everything worked out fine. That was not acceptable in our case, though, since we used other modal html-based windows that covered the Flash client, so we couldn’t use the window wmode.

  Our site is fairly complex and the client itself gets animated in via HTML, so I tried just for the sake of it to place the client somewhere else within the DOM. There were places where it worked, and others where it didn’t, so I jumped to the conclusion that some CSS rules (or a combination of rules when traversing down the DOM) mess up Firefox and make the Flash client unclickable. Oddly though, our content in the Flash client was very much clickable and worked without any problems, only the security dialog was not clickable.

  Hmm, quickly testing I removed all styles from the site and tested. That fixed the problem. So it had to be somewhere in the CSS, some rule that made the security dialog unresponsive. So I did a number of tests, removing a piece of CSS at a time until I isolated the selector that caused this issue. It was a browser reset selector with a number of rules that I’ve used in most of my sites which is to allign every browser to render in the same way.

  Doing the same test for the rules within the selector, I finally found the culprit. One single CSS rule that made the security dialog non-responsive on Mac’s Firefox:

  1	a {line-height:1em}

  Say what? Right…

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    Brett 14:58 on July 21, 2010 Permalink | Reply
    

    I quit! I want to be a gardener

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    david 21:01 on July 21, 2010 Permalink | Reply
    

    oddly enough whenever the security menu shows on a mac I have noticed that it always takes no less than two clicks to access the buttons in any browser. I am not able to recreate the bug where it is fully inaccessible. Tried firefox 2 and 3 with all window modes. All this with no css applied to anything.

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    david 21:02 on July 21, 2010 Permalink | Reply
    

    actually I tried in all browsers but I tried specifically to recreate the bug you talk about in ff 2 and 3 on a mac

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      artman 08:41 on July 22, 2010 Permalink | Reply
      

      David, as I said, it also depends on your HTML DOM. Even with the line-height-rule, I could place the swf in various other nodes on the page and it would work fine.

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    david 19:15 on July 22, 2010 Permalink | Reply
    

    I see. I jumped to the conclusion that, I could fix the 2 click issue by stripping out all css and adding back in figuring out which of the rules was causing the error my mistake.

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  Flash and 3D, here we go again

  Tuomas Artman 11:42 on July 9, 2010 | 11 comments | Tags: 3D, Flash (83), unity (2)

  

  A acquaintance of mine had a conversation with an Adobe executive discussing about jumping ship to Unity3D for their upcoming Virtual Worlds. The executive reportedly said that Unity is going to die away in a short while, hinting at 3D functionality (you know, _real_ 3D functionality, meshed, GPU-rendered) in the next version of Flash. There’s also a session at Max this year titled “Flash Player 3D Future” presented by a Flash Player engineer where he’ll demo new API’s in an upcoming Flash Player release.

  So, everything points to Flash Player 11 finally having a real 3D rendering engine and joining the fight for online 3D supremacy against WebGL and Unity3D.

  While I think that it’s almost one of those CE-Oh no, he didn’t! no he didn’t moments to say that Unity3D is going away because of the Flash Player, it’s a really welcome addition (if done right) to the Flash Player and has been long due.

  Unity kicks ass, and especially Unity 3 with it’s deferred rendering, MOD support (wOOt, have been asking that from the Flash Player teams since version 5), audio effects, beast light-mapping, super-fast scripting, umbra occlusion culling, physics and great editor is something that the Flash Player and IDE will never be able to match for serious 3D game development.

  On the other hand you obviously have the great penetration (and big community) of the Flash Player which will drive casual game development away from Unity.

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    Devon O. 15:49 on July 9, 2010 Permalink | Reply
    

    While I can’t wait to see what 3D goodies the next Flash player has in store, to say that Flash would be a Unity killer is no more reasonable than saying that Unity is a Flash killer. Unless the next version of Flash supports all that you listed above PLUS is able (and allowed) to create iPhone and Wii apps/games, these are two very different tools which will continue to coexist for a long time to come.

    What this is more likely to kill off, though, are all the independent 3D engines out there such as Papervision3D, Away3D, etc, etc. Now that would be a damn shame as a whole lot of people have put countless hours into creating these things that have been used successfully by the community for quite some time. If Adobe wanted to be nice, when this 3d version of Flash is released, they’d front some of the developers of those engines a bit of cash and a public thank you. Those guys have filled a void in Flash for a considerable amount of time.

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    Tuomas Artman 15:58 on July 9, 2010 Permalink | Reply
    

    Devon, I fully agree with every point you’re saying. And yes, there’s not going to be much left of PV3D (at least the rendering engine) if Flash truly goes 3D. Come to think of it, Ralph Hauwert said goodbye to PV3D development about a year ago. Maybe he had the inside scoop back then?

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    Jarrad 17:41 on July 9, 2010 Permalink | Reply
    

    Adobe is attacking Unity? Shouldn’t they be doing something about Apple? Sounds like your clutching at straws – you’ve put proper 3d off way too long – this should have been worked on when 3D in flash was hot.

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      artman 22:27 on July 9, 2010 Permalink | Reply
      

      Who says Adobe is attacking anybody? This was one employees (oh so stupid) marketing pitch for Flash. I’m sure that Adobe realizes that they really can’t compete with Unity in anything else than casual web-based games.

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    James 17:55 on July 9, 2010 Permalink | Reply
    

    Flash 3D can be open spec? Then PV3D can be saved since OpenScreenProject is already a success

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      artman 22:22 on July 9, 2010 Permalink | Reply
      

      I really don’t know what you meant by that James, but I’m sure whatever the new features will be, Adobe will replicate those for mobile devices (they would be mad to branch off mobile developent just after they’ve gotten them on the same code-base). I’m quite positive that this will kill off PV3D and all the other AS3 engines, as there’s really nothing that they will do better than a native implementation. Rendering is two or three orders of magnitude slower and any a native implementation will come with it’s own set of API’s (you know, transforming models and their hierarchies, shaders, textures, uv-maps).

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    Kevin 00:52 on July 10, 2010 Permalink | Reply
    

    I would say if Flash development environment doesn’t drastically change then people will keep using Unity. For me Flash dvelopment environment just sucks, takes too long to do things in, has the worse debug environment, lots of things.. I doubt Flash has anything to compete with Unity close to releasing or Google would be partnering with Adobe on the Android phone.

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      artman 12:03 on July 10, 2010 Permalink | Reply
      

      Huh, does anyone still use the Flash IDE for development? Try using the Flash IDE just for asset creation only, and do your coding (and building) with Flex, errr… Flash Builder. It’ll give you a very decent debugger and profiler.

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    Jensa 23:34 on July 14, 2010 Permalink | Reply
    

    I think someone jumped to conclusions here? There’s no engines integrated in the Flash Player and there never will be. It’s just a runtime that offers low level features that you can BUILD engines upon. Away3D and the other existing engines will rather thrive – that is IF they implement the new 3D features.

    Also – I wouldn’t bet on PV3D atm. Just take a look at the date for the last release / SVN logs

    J

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      Tuomas Artman 09:42 on July 15, 2010 Permalink | Reply
      

      Jensa, I think your wrong. Currently it’s true, there is no 3D engine in Flash, but with the intorduction of real 3D functionality there’s bound to be an API that’s going to more or less do the same that PV3D or Away3D. Just look at the old 3D API of Shockwave.

      Adobe of course could go the other way and just have as have GPU-accelerated texture draw calls, leaving current 3D engines thrive. This however would cripple the whole feature in the first place. Having to z-sort trialngles via ActionScript will essentially kill performance.

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  "We just upgraded your internet for free"

  Tuomas Artman 17:48 on June 14, 2010 | 3 comments

  

  It’s nice to get surprised positively once in a while by a service provider. Today, I got a mail from my ISP, Welho, telling me that they’ve doubled my internet connection speed to 200 mbit/sec at no charge. And yes, SpeedTest.net now gives me a download speed of 155 mbit/sec.

  Well, thanks!

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    JabbyPanda 10:45 on June 16, 2010 Permalink | Reply
    

    Are you on FTTN? It is common in Finland for households to be able to connect via FTTN?

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      artman 11:08 on June 16, 2010 Permalink | Reply
      

      Cable!

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    Paul Taylor 18:25 on August 24, 2010 Permalink | Reply
    

    What is this I don’t even. That’s astounding. Europeans get it all!

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  Apple about to become the second $largest$ corporation in the world

  Tuomas Artman 22:35 on May 24, 2010 | 2 comments

  

  Uh-oh. That was quick. Just a few months ago many were noting that Apple’s market cap was closing fast on Microsoft’s. Back then the gap was still 50 Billion.S dollars. Just now the gap has shrunken to 5 Billion. And Apple is still gaining fast. A recent Stanley Morgan put the target for Apple’s stock price at 310$ (currently it’s 250$). After a few days Apple is bound to go past Microsoft and take the number 2 spot just after Exxon Mobil. Wouldn’t it be cool to be a fly on Ballmer’s wall?

  Update: There it is. Apple is now valued at 222,1B $, while Microsoft is at 219,2B $.

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    funny 02:59 on May 25, 2010 Permalink | Reply
    

    You are kidding right!!!

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      Tuomas Artman 08:43 on May 25, 2010 Permalink | Reply
      

      Nope…

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  Ouch, here comes the first(?) Facebook "virus"

  Tuomas Artman 14:36 on May 21, 2010 | 8 comments | Tags: facebook, hack, social graph, virus, Web (31)

  

  Well, it’s not actually a virus, as it still needs user interaction to post itself to your wall, but still it spreads like hell. Here’s how it works:

  You wonder why all of your friends are posting links to http://www.fbhole.com/omg/allow.php?s=a&r=72306 (warning! don’t open this link just yet, or if you do, don’t click anywhere). You get to the site, get a cryptic error message (which looks like a Windows dialog, if you happen to use Windows). You try to click it and boom, you’ve just reposted the link to your wall. Huh?

  Looking at the source, what happens here is quite simple and is an old trick if you’re familiar with how people were able to open a browse for file dialog with Flash 9. An iframe with 0.001 opacity is opened on the site (pointing to http://www.fbhole.com/omg/tab.htm) which again contains a iframe pointing to Facebooks connect/prompt_feed.php, which is used by a gazillion sites to let users post a message to their wall. This iFrame is then repositioned whenever your mouse moves so that the publish button of that dialog is positioned under you mouse pointer. When you click, anywhere on the page, you actually click the Publish button which posts the pre-filled text containing a link back to the site to your profile.

  No worries though, your personal information is (as the time of writing) not compromised by this hack, but it will most certainly have implications to Facebooks sharing functionality.

  Update: For those of you who appreciate the “Objects may appear closer than they actually are”-warnings in the rear view mirror of U.S cars, the hack currently does not steal anything, but that’s not to say following the link will be safe in the *future*. It can be changed to something malicious after a million or so users have forwarded it. So be careful, or use a Mac

  Update 2: The worm was taken offline. It seems that Mikko Hyppönen, Finlands #1 celebrity in antivirus affairs was able to track the Czech dude who put this out on the interwebs and give him a call:

  Domain fbhole.com shared an IP address with ironbrain.net [82.208.32.99]. Ironbrain.net hosted a website with references to Facebook but no obvious illegal content. While fbhole.com was registered with privacy protection, ironbrain.net had contact information in the WHOIS database, complete with a Czech phone number.

  So I called the number.

  The call went roughly like this:

  – Hello?
  – Hi. This is Mikko Hypponen from F-Secure Labs.
  – What is this about?
  – I’m looking for a person related to ironbrain.net.
  – ???
  – We’re investigating a Facebook worm on fbhole.com. That domain shares an IP address with ironbrain.net which is registered under your name.
  – And you are?
  – I’m from an antivirus company. Are you related to ironbrain.net?
  – I’ll have to check… maybe my company is…
  – Please do.
  – Bye…
  [Click]

  About 15 seconds later, both fbhole.com and ironbrain.net went offline. The attack is over.

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    Neutron 14:58 on May 21, 2010 Permalink | Reply
    

    Thx for the information

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    Tero Keski-Valkama 15:29 on May 21, 2010 Permalink | Reply
    

    The link target web site can whenever be changed by the original author.

    For example, when the link has been farmed to a million FB users, the author can insert a real exploit to the page.

    It’s nice to spread consciousness about these holes, but it is a bit misleading to say: “No worries though, your personal information is not compromised by this hack”.

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      artman 16:03 on May 21, 2010 Permalink | Reply
      

      @Tero, sure, there’s a risk that it is change to a malicous site later. A few friends just were terrified if the hack had exposed them in a way, that’s what the last paragraph was about. But you’re right, I updated the article to reflect this.

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    David Tilley 15:40 on May 21, 2010 Permalink | Reply
    

    Perhaps inserting the word “currently” or “yet” might be more responsible

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      artman 16:05 on May 21, 2010 Permalink | Reply
      

      I agree, I updated the post. Note however, that reading this post on your netbook might put you at risk of getting electrocuted if you’re taking a shower at the same time

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    Philipp 17:06 on May 21, 2010 Permalink | Reply
    

    using a mac won’t help you at all, if the browser is exploitable

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      Tuomas Artman 18:09 on May 21, 2010 Permalink | Reply
      

      Sure it’s very much exploitable, but no one to this day hasn invested their time in writing an exploit for a 5% marketshare population. So we are “safe” for the time beeing

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    Anonymous Coward 03:20 on May 24, 2010 Permalink | Reply
    

    *yawn* yet another clickjacking CSRF vulnerability. When will people learn?

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  TripSay's fantastic new hotel booking feature

  Tuomas Artman 20:37 on April 25, 2010 | 0 comments | Tags: tripsay, Web (31)

  

  TripSay recently introduced a fantastic new feature to their web service – hotel bookings. The feature in itself is nothing exciting (they’re even using booking information from booking.com only), but it’s the way they’ve implemented it, that’s fantastic.

  You’re essentially searching on top of a map of the city you’re about to visit and tools let you easily drill down the number of results shown on the map by dates, stars, budget and location. Hotels matching your search result are shown as markers on the map including the average price per night, giving you a fantastic overview of what’s available in the target city.

  One fantastic functionality is to center the location of your search around a specific sight or location.

  If you haven’t already tried it, you should. I know I won’t be using anything else for all of my hotel bookings from here forward.

  Of course even the best can be made even better. Markers could be slightly smaller, as you get a lot of overlap when you’re browsing a city with loads of hotels.

  Kudos to the team. This rocks!

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  Adobe just got f#%& by Apple

  Tuomas Artman 11:03 on April 9, 2010 | 1 comments | Tags: adobe (3), apple (3), Flash (83), iphone (3), sdk

  

  Ouch. If that does not hurt, I don’t know what does. After introducing iPhone OS 4.0, Apple updated it’s developer user agreement to disallow AppStore submissions that link to API’s through intermediary translation (in effect, not written directly in Objective-C, C, C++ or JavaScript).

  This essentially means that Apple won’t accept any apps submitted to the AppStore created with Flash CS5 or any of the other not yet released ways of publishing for the iPhone. Hundreds and hundreds of man work months down the drain.

  “Applications may only use Documented APIs in the manner prescribed by Apple and must not use or call any private APIs. Applications must be originally written in Objective-C, C, C++, or JavaScript as executed by the iPhone OS WebKit engine, and only code written in C, C++, and Objective-C may compile and directly link against the Documented APIs (e.g., Applications that link to Documented APIs through an intermediary translation or compatibility layer or tool are prohibited).”

  This comes three days before the introduction of CS5. The main USP for Flash CS5 before today was that it was able to compile for the iPhone OS. Would love to be a fly on the wall of Adobe’s executive team.

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    Rob 01:56 on May 14, 2010 Permalink | Reply
    

    f#%& Apple. Steve Jobs is an obstructionist and karma will bite him in the ass

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  Flex 4 available

  Tuomas Artman 11:18 on March 22, 2010 | 0 comments | Tags: flex (5)

  Flex 4 is now available for purchase. Go get it.

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  HTML 5 killing Flash blah blah

  Tuomas Artman 19:00 on March 12, 2010 | 4 comments | Tags: Flash (83), html5, silverlight (2), video (2)

  

  Enough already. I’ve been asked a number of times what I think about Flash beeing killed by HTML 5 and I’m really getting tired of the whole discussion (which to begin with is not very interesting). That’s why I’m writing this down in a post so as to spare me from answering the same dull question once and for all.

  Those seeking a quick answer to whether HTML 5 is going to kill Flash, the answer is: “No”. A slightly longer answer would go: “No, but I hope it did”.

  iPhones, iPads

  So the iPhone and the iPad does not support Flash, and quite likely never will. So what? At the time of writing there is no single mobile phone to be bought by consumers that support a full Flash experience (to me that is Flash 10 within the browser). So, if there’s no single mobile phone today that supports the Flash experience, how come Flash is still alive? The mobile web is still different from the desktop web, and it’s going to stay that way for a while still. People use the mobile web for different purposes and I really don’t think that to this day many have missed Flash on their mobile devices. The iPad is a different story, as the experience and use scenarios come close to the desktop web. But I think that the absence of Flash on the iPad is Apple’s loss, not Adobe’s.

  

  Video

  Whenever a major newspaper with inexperienced tech journalists write about how Flash is being killed by HTML they always refer to the video embedding capabilities of the spec. And nothing else really. Somehow someone has been able to seed the perception that Flash = web video. Within that false perception, HTML5 might actually kill Flash (in the distant future). Somebody will create a fantastic plug-in for jQuery UI that puts lovely controls around all video tags on a page, and that will become the norm. For that to happen, however, most users on the web will need to surf on a HTML5 enabled browser. Usually “most users” refers to more than 90% of all users (after which developers can start to remove any gracious fallbacks that involve Flash). If you look at the market share of IE6, which was released ages ago, you know it’ll take a while to reach that 90%.

  Silverlight

  The fact that Microsoft has created Silverlight and still keeps on pushing it hard is actually a case for Flash surviving the “onslaught of HTML5″. If MS felt that they could not compete with HTML5 using a plug-in technology that is far less spread than the Flash Player, they would not pour millions of dollars into it’s R&D. Nuff’ said.

  But I wouldn’t mind if it did kill Flash

  On the other side of this argument are Flash developers, screaming out loud things like “To arms! Flash is under attack”. WTF? Let’s imagine that HTML5 (or whatever else) would actually kill Flash.

  For this to happen, there would need to be a technology or language that would be widespread amongst internet users, embraced by developers and thus superior to whatever it is that Flash is doing now. Metathesiophics (people who fear change, yes I had to look that up) aside, wouldn’t that be great? Whatever comes along, it’s bound to be programmable by something which reminds us (or is) of ECMA-Script or Java, so there’s really no steep learning curve for any Flash developer, especially as change does not come overnight, but over many years (sad but true).

  So yeah, I hope something kills of Flash really quickly.

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    Simon Bromfield 23:34 on March 12, 2010 Permalink | Reply
    

    At last, a sound a reasoned post on the subject kudos to you!

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    P-J 13:14 on April 13, 2010 Permalink | Reply
    

    Theres a good article on Smashing Magazine regarding the gradual something of flash.
    http://bit.ly/aAJaRs

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      artman 13:32 on April 13, 2010 Permalink | Reply
      

      Great article!

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  FP 10.1 Finally delivers speed improvements for OS X

  Tuomas Artman 10:24 on February 28, 2010 | 0 comments | Tags: Flash (83), flashplayer

  

  I thought of writing a post on how the Flash Player absolutely sucks on OS X. Jeah, people have been writing a number of related posts, but I didn’t think anyone actually grasped the severity of the issue. Flash 10.0 in Safari 4 on Snow Leopard (64 bit, FP running in it’s own process) actually becomes what I would say unusable. Even if you don’t do much processing, frame-rates plummet by at least a factor of four compared to a Window XP setup with the same hardware. And sure, while Firefox on OS X has run Flash sort of okeyish, it has never been able to compare against a Windows counterpart.

  That is, up to now.

  Tinic had a great post on changes they’ve made to how they composite Flash Player 10.1 renderings in the browser. The changes truly have made a big difference. Compared to 10.0, 10.1 screams on Safari, and is also a bit faster on Firefox.

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  iSlate/iPad/iTablet

  Tuomas Artman 20:24 on January 21, 2010 | 0 comments

  

  I’ve never seen a product being talked about this much before actually beeing introduced as the iSlate/iPad/iTablet. Compared to this, the iPhone rumors were just mere whispers in the wind.

  Now, can anyone really expect for the tablet to actually live up to the expectations, unless the “one more thing” is that it actually self-levitates.

  We’ll have to see next wednesday.

  Update: Well, it didn’t self-levitate. What a bummer.

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  Sleep Phase wakeup clock now available on the App Store

  Tuomas Artman 20:24 on January 12, 2010 | 4 comments | Tags: appstore, c, iphone (3), objective-c

  Sleep Phase wakeup clock, my second iPhone app is now available on the App Store. It’s a alarm clock, which monitors your sleep rythm through the iPhone’s microphone or accelerometer and wakes you up in a light sleep phase, which means you’ll feel energized and refreshed every morning.

  Originally I had this idea more than a year ago, but did not start to experiment with some code untill last summer. I was about to wrap everything up this christmas, when I stumbled upon Sleep cycle alarm clock, which was released about a month ago. They’ve sold over 100.000 copies in the first month. Lazy me, could have beat them to the store had I tried a bit harder. Well, life sucks.

  Anyways, I do appreciate what I learned from this “project”. It all came together much easier than Web Feeds, the first iPhone app I created one and a half years ago. Go ahead, give it a go, it’s not that expensive

  Update: I pulled the app from the store. I realized that I need to figure out a better, more descriptive name than “Good Night”. Unfortunately the app name cannot be changed once it’s submitted.

  Update 2: It’s available once more under the Sleep Phase wakeup clock name.

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    LyhjeHylje 22:41 on February 7, 2010 Permalink | Reply
    

    The app seems to be back named as “Sleep Phase”? Just bought it and has one question: it says I can lock my phone, but once it said I must NOT lock my phone. The latter occurred after I had locked the phone and removed it from charger while the app was running.
    So can I lock the phone or not?

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    Tuomas Artman 09:26 on February 8, 2010 Permalink | Reply
    

    You can lock your phone if:
    1) You are using microphone monitoring
    2) You keep your phone charging

    If you lock your phone and have don’t have it on a charger, the app will be put to sleep by the OS.

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    Andy Hopper 13:08 on March 21, 2010 Permalink | Reply
    

    Hi Tuomas, I was just wondering if you plan to include some kind of graphing capability in a future update, or another method to analyse the data your app collects overnight.

    I bought and use the competing Sleep Cycle app, but in truth I wanted to buy yours more. The only reason I didn’t is because I needed the reassurance from the graphs that it was actually working properly.

    If you included those, I would happily switch to your app, as I prefer the idea of use the mic so I can leave it in my bedside table.

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    Tuomas Artman 14:39 on March 21, 2010 Permalink | Reply
    

    Hi Andy, yeah, graphs are planned, but I don’t now when I have the time to implement those.

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  Tuomas Artman 23:11 on December 30, 2009 | 0 comments | Tags: problems

  Had a small hickup, due to our server melting. Everything should be back up now…

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  Building MMOG's for the Flash Platform - AS3 to Java Byte-code Compiler

  Tuomas Artman 21:20 on November 9, 2009 | 2 comments | Tags: as3 (3), Flash (83), java (3), mmog (4)

  

  Whoa, long time no post about this subject. My apologies. This one won’t be long either, but I just had to share this freakin’ cool thing.

  You might have read before that one big part of our MMOG Platform is the ability to write all code in AS3. Client-side as well as Server side. As there is no real AS3 server-side technology available we had to write our own. Our first version was up and running almost a year ago. Performance back then was OK, our tests showed us that our compiler could generate Java Byte-code from AS3 that ran as quickly as AS3 in the Flash Player, and included almost all core functionality of the AS3 scripting language.

  Jump forward a year and now we have our second version of our compiler up and running (well, compiling). And boy is it fast. When you write decent code with type annotations and all, the compiler will churn out almost perfect Java Byte-code without pushing anything on the stack.

  Performance?

  Our simple (and yeah, a bit biased I must say) test suite with heavy calculations performed wonderfully. We ran the same test suite in the Flash Player and in it’s compiled form from the command line (compiling from the same source code of course).

  All I can say is wow. Optimally, our AS3 to Java compiler produces byte code that runs 900 times faster than ActionScript in the Flash Player. 900 times.

  This of course won’t hold true in the real world where we pass around closures, dynamic objects and other resource hogs. But from what we can gather it should be around 100 times faster even then. Stay tuned for some real world tests once we get to those.

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    Ivan 15:17 on March 10, 2010 Permalink | Reply
    

    Hello Artman, the article is actually very interesting, or rather it ssubject is. Any chance I could get my hands on an AS3 to Java compiler (might we call it some cool name, like Ajas or Javas?) , either as free or commercial software?

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    Tuomas Artman 16:54 on March 10, 2010 Permalink | Reply
    

    Hi Ivan, stay tuned for updates. You might be able to use it soon…

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  Vattenfall, please explain yourself

  Tuomas Artman 21:14 on November 2, 2009 | 0 comments | Tags: carbon, electricity, green, oil, power

  

  I just moved, and started to compare prices for electricity. Vattenfall has a great number of options to choose from. You can choose with what method the electricity you’re buying has been produced. Nuclear, wind, water or “basic” (=nuclear, fossil, wind & water). Now, the pricing for wind generated power is a bit higher than for the other options, but what was really surprising was that the “basic” option, which is powered by fossil fuels in addition to clean energy is priced the same as electricity that has been generated 100% from water power.

  My question is, why the hell does Vattenfall have an option that includes fossil fuels when there is a clean option at the same price point?

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