Thank you for the Weeb Feeds HD, it’s great! But I have noticed some problems:
1. FaceBook sharing is not working. I cannot type in my FB info. The username/ID section doesnot show the letters I typed;
2. After I read some feeds in Weeb Feeds HD, the feeds I had read were not marked as read in NetNewsWire on Mac or in Reeder on iPad. If I read the feeds in Reeder on iPad, it showed as read in NetNewsWire on Mac (or if I read the feeds in NetNewsWire on Mac, it showed as read in Reeder on iPad), but did NOT show as read in Weeb Feeds HD either way. So, I have go to through and figure out what I had read and mark it as read again.
Browsing articles from "August, 2010"
The Flash Player Secret Garden
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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Web Feeds HD now available for your iPad
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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I forgot to mention: Weeb Feeds HD, Reeder and NetNewsWire are all synched with my Google Reader account.
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Weeb Feeds HD is slower than Reeder when it comes to the speed of downloading feeds. Again, it’s all synched with my Google Reader account.
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Really great little app. Thank you!
One further addition would be welcome: filtering the posts by inputting key words or phrases.
Where’s that Flash app?
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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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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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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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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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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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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What about browserlab.adobe.com? Ok, it’s Adobe’s own site but still pretty useful.
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I use Yahoo’s Web Messenger (webmessenger.yahoo.com) for my YIM client and Grooveshark (www.grooveshark.com) for my music client. I use these Flex apps all day almost every day and think they are really great.
When hockey season is on I often watch hockey games via NHL’s Gamecenter app (www.nhl.com/gamecenter/) and other sporting events on ESPN3′s video app (www.espn3.com)
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As a developer you might be interested in http://creately.com/. An online UML tool created with Flash. It seems promising because UML tool really is a concept that does not suffer from any weaknesses that Flash has compared to HTML implementation.
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Yeah, Creately is “nice”, but it’s still far from perfect. It’s not that any Flash apps have to compete with HTML apps, they have to compete with desktop apps aswell. And as my coding still hapens on the desktop, I like my UML design tool to be a desktop app aswell.
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Hello (mt)
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?
Less AS3 frameworks, more native implementations, please!
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:
- Updatability. You don’t rely on Flash Player updates to deliver new functionality or bug fixes.
- The Flash Player download size does not increase
Disadvantages:
- 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.
- 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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Please donate testicle. We could use the speed.
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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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Um, I don’t know if “beeing able to debug a feature which should simply work” qualifies as an advantage.
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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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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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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.-
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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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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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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fyi — I think your blog posts are being used by others to give credibility to their shop.
http://techliance.com/blog/frameworks/less-as3-frameworks-more-native-implementations-please.html
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Jamie, thanks for letting me know.
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Check out this link:
http://www.bytearray.org/?p=1836
i suppose it’s better to not make promises, if you’ re not sure about keeping them.
just look at what happened with windows vista