• Temporize
• Web log
  2009
• 05/01/09

Following on from the last post, I’ve just finished reading and interesting piece by Brad Neuberg about how flash can integrate with the open web. One of the comments of the comments I found interesting was:

“Over time Adobe has been become more and more open source friendly, contributing to open source projects and opening up their own products. However, these decisions have always been good business decisions and open sourcing Flash right now is a really bad business decision.”

A good point, though I really think open source is going to be one of, if not The, major business models of the future, and I believe most companies are going to have to go this way at some stage in order to compete in the market place. Microsoft will at some point (if they haven’t already) start eating into Adobes market and user base with their Silverlight product, so opening up Flash to the open web and significantly increasing the developers and the community involved in the product would, in my option, be a very good business decision.

Although flash is slowly making its way onto some mobile devices, Flash on the iPhone is still looking as far off as a manned mission to Mars. But with HTML 5 starting to be implemented in webkit and most other browsers, and the advancements in SVGs of late, I’ve been thinking about what roll flash will play on the iPhone, and if it is really needed at all …

At the moment, I find the fact that I can’t jump on youtube and watch my friends latest video a little annoying, but with the <video> and <audio> tag already working in safari 3, how long will it be before these are carried through to the iPhone? And with the wider adoption of such tags, will sites such as youtube continue to use flash as their default media player?

I’m a big fan of Flash, and seeing what Joshua Davis and Hi-Res were doing with the platform back in the late 90’s is what really go me into web design and playing with code in the first place, but now that I’ve had to live without flash on the iPhone for the last few month and counted the amount of times I’ve actually missed it, I’m not so sure it’s the iPhone enhancer I’ve been hoping it would be.

Since posting about Robert Hodgin’s work over at Flight 404 back in September last year, the quality and complexity of the projects he has been producing have skyrocketed. His latest piece Solar is amazing.

I don’t know what it is, but there is something about tinkering with code that keeps me wanting to learn more and more. As I recently explained to a friend, learning to build websites is sort of like cleaning a small spot on an infinitely large dirty window; once you start, there’s always more to clean.

The latest spot I’ve started on is Ruby, which I’ve done with the help of Why’s (Poignant) Guide. Even if you have no intention of ever looking a piece of code, I recommend you check out this work in progress by Why the Lucky Stiff. Filled with talking foxes and chunky bacon, this guide is as far removed from you’re traditional text book as you’re ever likely to come, yet is still a great resource.

If, like me (or Boicozine), you’re constantly battling Wordpress in order to bend it to your will, you might want to head over to the Web Designer Wall. Nick La, who also runs N.Design Studio and Best Web Gallery, has written a great post on hacking Wordpress in order to maximise it’s CMS capabilities. Even if you’re not to keen on the ‘coding’ side of things, there are some great little tips there that may just keep you from screaming at your computer the next time you go to update your theme …

While we’re on the subject, I came across this nifty little piece by Robert Hodgin (Flight 404) over at the Processing Blogs. If you are writing about using (and learning) Processing, be sure to send these guys and email, as there are currently looking for more feeds for the site.