Rants
In reply to
Feb 4th
Radley Marx wrote a short piece on ‘myths’ about HTML5; I read his post, and what struck me about it was that, despite a few salient points, it seemed mostly FUD. Particular gems stuck out, such as his assertion that HTML5 will create unblockable banner ads, that we’ll see a resurgence of unwelcome ’splash pages’, or that HTML5 will be just as crashy as Flash. It reeked of the kneejerk reaction I would expect from someone whose information comes entirely from the pro-Flash camp. Most of the assertions he makes are either wildly inaccurate or misrepresent the truth badly.
Myth 1 – HTML5 Video is only for the iPhone
On the iPhone, YouTube pops up Quicktime to play the video, because that’s what plays h.264 video on the iPhone. On Safari on Windows and Mac, it uses Quicktime for decoding as well. On Chrome, it uses Chrome’s built-in video rendering.
Also, if you visit www.youtube.com/html5 on any browser, it gives you a page asking if you want to enter the HTML5 beta – not any actual video. You should have checked the link first.
Myth 2 (section 1 – penetration)
HTML5 isn’t here yet? No, it’s not. Support for HTML5, however, is growing. Chrome, Firefox, and Safari all support HTML5 and CSS3 to varying degrees; Safari and Chrome both support h.264 video, and Firefox supports Ogg Theora video.
The point is not ‘everyone should switch to HTML5 immediately for everything’, but rather ‘Now’s the time to start thinking seriously about what HTML5 can offer you’. For example, in the case of Vimeo, I can turn on HTML5 instead of Flash (at my option). As a result, videos on Vimeo use far less CPU – On the Mac, a typical Vimeo video uses 100% of one CPU and 20% of another to play Flash video, vs. only 20% of one to play HTML5 video. If you don’t want it, change it back.
Myth 2 (section 2 – flexibility)
This one was a doozy, but I’ll try to address some of the points.
- Customizing the video player – see SublimeVideo for an example of the customizations you can do to an HTML5 video player. Works in Safari and Chrome.
- Movie clips – we just covered this, the <video> tag does this.
- Native apps – I assume you mean Adobe AIR? Personally, I can’t stand it. Every single app I’ve used that was written in AIR didn’t behave like a native application, was slow, and used up far more memory than an app should. It’s great for banging out a quick, cross-platform app, but no one I know uses it if they have a choice.
As for the rest – no, HTML5 doesn’t do all of that. It wasn’t meant to. That’s the sort of thing Flash is (maybe) good for.
Myth 3 – Canvas is inflexible, and nigh-useless for real work
- Canvas doesn’t support fonts – except those supported by browsers. True, but browsers like Safari and Chrome are also adding support for downloadable fonts, meaning that you, as a designer, can make a font available to the browser to use.
- Canvas only supports limited interactivity, so games are a no-go – I’m not sure what you mean by ‘limited interactivity’. You can capture mouse and keyboard events. Did you want more? You can certainly create games, and people are starting to do so. As a primitive example, check out this Wolfenstein 3D-esque 3D engine using Canvas.
Sure, it’s not the most advanced example, but it only took a few seconds of googling to find. There are much more complex and innovative examples out there.
- Tools – Ironically, the very company you seem to be trying to defend, Adobe, has tools that will do this. Check out this demo from October of someone using Illustrator and Dreamweaver to create Canvas-based content.
Myth 4 – HTML5 has all the problems of Flash, and will bring back splash pages
- CPU hogging. Well, of all the things I’ve seen in HTML5, none of them are cpu-intensive, except the one thing you linked (which looks like it’s doing some very inefficient things very often). Meanwhile, in my experience, without Flash blocking the entire web is geared towards draining laptop batteries as much as possible. Not ideal.
- Banner ads – Flash blockers aren’t the best way to get rid of ads, they’re just the best way to get rid of annoying flash that gets past your ad blocking filters. If you want to get rid of ads, use an ad-blocker that will stop your browser from downloading the Javascript that puts the ads there in the first place. This will work for HTML5 just as well.
- Splash pages – HTML5 means a return of splash pages? No. People who know how to build a good user experience won’t suddenly forget when they stop using Flash.
- Crashes. You start talking about crashes, then talk about CPU use. There’s no correlation. Regardless, Flash on Mac especially is horrendously buggy. Safari is far, far more stable now that I block the Flash plugin from doing anything unless I tell it to. This isn’t going to change, because Adobe doesn’t care about the Mac market. If they ever start to care, then maybe we’ll start seeing some improvements.
Conclusion
I’m not entirely sure what the point of your blog post was. You seem to spend it all spouting off knee-jerk reactions, of the kind that implies you’re a Flash developer, and you’re afraid that you’re going to become irrelevant. Maybe it’s just me, but that’s how it comes across.
But it doesn’t make any sense. Adobe is not afraid of Flash being killed off by HTML5; you’ve pointed out several reasons yourself why it won’t – things like throwaway browser games, or voice/video apps. The fact is that the design goals of Flash and the design goals of HTML5 overlap in some areas, but definitely not all of them. Flash isn’t going away any time soon (though I’d be thrilled if it did). What we will start to see is compatibility. Let Flash do what only Flash can do well, but let the browsers do the rest, and let them do it better. Instead of Adobe trying to optimize for every case, let Adobe focus Flash on what it needs to do best.
What it comes down to is Adobe execs making this about ‘us or them’. They keep talking about how they have this awesome version of Flash for the iPhone waiting in the wings, but Apple is cruelly depriving its users of the joys of Flash. In reality, Adobe hasn’t bothered to give Mac users a working, stable version of Flash. For that matter, even the Mozilla Maemo team is having problems with Flash performance; Stuart Parmenter announced today that they have RC3 of Firefox for Maemo ready, but they had to turn off plugins because Flash slowed things down too much.
So let’s stop this fighting. Adobe used to be a great company, maybe it will be again. They can continue to make tools, whether Flash survives or not, whether HTML5 becomes commonplace or not. That’s where their money is, and that’s fine. What we need to stop is this misdirection, the fear, uncertainty and doubt that people are spreading about ‘Flash vs. iPad’ and so on. It doesn’t help anyone if you force them to take sides.
Digital Downloads and Analog Media
Apr 4th
Note: The following post is very Apple-centric, re: iTunes, AppleTV, etc. Substitute if you like any similar technology except Windows-specific ones. Oh wait, that only leaves Apple.
I’m not asking too much. I mean, I don’t watch a lot of TV. Any, in fact. I don’t even own a TV. I don’t have a DVD player or TiVo, and I don’t have cable.
If you consider my impact on the television industry, you’ll find it’s not really worth factoring into any equation. And yet, if they want to reach into my pockets and clean out any part of my paycheque that doesn’t go to food, rent, or Starbucks, it’s a pretty simple matter. In fact, I’ll tell them right now what needs doing.
A tweet from the lovely Shannon McKarney got me started down this line of thought, and brought up some old ideas I’d had. Not complicated ideas, nothing I’d consider revolutionary, but pretty straightforward ideas. Her question revolved around how, given the demand indicated by the Wolverine workprint leak and the feeding frenzy of downloading it set off, can movie companies use the internet to make money? There’s a market, how do you tap it?
Simple. Give me what I want the way I want it.
Movies: easy. Release in theatres on a Friday. Next Friday, release on iTunes in HD for rent. Depending on the movie, MAYBE wait two weeks. Two weeks after that, release on Blu-Ray and DVD. Down the road, THEN you come out with extras. BD discs with behind-the-scenes stuff, all the extra fluff, bonus sequences, director’s cuts, and so on.
I want to watch movies, but that’s not what theatres are about to me. Theatres are about pushing your way through a crowd, about getting the worst seats in the house because there are no two adjacent seats together. They’re about overpriced, substandard food, five dollar soft drinks, sticky floors, and people talking to each other behind you and kicking the back of your seat.
Imagine not having to pay for that. Imagine sitting down at home, cooking up some pasta, making a sandwich, grabbing a beer, blending a smoothie, or BBQing some steaks, and then putting a movie up on the big screen. Enjoying a movie even when your baby is sick, or your child is teething. Recovering from the flu, or staying in with your sweetheart on a rainy Sunday evening. It’s a better experience all around.
Some people will prefer the classic, and for groups of any reasonable size, the theatre will just make more sense. It won’t kill the theatres, but it will augment them. More people will watch movies because the barrier to entry will be lowered. The giant screens are irreplaceable, but that just justifies them staying in business and charging more. It’s an experience, but you don’t always want it.
So what about TV shows? Possibly a little more complicated, but I have an idea about that too. First things first: confessions. I download all the TV I watch. I don’t pay for it, I don’t have cable. No one gets anything from me. If I had the following solution, I would pay.
Imagine a scenario: It’s Monday night – Lost night. You’ve got a long day at work, but at the end of it, you drive home. Throw together a dinner or some leftovers, sit down on the couch, turn on your AppleTV, and flip on Heroes. Watch it, in all its HD glory. When your wife gets home from her late-late shift, she can watch it again. The key factor: you don’t have cable. You never had. No DVR, no anything.
You bought a subscription to Heroes. You paid, up-front, for the entire season. Every Monday morning, your AppleTV downloads the next episode of Heroes for you, automatically. When you get home, you don’t have to wait for it to download, you just jump right in. The AppleTV respects airdates by requesting a key from Apple’s servers before it’s allowed to play it. It knows what time it’s supposed to be available, and once that time comes, it will let you play it. It verifies with the servers, and the content is unlocked – for good. It costs a little extra to get it in HD, but it’s worth it.
The end result? High-quality digital versions of the show, each episode sent to your home so that you can watch it on your own terms, without having to subscribe to cable TV, get the HD pack, get the HD PVR. For me, it would be about $78/mo before tax to get the same thing. That’s a lot of money that most people aren’t willing to pay – especially if, like me, you only watch a few hours of TV per week. No wonder people pirate it.
So think about that. I can pay $78 to Shaw, who then turns around and buys access to the channels, who sell access to advertisers to make money for production (or syndication rights). For that, I get hundreds of channels I’ll never watch, and years of content I have no interest in. Or, I can pay $20 (or even $30!) to subscribe to an entire season of Heroes, or any other show (adjust pricing accordingly for different types of shows).
It’s a no-brainer.
So please, accept the digital age. Accept that you can skip the middleman (or at least, a lot of the middle men). Accept that you can lower your overhead. Accept that impulse-buying is a good thing. Accept that having an entire season of Heroes paid off by the fifth episode is a good thing. Accept that you’ll be able to have TV series with long-running plots, because people will be able to easily start at the beginning, rather than wherever the networks happen to be airing them at. Accept that on-demand is better over the internet than through some broken cable box UI.
How do you stop piracy? You don’t. But if the iTunes Music Store can be more popular than free, I think you’ll find that giving people quality will encourage them to part with their hard-earned money.
Accept change, because the world is changing, with or without you. After all, I can already do everything I’ve talked about above, I’m just not paying you for the privilege.
Why I’m no longer following you
Feb 25th
First a note: this isn’t intended to any one person. Many, many people fall into this category for many reasons. I’m not going to single anyone out in particular.
I follow a lot of people. I’m not saying I’m following a lot of people. I follow a lot of people. How else are you going to know if they’re relevant to your interests? Interesting people follow me, and I follow back, or vice-versa. That’s how Twitter works after all, and I’m not some high-falutin’ Twitter royal who never has to follow back to be noticed and get involved with people on Twitter.
SEO and Social Media Asshat Experiment
Jan 24th
So recently, I’ve been doing two things: whining about how social media ‘experts’ and ‘SEO experts’ follow me on Twitter, and checking my e-mail to find that a bunch of social media ‘experts’ and ‘SEO experts’ have just followed me on Twitter.
WTF?
Obsessive Compulsions
Jan 18th
You’d be hard-pressed to find an individual who hasn’t heard of the term ‘obsessive-compulsive disorder’, or its more common abbreviation ‘OCD’. In fact, a lot of people use it to refer to themselves or others, about how they’re ‘OCD about’ something (say, keeping their desks tidy). Like many terms (like the term ‘crazy’, for example), it’s often used to refer to people or situations that don’t entirely qualify, and like most such usages, no one really thinks twice about it.
One portrait of obsessive-compulsives was the 1997 film As Good as It Gets, starring Jack Nicholson as a writer who has a strict routine, including sitting at the same table at the same restaurant every day, being served by the same waitress, and so on. When forced out of his routine, he becomes agitated and (as I recall) seems rather panicked.
Obsessive-compulsive disorder has a few criteria for diagnosis. The DSM IV defines obsessions as recurrent thoughts, impulses, or images that are intrusive and caused anxiety or distress, which are not excessive worries about actual problems. The person knows that they’re all in his or her head and tries to suppress them because they are interfering with the sufferer’s life.