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.

1. 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.
2. Movie clips – we just covered this, the <video> tag does this.
3. 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

1. 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.
2. 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.

3. 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

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. 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.

I try not to take sides, even when it involves my friends, until I know both sides of the story clearly. Still, I don’t know Rebecca except by reputation, and I know Corinna personally, so I took her words at face value.

This morning, I got an e-mail from Rebecca, trying to clear up the situation. Without commentary on its contents, I thought I’d post it here so other people could see her side of the story.

First of all, you can read what Corinna had to say over on her blog. Then, you can read the below e-mail and see what you think.

Hi Dan,

I just wanted to clear the air about the Best of 604 Awards as I’ve seen some chatter lately on Twitter.

They have and always will be people’s choice awards. People nominate and people vote, me or judges are and never will be involved. For the 2009-2010 event I opened up a Twitter account and updated the home page http://bestof604.com.

I’m not sure why anyone would think they are “banned”, I’m not even sure in what context. I have a complete list of winners available here, listing all 1st, 2nd and 3rd place bloggers:
http://www.miss604.com/2008/12/best-of-604-winners-and-the-morning-after.html

The event hasn’t even been setup this year but I did announce nominations will once again be open March 1st. That’s about all the planning that has taken place so far.

If you have any concerns, please let me know as this is 100% about the blogs that people love and want to support — from mainstream news to knitting, it doesn’t matter.

Cheers,

Rebecca

So that’s what Rebecca had to say. I’m not going to pass any judgement in either direction yet. There’s still some details I feel like I’m missing before I make my final judgement, but hopefully this will help clear the air, and not fan the flames.

As an example, I’m doing a lot of domain stuff today, and dealing with our registrar of choice, eNom – except that if I type their name in lowercase (‘enom’) SL automatically corrects it to ‘enema’, which means I’ve been inches away from sending horrendously confusing and potentially inappropriate e-mails to people.

Maybe it’s something to watch out for. It’s nearly screwed me a few times.

Their API doesn’t actually expose a whole heck of a lot very well, but there’s enough there to play with and I thought someone might find some use for the work I’ve done so far on what might become a Pingdom module for Python. Now, this is my first Python module, so if I’m doing anything horribly stupid (I probably am), feel free to let me know.

You can find the source code on the github page for the project.

Examples

Logging in and getting the list of pingom check locations, and the list of checks configured in your account:

Getting the current states of all checks:

Getting recent downtimes for a given check:

It’s hard to come up with an analogy that everyone can appreciate and which fits well enough that it will help, but I’ll try. Consider the first time you saw a TV show or movie in HD – perhaps you bought an HDTV, perhaps you upgraded from digital cable to HD, or you bought a Blu-Ray or HD-DVD player. Maybe you just saw one at Best Buy playing your favourite summer blockbuster. You see what’s on the screen, and it’s still the same, really. It’s the same movie you’ve enjoyed in the past, the same TV shows you’ve always loved. The plot hasn’t changed, the writing isn’t any better. It’s quantitatively clearer, but that provides a qualitative improvement.

If you’re a gamer, the comparison is easy. Do you remember the first time you upgraded your video card to the latest and greatest? The frame rate increased, you get more texture quality, it’s smoother. There’s less jitter, scrolling and panning is smoother. You didn’t really notice it before, but now it feels better. It’s more natural, it flows better.

And that’s really the key. The iPhone isn’t faster, because ‘faster’ doesn’t connote the right differences. The iPhone is more fluid. Moving from one application to another, or from one screen to the next, or scrolling around on a website or reading your e-mail, it flows better. It’s not just that the current iPhone is slow, it’s more that it breaks your stride.

Here’s another example. Let’s say you’ve got a room in your house with doors on two sides, directly opposite. On the other two sides, you have a couch and a TV, and in the middle, there’s a coffee table. Let’s also say you have to walk through this room to get from your bedroom to the kitchen, so it’s a trip you make fairly often. If you put your coffee table directly between the two doors, then every time you cross this room, you’ll have to go around it. It’s not a big deal, but it throws off your momentum. You’ll have to step to the side twice every time you go through the room. You’ll also have to go through the line of sight from the couch to the TV, so you might have to slow down if someone’s playing games or watching a movie, waiting for the perfect opportunity, and you’re more likely to bang your knee while going around it, maybe if you’re in a hurry or it’s dark.

Using the iPhone 3G now is a lot like that. There are a lot of situations now where the flow of action from one activity to the next is disrupted. The straight path from point A to point B has a detour in the middle, an obstacle, a delay, and it slows your momentum ever so slightly. Enough of these delays and it becomes subconsciously frustrating. The iPhone 3GS does away with that.

Now here’s the key, and here’s why it’s hard to quantify. You probably didn’t notice any of those delays. You go around that coffee table so often that you don’t even realize it’s there, but on a subconscious level, it bothers you. You don’t think to move the coffee table because you don’t realize it bothers you, but if you moved it a half a foot out of the way, you’d decrease your subconscious frustration ever so slightly, and you’d find yourself enjoying your home more (and you’d have fewer bruised shins to show for it).

I didn’t dislike Twitterrific on the iPhone, not really. It was ok, but not great. The UI was nice, but I just didn’t really care for it, preferring Tweetie. I couldn’t tell you why, I just didn’t like Twitterrific’s interface, or maybe it was the colours, or maybe it was just kind of convoluted to use. I don’t know why I didn’t care for it, but I didn’t.

Now, however, I know. Twitterrific wasn’t slow, you have to understand. I wasn’t sitting there, staring at loading screens or progress bars, waiting for it to accomplish the task I’d set it to. The real reason I didn’t care for Twitterrific was because there was some subtle, imperceptible lag when moving from one action to the next. I didn’t notice it consciously, but subconsciously it bothered me, it made me dislike the app for reasons I didn’t realize or understand. On the 3GS this week, I used Twitterrific exclusively. I didn’t try any other Twitter apps, and it didn’t occur to me to want to. Twitterrific was great, and I was happy to keep using it, because that unconscious frustration with minute waits and imperceptible lag was gone.

And that’s what it feels like to move from an iPhone 3G to a 3GS. It’s a more satisfying experience, a more enjoyable device, but not for reasons that you might think. It takes better pictures, but I don’t really care. It records video, but I don’t really care. It has faster data access, but I don’t really care. It has voice control, but I don’t really care.

The real difference between the iPhone 3G and 3GS isn’t something that you’re likely to notice unless you’re looking for it. You’ll enjoy the new phone for reasons that you can’t really explain, and when people ask why you paid an extra few hundred dollars for a not-so-different phone, you won’t regret it, but you won’t be able to defend your decision either, because you can’t reduce the experience to numbers.

It just feels better.