Technocrank

Choice quotes from Adobe’s CEO in this article:

“Considering the amount of content on the Web that uses Flash — not allowing your consumers to access that content isn’t showing off the Web in all its glory.”

And,

“Apple’s business model is more trying to maintain a proprietary lock.”

And,

“the 10.1 version will do what Jobs wants it to do.”

I can hear the canned laugh-track as I read it.

I’m not particularly fond of Steve Jobs’ accusations that Adobe devs are lazy.  It sounds a bit peevish and personal and just because he thinks he’s Superman doesn’t mean he gets to be a dick.  I did like him calling BS on Google, though, there are a lot of things that Apple’s done under his command I think were questionable (“evil” even).

I’m also not saying that Adobe is a shining star when it comes to some of the choices they’ve made but overall, I’d say they’ve done a pretty good job at holding up the bar in the design world (even if they’re responsible for making drop-shadowed text ubiquitous).

It takes a lot of guts for Emmy Huang, the Project Manager for Flash Player, to write this post.  It displays a humanity, although I’m sure Jobs wasn’t implying they’re lazy robots.  It also highlights problems in their process.  But I do wonder about this:

“I want to reiterate that it is our policy that crashes are serious “A” priority bugs, and it is a tenet of the Flash Player team that ActionScript developers should never be able to crash Flash Player. If a crash occurs, it is by definition a bug, and one that Adobe takes very seriously. When they happen, it can be the result of something going on purely within Flash Player, something in the browser, or even at the OS level. Depending on where an issue occurs we work to resolve the crash internally or with our partners.”

She then goes on to outline the timeline of how the wheels fell off the wagon.

Some points:

• crashing bugs should be fixed and released immediately, i.e. the day they fixed it.  Telling me that it was fixed 3 months ago and we’re only going to see it with the next release which is…when?…only makes me froth.
• it’s not as if Flash 10 is the first version where the player has had serious issues and caused crashing.  It’s almost a defining characteristic of the platform since version 1.

No amount of denials from upper management is going to make the existence of problems untrue and no amount of apologies from the developer level is going to change the fact that if it’s not in our hands, it’s not fixed.

Adobe needs to fix their process, like a decade ago.  I know it’s complicated, and I know the software’s a crazy rat’s nest.

For what it’s worth, I don’t think Flash will ever completely go away.  Flash as a video delivery vehicle always kind of bother me as over-engineered and overkill.  But as a platform for other things I think it will still have a place, albeit with a much lesser presence.  Nonetheless, Adobe, I don’t think it had to be this way.

Wordpress 2.9.1
WordTwit 2.3.1
WPTouch 1.9.7.7

Some bizarro stuff going on with WordTwit. First it was complaining about a foreach() loop and coughing up a PHP error. Now it doesn’t seem to know how to handle the multi-dimensional array $tweets; it spits back the first character of the first levels elements. I posted the letter “t” -900 minutes ago and the number “2″ 14646 days ago?

In another theme that handled widgets, similar hanky, but with doing something with an array that PHP didn’t like.

Unfortunately, Bravenewcode, the authors, have their support forums in plastic surgery right now and I’m not sure how to contact them. I’ve also tried hitting them up on Twitter for a clue on how to hit them up. Nothing yet.

Update: the lads from Bravenewcode have quickly fixed this. It was an error caused by Twitter not returning an array when only one tweet was available (when it normally does). WordTwit 2.3.2 and WPTouch 1.9.8.1 address this issue.

Wordpress 2.9.1
Wordpress for iPhone 2.1-2.2

Saving a local draft fails. Not iust fails, but completely doesn’t happen at all. Writing a post of any length goes into /dev/null. Seems it’s not an exactly uncommon issue as this forums post shows but for some reason isn’t reproduceable.

Saving as a draft to the server is fine, though.

I’m fascinated by people’s relationship with technology and this recent posting on Lifehacker is a prime example of the wrong questions being asked.  We’ve heard about Internet addiction – there was a story last week out of China with a death related to an Internet addiction rehabilitation program.

What’s most interesting to me about the Lifehacker article is that there should even be an article at all.  Its subject “Is The Web Crucial To Your Morning Routine?” is about as germane as “is the telephone crucial to your morning routine?” or “do you turn on the TV for the morning weather or open a newspaper?”

My routine involves roughly, turning on the computer and leaving it to boot, make a pit stop in the washroom, to the kitchen and make some tea, pour some cereal and then sit down to check out what news or weather updates have come up – on the net.  It’s my main (and preferred) source of information that informs my day and it seems that it should figure into the start of it (I don’t have kids yet, will change, I’m sure).  However, is it really that much different from looking to the sky to see if it’s going to rain today or running around the corner to grab the paper to see if the economy has tanked and I should buy extra tins of food for the bomb shelter?