Technocrank

I’m intrigued by this.  On my system, the Flash player plugin is 31MB of top-quality Adobe-compiled code.  How can it be that Smokescreen, a Javascript implementation of a Flash player that weighs in at 175.1kB (minified) can fully replicate the functionality of the Adobe player?  Either (a) it doesn’t (perhaps a work-in-progress, but still…), or (b) Adobe’s plugin is a steaming pile?

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.

I found this a few months ago but forgot to post it:  Fluid, the OSX WebKit-based single-site browser application, floods your /var/log/system.log with errors regarding CGWindowContextCreate failing:

FluidInstance[3592]: Failed to create window context device
CGWindowContextCreate: failed to create context delegate.
_initWithWindowNumber: error creating graphics ctxt object for ctxt:0x18343, window:0xffffffff

The bug was being discussed here (in which commenters pointed their fingers at several plugins) but the discussion seems to have ceased.  The last suspected culprit is the Google Gears plugin (located in /Library/Internet Plug-Ins).  Indeed, when I removed every plugin and added them back, the Gears plugin was the one that caused the flooding.

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ClickToFlash is a nice little Flashblock-type plugin for Safari with one big problem.  Two, actually.

1. you can’t leave feedback for the developer without creating a (free) account on the project website.  Dude, I just wanted to tell you about #2…
2. the only way I could find to get into the whitelist and preferences for the plugin is via a page with Flash that isn’t already blocked (there’s a little control on the blocker that gets you in).  However, if you’ve already whitelisted the page there’s no way to get back in and un-whitelist it without going to another site with Flash.  Worse, if you’ve whitelisted it in Fluid (a single-site browser application instance of Safari) there’s no hope at all of making any changes.  You are stuck.

You need to get a preference pane in the main application fast.

One thing about ClickToFlash compared to Flashblock: as I’ve cranked about a few months ago, the Flash media player on MySpace doesn’t load properly in Firefox when you tell Flashblock to unblock.  However, with ClickToFlash in Safari there’s no such problem.  You click, it appears.  Flashblock developers say this is a known bug in the Mozilla code which I should point out nobody seems to be working on.  The Flashblock bug was logged October 2008, the Mozilla bug March 2009 and the feedback comments run in circles.  It’s also suggested that the problem is with the Flash player but ClickToFlash on Safari doesn’t have the same issue.

Score one more for Safari.