Archive for the 'Uncategorized' Category

Take a look at this screencast of Adobe’s LiveDocs loading in FireBug’s network debugging panel, it’s completely priceless and explains why the LiveDocs suck so beyond anything else:

http://codesoup.org/adobe_livedocs/

60 requests before you can actually click on anything, and almost 700 requests before it tells you that a search for “adobesucks” didn’t yield any results – and searching for “MovieClip” aparently loads just as much. It’s over 2 Mb of data, and only 10 Kb of it is cacheable.

It’s a good thing the ActionScript 3.0 and Flex API docs are generated by ASDoc and are not accessed through LiveDocs, otherwise I would go mad.

Found via http://forums.worsethanfailure.com/forums/thread/116913.aspx, which actually contains a explanation and apology from a Adobe representative.

I’m going to London in April, and as the environmentally aware person I am, I would prefer not to fly. The problem is that I live in Gothenburg, Sweden, which isn’t connected to the British isles in any way. Really, it’s not far, but there are a few obstacles in the way – look at a map and you’ll understand. Ferry would be ideal, but the last connection was shut down a year ago – outcompeted by RyanAir. So what am I to do?

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I got a weird idea and started googling all the letters of the alphabet to see which pages had managed to SEO themselves into the top position. The results are quite interesting — well, to be honest, some are boring, but perhaps half are surprises — and you can see some trends: W3C specifications and Wikipedia entries for letters are common, if not on the top position then in the first page. Also Google has trouble with apostrophes, so the top hits for the letter s are all companies with names ending in ’s. Jennifer Lopez is the only person who makes it to the list, but when I re-checked the results today (I did the initial searches yesterday) she had been bumped down to fifth place for the letter J. She’s still in my list because I kept all the data from the first run, and it would be a shame to remove the only person.

Read on for the complete list.

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There was some rumors some weeks back that Apple was going to release Safari on Windows. I didn’t pay any attention to it then, but it struck me the other day that it’s quite likely. Perhaps not Apple releasing Safari, but someone releasing a WebKit-based browser for Windows — because really, Safari is more or less just a shell on top of WebKit.

I can even give you a when: as soon as Adobe releases Apollo.

Apollo will be built on top of WebKit, so WebKit has already been ported to Windows (which couldn’t be very hard, since it came from KDE to start with) and writing a fancy web browser UI in Apollo should be easy as cake.

We’ll be seeing Safari on Windows very soon.

I have started to play with ActionScript 3 and the command line mxmlc compiler (which is free, horray). Adobe has posted some interesting libraries on labs which I’m interested in trying out. When you download the frameworks you get three things, the compiled swc, the source and the documentation.

Except you don’t.

You don’t get any documentation. What you get is the generated API “documentation”, which is like throwing a gadget without any visible clues as to how it’s operated in someones face and say “you figure it out”.

Its such a waste of good code! Some of the frameworks have tens of classes in them, how do I know which ones to use? I’ll have too look through everything just to get an idea of what it can do.

A simple “this is the bare minimum of code you need to do X” would suffice, from there I can experiment my way to understanding the whole framework.

If you are going to distribute a framework or library, at least include an example of the most common usage of the framework. If you can’t bother doing that, don’t bother releasing it.

Luckily there seems to be (more or less) third-party guides to some of the frameworks, so I’ll get by. It still makes me disapointed, however.

According to the Apollo FAQ will include Apple’s WebKit, the HTML renderer and JavaScript engine in Safari, Dashboard and other Mac OS X applications (as well as some new Nokia mobile phones, I belive).

This is good news for Apple, as WebKit will gain some ground in that area, but not very surprising when you think about it. To use the host OS native web browser engine is not an option since it unecessarily would make Apollo less platform independent; the Internet Explorer engine is also out of the question since it isn’t supported on any other platforms. Then there are Gecko, Opera or developing a new one. The latter is too much work, and not worth it. Opera would probably work, but they are quite marginalized as it is and Opera is currently focused on the mobile market. Then there is Gecko, but there is a reason why Apple chose to go with KHTML and not Gecko a couple of years back: Gecko is huge, a beast. WebKit, née KHTML, is leaner and has already shown that it can be ported to mobile devices. The FAQ actually states that WebKit was chosen because it had a “Minimum effect on Apollo runtime size” and “Proven ability to run on mobile devices”, which Gecko doesn’t.

Oddly enough, this isn’t in line with Adobe’s recent decision to give away the ActionScript runtime to the Mozilla foundation. But on the other hand, that doesn’t really have anything to do with Apollo.

I’m really looking forward to see what Apollo will be able to do. In my mind it spans the web-desktop divide which is quite exciting.

I just installed the Photoshop CS3 Beta, and there was something with the installer that made me curios. I checked the application bundle and found a Nib called “DHTMLAlert.nib”, which was a window filled with a WebView. In further inspection the “resources” directory which is on the install disk contains the interface, in HTML and JavaScript files. In essence, the installer is an Ajax application, at least the user interface.

I guess this is more common on the Windows platform, so perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised. On the Mac, however, we don’t see this very often, and I hope it will stay that way. Web applications are ten years after their desktop counterparts when it comes to user interfaces, so doing what Adobe is doing isn’t a step forward, in my opinion. I don’t want every application to have it’s custom GUI style, and I don’t want hover effects on every control, it’s not in the intrest of good user interface design.

But that wasn’t really why I wrote this, the real reason is that I’m curious if this is an example of what Adobe’s soon-to-be-released Apollo can do? It looks and feels kind of sleek, so I’m impressed. For some applications I can see why using this kind of technology would be better than trying to do the same thing in .Net or Cocoa.

It’s actually a web application

The “four kinds of freedom”, as defined by the Free Software Foundation, tells us that users of free software have “the freedom to run the program, for any purpose (freedom 0)”. What an irony it is then, that most open source/free software applications I have installed on my Mac include a licence agreement step, like in these pictures:

The user cannot install the software without agreeing to the GPL, which I must say is a clear violation of “freedom to run the program, for any purpose”. And this is regardless of that the GPL, to the best of my knowledge, does not impose any restrictions on the user of a GPL’ed application*, so there isn’t really anything to accept.

Edit: The GPL FAQ actually mentions this.

* As far as I understand it (I really need to say that so that Stallman doesn’t put a fatwa on me), the GPL is concerned with distribution of software, not, for example, usage.