Tim Mahoney

Adobe’s been taking quite a beating lately from a lot of folks. Apple won’t support it on it’s mobile devices, everyone is touting HTML5 as a “Flash killer,” and all in all the PR for them has been rather awful.

All that being said, this could be an opportunity for Adobe to turn around and make something excellent for themselves.

Creating HTML5 code using Flash

The HTML5 specification does a lot. It doesn’t enable you to do everything that Flash does, but there’s a lot there, and and it’s coming along quickly. So, how about this? Adobe already has a platform that creates rich web applications well. Adobe even has their own HTML generator, Dreamweaver. I’m sure this is on their mind, but won’t people be able to build HTML5 applications in Dreamweaver? It’s not too much of a stretch to think that Adobe has tasked a bunch of people to basically make an “HTML5 Mode” for Dreamweaver, integrating it (as they normally do) with the rest of their products, so that you can take advantage of everything HTML5 enables you to do. Created a cool animation in Flash? Save it as an .flv file and embed it in an HTML5 video tag with Dreamweaver.

I think they could come out of this with the hottest HTML5 development platform out there. Or, they can sit back and let people ream them. If they keep throwing up the line “Adobe is fundamentally about making it easier for devs to write multiplatform tools” Then obviously they’re going to have to move forward with the rest of us, no? Does anyone really think that Dreamweaver will not support all that HTML5 has to offer? If it doesn’t, an entire segment of Adobe’s customer base will bid them good day – the web designers and developers will move to another HTML generator-type suite.

On Drawbacks, and Timing

Both methods have their issues. Flash’s video playback is now hardware accelerated in Windows, but still lacks that in Mac OS X and Linux. On the other hand, HTML5′s browser support is not all there yet, and won’t be for a while. This means if Adobe can get their act together, they might come out of this smelling like roses.

Apple’s Refusal to Enable Flash on it’s devices

Apple sells closed-source software. It enables developers to make software for their platform, but you can only distribute it through approved channels, that are controlled by Apple. If developers could write a quick Flash application, put it on a website, and point people to it, wouldn’t that enable people to circumvent the App Store? Wouldn’t that “rob” Apple of a significant portion of the profits they made by taking a cut from developers selling software on the App Store?

I’m not here to hate Apple; I can appreciate that Apple’s refusal is business, not personal. But it reeks of a “we want to make more money” decision. It’s easy for a lot of people to

tl;dr

There’s an opportunity inherent in this situation: The user experience on the web is always getting better, and there is a lot of business to be had in building and deploying new and exciting applications all across the internet. Whether Adobe swallows it’s pride and moves forward with an open standard or not, somebody’s going to come out of this on top.

I’ve been hard at work, and I think I have the first iteration of the database schema ready to start building around. I’m planning to start with the administration portion, because without it, I don’t have any content to display on the front end at all. Sort of a Data / Logic / Presentation thing I think.

The administration area needs to be familiar to people. I like both WordPress’ and CMS Made Simple’s, because it splits the different things you need to manage into identifiable categories and you have a very good idea of where to find everything just by looking at the “Admin Home Page.” What I’d like to do a little different is multi-tasking. At the moment, you can only be on one page at a time, something that irks me greatly when I’m trying to put together a site in either system. If I’m trying to edit templates and style sheets at the same time so that I can get a site out the door, at the moment I’m stuck switching between tabs/windows. What I really want is the ability to have separate, what I’m going to call, “Panes,” so that when you click a menu item it opens in the browser window, but if you click another menu item it opens another “Pane,” that’s not an actual new browser window or tab, but a new frame within the same browser tab.

This way, you can open multiple Panes in a window, and be working on different things in the system, all independent of one another, but still in one place where you can see them all.

Of course, this will not be developed right away. I need to put together an Ajax framework for it to happen, and I’m more concerned with being able to manage putting stuff into the database than making it pretty and user-friendly. There will come a time for GUI design, though, and I always like brainstorming how friendly I’d like it to be from an early stage, because it will affect how I build the system .

I created a site last week, and submitted the URL, sitemap, and other information to Google, Yahoo, and Bing yesterday. The point of the site was to see if by doing a few things, I could get my site listed well in the big three search engines, and hopefully even get on the front page for several of the pages on the site.

Since it’s an experiment, I’m going to collect and aggregate date before drawing conclusions, but I want to start documenting the time at which I do certain things on the site while it goes on, so that I can remind myself to update the site with new content every day, in an effort to get the site ranked higher.

This is not a black hat SEO project, but rather (I think) a different method of getting traffic to a site. It will remain to be seen what the search engines think about it; I haven’t been hit by any of the spiders yet, so I’m still waiting to see what they think.

I’m probably going to collect data, and hopefully use it to educate myself and others on traffic boosting methods that are not evil.

Here’s hoping!

Today is apparently Web Developer Tools day.

Ever copy and paste from Work or Outlook, put it online, and have someone call you screaming about “weird characters”?

This is because Microsoft like to “help” you output nice text. Down side is, it comes along with a copy and paste.

Clean that bad markup with HTML Tidy! Paste in a URL, copy and paste text, or upload a file, and outputs neatly structured HTML goodness.

Browsers bug me. Compensating for the differences between them is always a chore, and can consume hours.

Enter Reset CSS and Rebuild CSS.

Eric Meyer basically sets every HTML tag to nothing.

Blueprint basically builds it back up, standardized.

Importing these two files at the top of your CSS, like so:

@import url('styles/reset.css');

@import url('styles/rebuild.css');

basically allows your to start from scratch.

This is not to say it’ll be perfect. However, I’ve noticed far less issues stemming from cross-browser incompatibility when using these tools.

I advocate compiling these 2 sheets with a personal “Master Sheet” that will allow you to start, for example, with consistent Header Tag styles. Personally, I like to set my font-sizes for my header tags the same across all sites I do, so that I know exactly what sizes they will be.

Stuff like this saves me time on every project, either making me more money freelancing, or allowing me to get ahead of projects at work.

For some reason, this is a pain in the neck to find and I always have to end up copying and pasting some list with extra crap in it. For once and for all, here it is.

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When shit that I want to create doesn’t work on your browser, that’s when.

I’m learning about the Document Object Model so that I can build killer web applications. Unfortunately, different browsers will read my code differently, and in many cases, throw massive coronary errors and refuse to work.

If you use Netscape Navigator, Internet Explorer <= 6, or any other browser that does not support the traditional event registration model, you’re shit out of luck. This allows me to at least get my web app off the ground before I start worrying about everyone and their mom that uses IE6 going to the site and having it not work. I’ll get it off the ground, then pay someone else to make it work in other crap. In the mean time, when someone goes to the site, they’ll see a blank page with links to browsers that work.

Event Listeners own me.

I’ve been DEATHLY scared of these damn things my entire professional career. Finally, last night, in an attempt to create my first full-on javascript / php / mysql / ajax / blablabla some other web technology, I started to come to terms with the fact that yes, I need to learn it if I want to create some truly awesome web apps.

I’ve “used” them before. Usually, this entails going to someone else’s site that had what I needed to accomplish already completed and there for the download / copy / paste. However, with this new project that’s consuming my mind, I need to learn them. I need to make 100% unique javascript functions in order to accomplish my goals. I think that as I learn this stuff I’ll post here, but most likely I’ll just post some strings of code with a post titled “EUREKA!”