Archive for April, 2010

To Flash or not to Flash, and confusion over everything else

April 29th, 2010

It all started with the first iPhone. Amidst the list of things it cannot do, one pointer that was specifically used against the Apple was iPhone’s lack of Flash player. Sitting at the third generation today, iPhone still doesn’t support Flash. Meanwhile there is sort of a war between Apple and Adobe, Flash users and Flash haters, Flash Developers and HTML5 promoters. But here lies the problem, while some are predicting the demise of Flash, nobody knows what part of Flash we are talking about here. Yes, there are more than two sides of this “Flash” thing.

There are four flavors or types of Flash content that general surfer sees. Let’s list in the order of their dominance over the web.

  1. Video content delivery
  2. Banner Ads
  3. Games
  4. Application interfaces / Website interfaces

The first and the foremost, Video. Since the inception of YouTube, Flash became the de-facto standard to deliver video content over the web. It surpassed other streaming formats and plugins by miles in a very short time. One of the advantages of it was easy creation of content, already large enough base of installed browser plugins and relatively decent quality for the size. But as the bandwidth increased and video quality started moving from SD to HD, flash didn’t evolve fast enough. Apple made YouTube switch to MPEG-4 as alternate content, to support iPhone. More on this later.

Banner ads, face it… nobody likes them. It’s annoying, it eats your valuable bandwidth and badly created content simply spoils your browsing experience. But, since most the people don’t know how to block ads, for one reason or another, accidental or deliberate clicks, it still works. But Flash banner ads were challenged long before the iPhone and mobile device started grabbing the market. Google did it with text-based, contextual ads. These were fast, not so obtrusive to user and more relevant to content the user was visiting.

That leaves us with Games and Application Interfaces. This still is Flash’s forte. Over the time HTML/CSS/JavaScript have come long way to create interactive interfaces, but Flash still have some advantages of its own against these open-standard architectures. But before we talk about those advantages, let’s take a look at Flash’s disadvantages and why Apple is so edgy about Flash.

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Why everyone should take time out to watch this….

April 13th, 2010

Seriously… everyone should just watch this and think about your life, your actions, your so-called achievements and your friends, your family and everything else you hold so dear. Think about the reasons that your fight, the reasons for that you feel like standing up, the nationalism, the religious beliefs, the clan, the name and every petty belonging that you accumulated over the years. Just watch this and understand the significance of your existence, which is actually a big fat NOTHING(sorry-for-bursting-your-bubble).

No matter how much hatred I hold for the whole human existence, the eternal optimist in me says that the world would be much better place if everyone just watched this and understand. But as unlikely that to happen, for we are a race addicted to social networking and developed a short-attention span.

UPDATE: Looks like the video was removed from Vimeo. No reason was given, so I’ve no idea why it’s deleted. Anyway the video is arranged from another source and it’s working again.

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