Archive for the ‘Digital Life’ Category

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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Asia IT Expo ’09: a minor disappointment

September 26th, 2009

So I went to Asia IT Expo ’09 and I came back…. I can sum up the experience in that one sentence. But I won’t because, it wasn’t that big of disappointment as last year. At least it wasn’t office furniture expo.

Truth be told, it wasn’t any different than Asia IT Expo ’07… it had some hardware, it had some software, it had more software than hardware, it has some brands and it didn’t have some brands. Some part was improved but it didn’t amount to much.

I’ll show you a picture story.

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Upgrading MacBook’s storage… the easiest way!

May 14th, 2009

I’ve got late 2008 model MacBook, and it’s a great little machine. In fact, I bought it quite fully loaded… with 4 gig of DDR3 1066MHz RAM and 250GB drive. So it wasn’t really required for me to upgrade the drive. But space, as you know in computer world, is never enough. Since I’m planning to use this little thing as primary computer for my photographic and traveling needs, I figured it was only logical to have as much as space possible. Those who, like me shoot in RAW mode would know how easy it is to fill up empty space after long photography sessions. So I bought the currently largest available notebook drive, that is 500GB. Unfortunately I couldn’t find Seagate momentus 7200RPM drive as it would have been better from performance standpoint. Neverthless, I was pretty happy to score WD Scorpio Blue 5400RPM drive at really good price of Rs. 4900 (approx $97).

Now here starts the real fun… these new MacBooks have very easy drive replacement facility, but something struck me as I sat down to replace the drive…. my currently installed softwares and data. I don’t want to re-install every fucking thing again and copy and re-arrange the data afterward. That’s too much of a waste of time. Well, well… it’s true that they say that Google is thy friend. Going through few sites, I came across couple of drive utilities for backup and restore. While most of the people were mentioning Super Duper by Shirt Pocket, there was this one software that caught my eye… Carbon Copy Cloner by Bombich Software. Off-course if you’re Time Machine user and have large external drive for backup, Time Machine let you restore entire system from backup. But since I don’t use it I’m not covering it in this article. So if you’re like me and you don’t use Time Machine then read on about how to do it with third party app like mentioned above.

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I Wonder……

May 14th, 2009

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Something is up for this weekend… :)

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