Thank You, Flash, for Showing Us the Way!

So the big news is that Adobe is ending Flash development for mobile devices.

Everyone's assuming, for this reason, that Flash's days are numbered. And well they may be, in which case, there's no better time to extol its virtues -- particularly the contribution it's made to our online world -- than now.

It's important to remember that before the Web, most communication online was largely through command line input. In fact, one of the great 'side' achievements of the WWW was that it liberated us from this tyranny, giving us a 'graphical user interface' instead. In the library world, this was the difference between DIALOG which only a consultant could make head or tail of and current versions of Ebsco or Proquest.

Flash (and its predecesso­r, Shockwave) took this a step further by introducing a far higher level of interactivity. It allowed us to click on things, enlarge them, drag them across the browser window. It allowed us to better coordinate various types of media -- images, audio and video -- into a unified user experience. In fact, it did this with video so well that many people nowadays think of Flash as primarily a video delivery system.

And maybe it is, or was. Things move on. What we used to do in Flash, we're slowly being able to accomplish using Javascript, CSS and eventually HTML5. That's the path -- but it was Flash that showed us the way.

In a Perfect World (Adobe Acrobat Ed.)

So I'm reading about 'Reembedding Fonts in a PDF':

"In a perfect world, all parties which contribute to a regulatory filing would properly embed fonts. Unfortunately, we don’t live in a perfect world . . . there are times when you may need to embed fonts as a post process."

Ugh, Dreamweaver Upgrade Borks my Site Settings, Gives Me Something to Be Thankful for

There must have been another copy of the site settings (from like say, 2005) that Dreamweaver grabbed when I upgraded from the admittedly ancient Dreamweaver 8 to a still shamefully retro CS3*.

There still were a number of sites in the "Manage sites" window which is why I didn't notice right away. Then when I started looking for anything I'd done in the past 2 years -- MPOW, a couple of other sites I'm working on -- denada. I had wiped them.

Thank God for TimeMachine. I was able to export the site settings from the deleted old version and then import them into the new version.

This Thankgiving I'm thankful for TimeMachine.

_____
* And no jokes about the version -- I'm just waiting for CS5 like the rest of humanity.

The Digital Life

1.  Try to install Adobe Captivate on my new Mac Mini. (I've got an important 'sceencast' that's got to be done pronto.)
   But Captivate only runs on a PC.
   
   
2. Load Captivate on my old Dell Notebook.
   But it's too much for my old Dell Notebook. The thing keeps crashing.
   
   
3. Load Apple's Boot Camp on my new Mac Mini. With Boot Camp, you can run both Mac and Windows!
   But Boot Camp only runs with Windows XP Service Pack 2 ('SP2'). My copy of XP (from my old Dell Notebook) is older than that.
   
   
4.  "Slipstream" (i.e. integrate) the updates from SP2 into the earlier version of XP and produce a new bootable CD.
   But 'Slipstream' doesn't work so well on OEM (as in Dell specific) versions of XP.
   
   
5. Walk three miles to a friend's house. Grab his copy of Windows XP, go home. Install it on my Mac Mini and finally load Captivate on the PC partition.
   
   Does this sound like a productive weekend?
   (And I didn't even mention the part where I completely erased my backup drive. Don't ask.)
   
   UPDATE: The fun continues....
   
   
6. Try to add an audio track to the slides in Captivate.
   But my new Mac Mini only has "line" input -- which as anyone who's ever been through Audio 101 knows, isn't the same as a mike input
   
   
7. Rush out of the house. Go downtown to the Apple Store, buy a Griffin iMic, and just because I've become paranoid at this point, duck into a Best Buy on the way home and get a Logitech headset with build-in mike that plugs into the USB port.
   
   
8. Mission accomplished!

Happy Days Are Here Again

The Adobe Creative Suite 3 just came in.

Adobe Icon Controversy

Nothing like a graphic design controversy to brighten up the day!

If you look at the Mac taskbar above and can figure out the difference between 'Lr', 'Ps', 'Ai' and 'Id', maybe you'll have no problems with the application icons in Adobe's new Creative Suite 3 currently in Beta.

For many designers however it's been thumbs-down.

Dave Shea has a wonderful analysis of the icons called 'Icont'. His reasoning reads like a basic lesson in graphic design:

They fail because there is no shape variation. Every icon is contained within an identical square. Nothing breaks the silhouette, the only shape variation occurs inside the square, in the form of the letters. But using a common typeface, stroke weight, and posture across every icon means the various letters have more in common with each other than they differ, and at a glance they all blend together. Since this is the sole shape differentiator, it’s a big, big problem.

Comments by designer Jason Santa Maria also merit a read.

I guess for me the bottom line is, the icons are pretty generic and drab. I'm not a great fan of the current icons but frankly, when I saw a shot of them all together, I had abolutely no idea what they were for. They looked like a bunch of Color Samples for choosing a bucket of paint.

You'd think Adobe could do better.