A couple months ago, with all the press focusing on Apple’s announcement of the iPad, Steve Jobs made a comment that Flash is dying and that people need to push HTML5. Since this comment, I’ve heard from many clients who want new sites and want to avoid Flash because it’s a dead technology and has no future.

I never thought I’d do this, but I think I’m going to come to the defense of flash. I don’t like programming in flash all that much and I find it quite frustrating and annoying (I had hopes that when Adobe purchased Macromedia it’s type support would get better… not worse).

Don’t get me wrong, in 15 years I don’t see a huge place for Flash. But in the now, and in the next 5 years, it’s still going to have a very strong presence. I believe this for a couple reasons:

1. Upgradeability (Spell check is getting mad at me for that word, but it’s the best word for this reason): If you want to upgrade flash, you can now do it without having to restart your browser. In fact, it often takes less than 5 seconds (really!). It is such an easy process that almost everyone upgrades without even realizing what they are doing (I won’t get into if this is a good thing). Therefore, within 6 months of a new flash version over 96% of web users have it. That’s some amazing penetration. Web browsers on the other hand (Internet Explorer in particular) is on the complete other end of the spectrum. People still use IE6. Yes, it is in decline, but a lot of people (and more importantly, businesses) still use it. There is no easy way to upgrade. A user has to go through Windows Upgrades application (which studies have shown that most people do not use). Microsoft seems to have finally gotten back into the browser game and has released IE7, IE8 and is even working quickly on IE9, so perhaps this will get better. But the bottom line is that right now (and for the next couple years at least), most people do not upgrade their browsers.

2. Video. There is a lot of hype around the HTML 5 video tag. Sure, it makes it really easy to embed video. It’s just one tag. Sounds great right? I think it is, but the markup isn’t the problem here. The browsers are. Just like in the late 90’s and early 2000’s we had to have a Netscape version of a site and an IE version of a site. Now, we’ll have to have video in one format for some browsers and in another format for other browsers.  In my opinion, video is the one thing that flash does well. Why? Because of my reason number one above. Flash gets upgraded often, and can support better and better video codecs/formats as they come out. Browser manufacturers can’t agree on formats. And as time goes by and new formats come out, it will become even more of a mess.

In a perfect world, the browser manufactures would agree on standards. And as new versions came out, people would make sure the upgraded. These two things don’t happen. Therefore, flash isn’t going anywhere.

The claim that flash is dying reminds me of the late 90’s and all the claims that XML was going to revolutionize the world and every new site and application should make use of it. Sure, XML is a solid tool, but 90% of the hype wasn’t necessary. Flash will go away at some point. But not nearly at the speed that people claim.

Over the past year I’ve looked a bit into iPhone App Development. I have an iMac at home, I use a powerbook at work, and I talk on an iPhone. I love to work on mac’s. But I must admit that I have absolutely no desire to start developing iPhone apps.

It has nothing to do with the programming language, the IDE or anything regarding development.

It really comes down to two reasons.

One main reason is that I despise building something for one platform. I don’t want to build an iPhone app, rebuild the same project as an Android App, and then again as a Blackberry app…etc.

It’s the browser wars all over again where we had to build a Netscape version, an AOL version and an IE6 version…etc.

The other big reason has to do with Apple’s policy. It can take weeks for an app to get approved. And there is no gaurentee your app will even BE approved. I know one company that built an app for a client, submitted and had the app rejected because Apple didn’t think it would have a large audience. Really? So do we need to submit a business plan with our app that projects what Apple’s return will be?

Of late Apple has been critical of Adobe Flash and has been trying to promote the open standards of HTML5 (while I like Flash, I applaud a company the size of Apple trying to push HTML standards forward).

Last month, Apple removed over 5,000 apps that it deemed ‘inappropriate’. Really? So on one hand it promotes open standards, but on the other hand they want to create their own standards and change them after the fact. These apps were already in the store – meaning they had been approved. And many of them have been purchased many many times.

I hope they don’t pull an Amazon and go into the phone to remove the app.

I have no idea if the economy is really improving or not. But I can say that work has picked up drastically this quarter. It seems like everyone was waiting till now to spend. Hopefully it keeps going into 2010…

Anyhow, just a short update. I’m working on the new kiosk for The Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts. It is flash based and will have a little bit of 3D. I noticed while working on it that all the dynamic fonts got really fuzzy once rotationY had been tweened. Even if I reset it to 0 there wasn’t anything that would remove the fuzziness.

Much thanks to Edzis for his post called “Blur on rotationY = 0 Use transform.matrix“. In order to set the font back to normal you will need to manually update the rotated objects transform.matrix.

Hopefully Adobe will fix this in the future.

In December of last year I left MediaTemple for WebFaction. And in less than a year I am back at MediaTemple. This is now my third time with MT. What is with this love that I have for them?

Well, this time I’m on their Dedicated Virtual (DV) plan. Their grid server plans may be great for some, but I will no longer use them or recommend them. MediaTemple has always had great support. I love their panel, and they have a great knowledge base and are very pro active in the community. Their Grid Server, however, can just be downright slow at times.

However, I’ve come around to finally realizing and admitting that that is just what you get when you are paying under 20$/month for hosting. I can’t afford dedicated hosting. So Dedicated Virtual is the next best thing. And in my opinion, MT offers a great package. And since I now host my email with Gmail, I don’t even need but half of the space on the plan.

So I made a pact. A friend of mine, Nate Sprehe of the newly founded Almanac went in with me to split a DV account. We each only get 10gig and 15 domains. However, it’s plenty for me. I’m paying $20/month and getting dedicated service.

Don’t get me wrong, WebFaction was better than most shared hosting providers, despite their unique way of managing sites and domains. Towards the end they did have some email problems which prompted me to move all my email to Gmail – a move which I highly recommend. SpamAssasin can not compete with Gmail. In addition to email, I had some issues with a couple aspects of the WebFaction setup:

• Email user names. You can have name@domain.com as your email. However, that isn’t what you log in as. You log in as a user name created in the panel. This name could be anything. It doesn’t have to be related at all to your email. This can be nice when you have a number of emails coming into one inbox. However, for some reason this user name doesn’t just have to be unique to your account, but to the server you are on! So if there is another ‘tyler’ on the server, well, that can’t be my email user name.
• When you FTP into the server, you can navigate up one level and see every users folder on the server. While I do not have permission to enter these folders… it just bothered me that I could even see them. I am no security expert, so I can’t say if that is a security issue or not. My gut just felt uncomfortable by it.

So.. good bye WebFaction. It was a fun 10 months.

Hello MediaTemple.. I guess you knew i’d be back right? Third time’s the charm? I hope so.

At TOKY, we’ve built a couple sites for clients who wanted a site search. Rather than re-invent the wheel we’ve tried using Yahoo’s search (this was pre BOSS) as well as Google’s Custom Search Engine (CSE). We have had problems with both search applications. In particular, the results would be different from page to page. For instance, when searching an item it may tell me that there are 300 total results. But then three pages into those results it would tell me that there were really only 37 total search results.

This would make it quite difficult to include total search results for a search on the page. It also prevented us from providing pagination as a method of browsing the results. Instead we can only provide Previous Page / Next Page style navigation of the results.

I contacted Yahoo, and they explained that they were working on it. The issue was mainly because the search would hit a different server with each search call.

I tried contacting Google, but never had much luck getting an answer.

However, after testing CSE a bit more, I noticed that this issue was consistently happening on certain searches and at certain pages within the result set. Therefore, the issue couldn’t have been the same as it was with Yahoo’s search app.

I started playing with every parameter that can be customized when calling CSE. I found one that seems to fix the problem: filter. Here is what the API says about filter:

“Optional. The filter parameter activates or deactivates the automatic filtering of Google search results. See the Automatic Filtering section of this document for more information about Google’s search results filters.

The default value for the filter parameter is 1, which indicates that the feature is enabled.

Note: By default, Google applies filtering to all search results to improve the quality of those results.”

I turned this filter off and search results were consistent from page to page. Google may recommend that the filter is enabled, however, in the majority of my tests the first couple pages of results were the same with it on or off. If the filter was turned on, I would still encounter the issue where 3-5 pages into the results the total number of search results would drop dramatically.

If the main difference is that I get extra pages of search results, I’ll take it. I’d much prefer that over the chance of changing the total search results from page to page or even worse, using pagination and allowing the user to go a page of search results that doesn’t exist.

I wasn’t making websites when the bubble first started, so I don’t know what it was like. But it always had a wild west lore. It seemed like anything could happen. Everyone was excited about the possibilities of what could be done. This is what iPhone development seems like to me – or rather I should now say ’seemed’.

I’m sure that I am like every developer out there. Trying to come up with the one app that could make you thousands of dollars. However, Apples approval process seems to be getting more press than the apps that are actually getting approved. For the most recent example of Apple App Store ineptitude read about the Facebook app approval process at theAppleBlog.

What makes the internet great is that anyone can put anything up. No matter how stupid, silly or great it is. Everyone can do something. It’s how little side projects can turn into unexpected internet sensations. Apple’s current approval process stifles all this. And, honestly, as a developer doesn’t make me want to develop an iPhone app.

This plugin has a new home. It will now permanently be hosted on Wordpress.org:
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/vimeo-badge-widget/

If you downloaded it off my site, you may want to re-download it from Wordpress.org. One person who was trying to use the plugin was running into problems because their server didn’t have cURL installed. I found wp_remote_get() in the Wordpress Codex. Sadly, it’s not documented at all.

So, if you’d like to make a call to another server, it looks like wp_remote_get would be the function to use. It checks to see what is available on the server and then uses the appropriate function. You can use it as so:

$response = wp_remote_get($remote_url, array('timeout' => 60));


About a week or two ago I was building a blog for a client who asked if a Vimeo Badge could be added to their sidebar. I expected there to be a plethora available. However, I was stunned to find that this was not the case. I tried Vimeo RSS, but I wasn’t really satisfied.

This afternoon I decided to write my own. Just a simple widget that allows a user to select the number of videos, and then grab the videos for a user, a users album, a group or even a channel.

It was also my first venture into Widgets since Wordpress released 2.8 and their new Widget API. I must say, I’m really impressed with the new API. For someone who has never used it before, I was able to develop a widget in under two hours. It’s nice, simple and very intuitive.

I’ve submitted it to Wordpress and hopefully it will be in their repository soon. In the mean time, you can grab it here: http://tylercraft.com/vimeo-badge-widget.zip

Tylr Slidr has been updated and is now at 1.5.

The latest release has had the following updates:

• Tested for 2.8.
• Upgraded swfobject from 2.1 to 2.2.
• Using Flickr slideshow swf version 71649

Download it here.

MYOS (pronouced mee-ohs) is a new content management system that we have recently announced at TOKY.

For a while now, I’ve been wanting to build my own CMS/Framework.

I’ve tried almost every CMS out there and have never been truley satisfied. Don’t get me wrong, there are a lot of great content management systems out there. They just never worked as I wanted them to. Either they don’t support the kinds of content I want or if they do allow the types of content I want they don’t allow it to be managed in an easy way.

What I really enjoy is making a content management system that is easy for the client to use. They shouldn’t have to think. For instance, when developing the back end to manage the people section of the Christner website, I developed it so that the client would see that grid. They could then drag the people around to position them exactly how they wanted.

Another example, on the McCarthy Contact Us page, each location shows up on the map. The locations are all dynamic so the map locations must be as well. I didn’t want the user to have to enter an X/Y coordinate. I developed it so that they map showed up on the back end and all the client had to do was click on the map to position the office.

I could talk about this forever, but instead I’ll just tell you to check it out! Go to http://myos.toky.com and you can view the features as well as try out the demo.