Steve Jobs’ last laugh: good riddance to Flash?

Thursday, November 10th, 2011

Steve Jobs isn’t here to enjoy his triumph, but this week’s announcement that Adobe has stopped developing the mobile version of the Flash player would undoubtedly have delighted him. The title of yesterday’s Guardian story says it all: “Adobe kills mobile Flash, giving Steve Jobs the last laugh”. The first comment is even starker: “Flash – good riddance!”

So why has Adobe taken the decision? Is this really the end of the road for Flash? And is it really good news?

(more…)

Adobe Creative Suite 5.5: a truce with Apple

Tuesday, April 12th, 2011

Adobe has announced a 5.5 release for its various Creative Suite offerings. As CS5 was only released a year ago, most creatives will be surprised by the news and may well assume that it’s little more than a holding operation at best.

That’s not the case. (more…)

Has Adobe figured out how to get Flash to play on your iPhone?

Thursday, March 31st, 2011

Recently I’ve been making the case that Apple’s anti-competitive ban on Flash has stopped rich cross-platform development in its tracks.

As such I was naturally intrigued by a video post I came across recently asking “Has Adobe figured out how to get Flash to play on your iPhone?” (more…)

Making HTML5 work in old versions of Internet Explorer

Monday, March 7th, 2011

One of the main reasons why developers may not be making the move to HTML5 as yet is the perceived lack of support for legacy browsers. This is actually untrue, and whilst there might be some jiggery pokery required for proper backwards compatibility, it’s still possible.

Of course, by legacy browsers I mean Internet Explorer, as all the other major players update regularly and their users tend to follow suit: browsers such as Firefox, Safari and Opera have supported HTML5 for a while. Some developers may decide to stop supporting IE6, but for some that’s not an option and, at any rate, neither IE7 nor IE8 support HTML5 either. IE9 will, but it runs on Windows Vista and Windows 7 only, so the other versions will still be around for a long time to come, as we have seen with IE6.

So what needs to be done to get HTML5 working in Internet Explorer?

(more…)

Why the HTML5 logo from the W3C only adds to the confusion

Wednesday, January 19th, 2011

Yesterday the W3C decided to release a logo for HTML5. Nothing wrong with that you might say, and I would agree with you. They have created a badge builder which allows you to specify which specific parts of HTML5 your website uses and enable users to see at a glance (provided they’re familiar with the icons of course) what you have used when building your site.

Great. Splendid.

The W3C has always provided icons in the past to place on your website to indicate validation for the various versions of HTML, XHTML, CSS and others. And although this particular logo doesn’t indicate validity, it is in fact an improvement on it.

But. There’s a problem.

(more…)

Silverlight 5: Back from the dead?

Friday, December 3rd, 2010

At its recent Professional Developer Conference Microsoft’s Bob Muglia signalled a major change of strategy for the company’s Silverlight technology. When first introduced Silverlight was intended to become a near universal cross-platform web runtime like Flash. Now Muglia revealed that Microsoft saw HTML5 as the future for universal in-browser development while Silverlight was being repositioned as a native application development platform for Windows Phone 7 devices. Unsurprisingly, most pundits saw this as an admission of defeat, with our own Jon Honeyball asking: “Silverlight RIP?”

Yesterday, just over a month later, Scott Guthrie announced the “Firestarter” launch of the new Silverlight 5 beta under the slogan “the future of Silverlight starts now”. So what’s going on? (more…)

Silverlight RIP?

Tuesday, November 2nd, 2010

The battle royal between HTML5 and the two major plugin runtimes of Silverlight from Microsoft and Flash from Adobe continues to rumble on.

To the intense annoyance of both firms, it appears Apple is holding sway here with its insistence that neither Silverlight nor Flash will be allowed on the iOS platform used in the iPhone and iPad. And that, in its opinion, HTML5 is the future.

Well, there is no doubt that HTML5 is the future, in that the current HTML5 implementation leaves much to be desired and it will take time and work for this to be fleshed out. But Apple says no, use native code on iOS or use HTML5. (more…)

Adobe MAX 2010: HTML5 and Flash

Friday, October 29th, 2010

Just how committed is Adobe to HTML5?

It’s a serious concern. Adobe is not only the developer of the main professional HTML authoring tool, Dreamweaver, but also of the Flash platform which promises to take the browser beyond HTML into richer, more powerful territory. Clearly there’s a possible conflict of interest here – a point I made at the launch of the latest CS5 suites when the page-oriented Web Standard suite was dropped in a blatant attempt to push designers towards the Flash-centred Web Professional suite.

Unfairly promoting Flash is one danger, but far worse is the possibility that Adobe would want to hold HTML5 back. This suspicion dawned with the limited HTML5 capabilities in Dreamweaver CS5 and was reinforced by Steve Jobs’ attack on Flash which ended: “New open standards created in the mobile era, such as HTML5, will win on mobile devices (and PCs too). Perhaps Adobe should focus more on creating great HTML5 tools for the future, and less on criticizing Apple for leaving the past behind.”

There’s a real danger here that HTML5 and Flash could be driven into opposing camps in the war between Apple and Adobe, and you really don’t want to bet against HTML. Based on the latest Adobe MAX 2010, it looks like Adobe is well aware of the potential trap and has acted accordingly.

(more…)

Should you be using HTML5 today?

Tuesday, October 19th, 2010

Despite all the hype about HTML5, there are still many people (mainly web developers!) out there who are wondering whether or not they should use it in their next site. The main issues seem to be browser compatibility and the myth that HTML5 won’t be ready for mainstream usage until 2022.

To begin with, let’s bust this myth once and for all. For any specification to be deemed “ready”, it supposedly needs to be fully implemented in two browsers. If this rule was true, CSS2.1 also wouldn’t be “ready”, and do you hear people advising you to hold off on using that? No, and quite rightly so too. And the same should go for HTML5.

As for browser compatibility, the latest versions of browsers such as Firefox, Chrome, Safari and Opera all support various parts of the HTML5 specification, and older versions of these browsers support bits of the spec. The major headache, as always, is Internet Explorer. However, with the upcoming release of Internet Explorer 9, which will support HTML5 features, this is improving. That said, there will of course be many people who remain on older versions of IE and how will they cope with HTML5?

Pretty well, actually, and there are a lot of things you can do to ensure browser compatibility.

(more…)

The future of the web, according to Opera

Thursday, October 14th, 2010

While Opera has only 2% of the desktop browser market, its features have a funny way of making their way into rival products – the Norwegians came up with tabs first, after all.

So when its execs – including founder Jon von Tetzchner and “father of CSS” Hakon Wium Lie – shared their vision of the future of the web at a press event in Oslo, it’s safe to bet at least some of their predictions will prove accurate.

Here are a few of the ideas Opera shared about how the web will evolve in years to come. (more…)