Tag: standards

HTML5 Is Ready – Rebuttal to Facebook’s native app

Posted on by Evan Mullins

Here’s a great “HTML5 Love Story” about the team at Sencha, who is passionate about using proper technologies for the one open web, who knew better than to trust that the failure of Facebook to create a reliable HTML5 app for users was because HTML5 wasn’t ready (as Facebook claimed). They built this demo to prove that HTML5 can do all that the now gone native FB app does and faster. The trick is you have to know what you are doing. Something it seems, FB doesn’t. Ready the full story and watch the comparison video: The Making of Fastbook: An HTML5 Love Story | Blog | Sencha. Or go try it yourself. Visit http://fb.html5isready.com on your favorite mobile browser.

When we started what became Sencha, we made a bet on the web: a bet that modern application development didn’t need anything except the browser, a great set of frameworks and a great set of tools. With those three weapons in hand, we knew developers could build applications that would delight users. The advent of HTML5 upped the game and it gave developers even more tools to let them treat the browser as an application development platform and not a page rendering engine. Developers sprang at the opportunity and unleashed a torrent of apps — on both desktop and mobile — that leveraged the new HTML5 capabilities to build amazing applications using web standards.

So, when Mark Zuckerberg said HTML5 wasn’t ready, we took a little offense to the comment.

We thought to ourselves: HTML5 can’t really be the reason that Facebook’s mobile application was slow. We knew what the browser on modern smart phones was capable of and what kind of rich capabilities HTML5 offered. We saw the latest generation of mobile devices — running at least iOS 5 or Android 4.1 — push ever increasing performance and HTML5 implementation scores. But perhaps most importantly, we’d seen what our customers were building and the amazing things they were creating using HTML5.

I totally agree with this sentiment and believe that native apps are the new flash to the web. They are fun and seem to be the way, but give it a few years and these native apps will quickly give way to web based apps that are browser based and offer speed and flexibility and consistence to the web experience. Sure, flash can do things that html still can’t. But I’m pretty sure no one would want to build their whole site in flash today. They would put the parts that need to be or the parts that belong in flash in flash and let the rest be standards compliant open web. Facebook has essentially built a flash based website for phones to access their website content. They will have to maintain and update this separate from their “real” version.

Our smart phones are helping us converge our devices, as in we no longer need a phone a camera a gps a notepad a … But it is not helping us converge our internet or content. We currently need to use a website in one way at our desk and another way on the go. Websites and the internet should have the same capabilities and the same uses no matter where we decide to use it. Sencha is showing us that, built correctly, HTML5 truly is ready to handle many things that belong in the browser rather than in a native app. We should never need to download a native app to access website data that we normally would just login at our desk. That’s inefficient, divergent and complicated. It’s against the openness and standards everyone preached and pined for and indeed “won” when flash-haters succeeded in ousting flash from mobile browsers. I actually respect Adobe for finally pulling the plug there because they too, believe in the web (and at the time, I was a full-time flash developer). I believe in the web too and that’s why I call it the one open web.

Web vs Mobile – For The User

Posted on by Evan Mullins

I agree with this idea from Ryan that the web has big advantages. I am constantly hearing stats and projections that Mobile is taking over. And sure, I agree that I use my phone to browse more sites, but when it comes down to it I’m just casually browsing – not working. I love the post he’s links in the first line: Vibhu Norby has a detailed post on why his startup is pivoting from mobile first to web first.

Vibhu details that he’s done the mobile startup thing and has learned from the complications. He explains that most of these have been solved in the desktop browser already and a lot of it relates to usability.

Another big point is that mobile apps must be installed (actually they must be found, installed, opened and setup), whereas a web app can be as simple as a link- click, and then the user is already using it. Adoption is much easier on the web.

And even another point is updates and testing and whatnot. YOu can do various tests and even update the whole app relatively fast on the web. There is the one version to support – the live one. While with apps, you can’t do much in the arena of testing and updating is sluggish plus it relies on the user to update (some don’t know how to update and even less care).

I think a web app that is mobile friendly wins. You can give mobile users access, but they aren’t stuck on mobile. They can use it anywhere. While so many are talking about responsive design and produce sites that are device agnostic mobile apps are very device centric.

I’m a fan/advocate of future friendly at least, and strive for future proof (although I understand that’s near impossible). I also hold that there is ONE web and mobile myths.

Web versus Native Economics and User Adoption | Ryan Stewart – Mountaineer Coding.

Flash Gaming Technology – Notes from Lee Brimelow’s Adobe Presentation

Posted on by Evan Mullins

Here are my notes on the presentation from Lee Brimelow of Adobe at the Atlanta Adobe Users Group Meeting: http://www.meetup.com/Adobe-User-Group-of-Atlanta/events/56200162/

What is flash for? Doing things the browser can’t! If you can use HTML5 then do it. Learn about it and learn the capabilities and know when to use what tool and when they are appropriate. It might not be easy, but it is where the industry is moving, don’t hide from it! If you want to do things that are to advanced for the current standards and browsers, then flash is most likely where you need to be. Adobe will always position Flash to be ahead of what is possible with browsers.

While you can do some gaming in browsers today, flash is now positioned to be the best solution for game development. It even can compile to native apps for ios and many successful apps have done so. Adobe has put in a site to showcase these games at: http://gaming.adobe.com

Adobe has a new partnership with unity. See example game: Angry bots.

Console sales are declining. We have so many other outlets to game: browsers, social, mobile devices… Soon professional games will be via Facebook and browsers.

Facebook angry birds game built in flash using stage 3D.

New gaming features:
Mouse lock.
Right and middle click events.
Concurrency, multi threading for player. Yo will not lock up with intense calculations.
Native extension Burls and extensions.

CS6:
Sprite sheet exporter!
Create js exporter, via Grant Skinner
Html 5 export to canvas a vector art.

Edge

11.3 – latest flash player
full screen keyboard input.
Background auto updates.
Audio streaming via net stream.
Improvements for low latency audio.
Stage 3D progressive texture streaming.
Lzma compression sort door byte array.
Native bitmap encoding to png and jpg.
Bitmap data draw with quality
Frame labels.

Air specific
USB debugging for ios
Native ios simulator support
Enhanced background support for ios
Android 4 stylus support
Mac app store support

Dolores, upcoming updates
As workers
Advanced profiling
Better sort for hardware accelerated video cards

Next
Refactorizing code base
Work on as virtual machine
Many action script language updates: stringent static typing as default, hardware oriented numeric types, type inference…

Vendor Prefixes – about to go south

Posted on by Evan Mullins

What are “standards” coming to?

Who’s guilty?

Apple and Chrome: They’re supporting vendor prefixed properties like they’re a standard part of development.

Firefox, Opera and Internet Explorer: They should have been on the ball more. Need to push their evangelism further. Teach developers that it’s not exclusively -webkit to style elements.

All the browsers: experimental suggests that it will either be discarded or implemented fully at some point. It’s both not clear what’s a real specification be experimentally supported, nor when those experimental prefixes will be dropped.

The working group: for not getting these properties to standards quickly enough. The web moves quickly, and as much as a I appreciate that the standards will not move as quickly, they’re still taking way too long.

Evangelists: We’re too eager to show off experimental effects. They’re cool, right? But it’s cost us, and we should always used vendor prefixes as a backup, not as the final thing.

Developers: We know better. We know/hope that eventually these prefixes will be dropped, but we’re propagating this problem.

You and me: I’m just as guilty as everyone else in using WebKit only prefixes.

Browsers need to:

Non-production ready browsers should support experimental prefixes, production ready releases should not. If it’s Chrome 16 – the stable version – experimental support should not be baked in. The properties should be full available without the prefix.
Drop experimental prefixes – not entirely, but after a finite amount of time. It’s unacceptable and a disservice to the developers working with your browser. You need to give timelines to dropping these things.
Work with the working groups (…Apple).

via Vendor Prefixes – about to go south.

Link: Why are standards such a good thing?

Posted on by Evan Mullins

Flash is always the bleeding edge and can move/adapt much faster than html because it is controlled by one entity. Which is some people’s criticism – they don’t want to rely too much on Adobe, I partly agree, but I’d much rather rely on Adobe than many other tech companies: especially Microsoft, Apple or even Facebook…

Link: Why are standards such a good thing? – (http://polygeek.com/4769_opinion_why-are-standards-such-a-good-thing?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Polygeekcom+%28polyGeek.com%29) from (author unknown) at polyGeek.com