Posts

I like to beat up on Flash a lot, but there’s no way to argue that it hasn’t delivered a ton of value over the years. Here’s Adobe’s John Nack arguing making the argument: But let’s also be honest and say that Flash is the reason we all have fast, reliable, ubiquitous online video today. It’s the reason that YouTube took off & video consumption exploded four years ago. It’s the reason we have Hulu, Vimeo, and all the rest–and the reason that people now watch billions of videos per day (and nearly 10 hours apiece per month) online. Without it, we’d all still be bumbling along. ...

It’s always hard to say, “I don’t know.” But no one else can say it for you. Ta-Nehisi Coates with the utterance of the new decade.

In 2002, there was a lot of fear of Microsoft’s trusted computing platform, Palladium. The idea was that Microsoft was going to add new security to computers that was enforced in the hardware which would put an end to viruses and some other security problems but would also fundamentally change the relationship between computers and their users. Your computer would no longer be fully under your control, nor would it be functionally anonymous. Steven Levy’s original article hyping Palladium explains the purported benefits, then Ross Anderson explained what was scary about it. ...

Stephen O’Grady argues that app stores (of which the iPhone App Store is an example) are going to continue to be a big deal. I’m inclined to agree, and I love his example of the WordPress plugin directory. I’m also going to quote from one of his sources, Farhad Manjoo’s negative article on app stores to make a slightly different point: That’s a miscalculation, because the App Store’s true rival isn’t a competing app marketplace. Rather, it’s the open, developer-friendly Web. When Apple rejected Google Latitude, the search company’s nearby-friend-mapping program, developers created a nearly identical version that works perfectly on the iPhone’s Web browser. Google looks to be doing something similar with Voice, another app that Apple barred from its store. Last fall, Joe Hewitt, the Facebook developer who created the social network’s iPhone app, quit developing for Apple in protest of the company’s policies. Where did he go? Back to writing mobile apps for Web browsers. ...

Whats truly depressing, however, is that as a country we seem to have completely lost the will and the capacity to collectively confront these challenges. Our union has been torn asunder by a clash of ideologies and special interests and brigades of power-hungry partisans that has resulted in a paralyzing political stalemate. In response, our citizens have become angry, cynical, distrustful and dispirited. From Washington Post business columnist Steve Pearlstein’s The State of the Union speech Obama would give in a more honest world. ...

A few days ago I ran into Kent Spillern’s post, Private Methods are a Code Smell. Here’s the meat of it: Private helper methods indicate classes are doing too many things. Moving private helper methods to different classes, including creating new classes if necessary, splits the original responsibilities across multiple classes leading to simpler, better designs. This post hit really close to home for me because I’m a heavy user of private utility methods. Splitting code up into lots of methods is a form of self-documentation that I advocate. He talks about one misuse of private methods that I don’t indulge in: ...

Google Reader will now generate feeds for Web pages that do not already have them. You can plug in a URL and it will figure out a way to track changes to the page and notify you of them. From a technology standpoint, I’m fascinated. About 10 years ago, I worked for a company called Alerts.com that tried to do this sort of change detection. This was before feeds really took off, Morbus Iff’s AmphetaDesk was probably the leading news reader at that time. ...

Chris Suellentrop has a fun article in Wired about how playing video games is creating a superior generation of football players. I think football players can learn more from simulations than most other athletes because football players have to think so much, and because they play fewer games. A lot of playing football is looking at how the other team has lined up and figuring out what they’re going to do. You can learn a lot about that by playing a realistic simulation. Sports like basketball and baseball are more about physical reactions, less about planning on the fly, so I’d expect that players of those sports benefit less. ...

At the core, because Flash is the only de facto web standard based on a proprietary technology. There are numerous proprietary web content plugins — including Apple’s QuickTime — but Flash is the only one that’s so ubiquitous that it’s a de facto standard. Flash is the way video is delivered over the web, and Adobe completely controls Flash. No other aspect of the web works like this. HTML, CSS, and JavaScript are all open standards, with numerous implementations, including several that are open source. ...

So many people posted about how fascinated they were by the New York Times’ feature A Peek Into Netflix Queues that I didn’t even bother to blog about it at the time. It shows the popularity of movies on a map by zip code. It’s a great toy that will eat an hour of your time before you know it. The Society for News Design published a piece last week explaining how the Netflix toy was built as well as a copy of the static version that was included in the paper, which I didn’t even know existed. It’s a fascinating case study, as interesting to me as the visualization itself. ...