Thought Delimited

So just when I thought that all of the rhetoric regarding the Apple verses Adobe dustup over Flash had died down, Steve Jobs published an open letter entitled "Thoughts on Flash" on the Apple website today, ringing in yet another round in this boxing match.

I encourage those folks who care about this issue to read the letter in its entirety (rather than someone's summary of it).

Some quick thoughts I have on what was said (just my opinions/observations):

• When Jobs dings Adobe on the issue of Flash being proprietary, he acknowledges that Apple has proprietary products as well, but that "we strongly believe all standards pertaining to the web should be open." Why, exactly? What makes it okay to engage in proprietary protections off of the web but not on it?
• Jobs makes the point of mentioning WebKit to illustrate that Apple contributes to the open standards for the web.  He fails to mention that Adobe also makes contributions to web standards as well (the partnership with Mozilla on Javascript engine code comes to me) and that Adobe does have products in their toolset to allow developers to create websites using the latest advances in HTML, CSS, and Javascript. Adobe certainly has an interest in promoting Flash, but they continue to support other competing technologies.
• It's interesting that Jobs implies that Adobe was tardying in providing support for the H.264 hardward decoder, yet it has been pointed out by a number of sources that Flash has long suffered from performance issues on Macintosh computers because Flash was not allowed to make use of the graphics accelerator on Macintosh chips.
• Jobs states that any Flash sites that rely on "rollover" events to activate certain functionality would have to be re-coded in order to work on the iDevices. That may be true in some cases, but let's not forget that certain HTML and Javascript events also rely on the idea of hovering over a page element with a mouse, or dragging and dropping an item. The need to adjust to a multi-touch paradigm is not something that just affects Flash-based sites; it affects websites built with those open web standards as well. And just because something doesn't work quite right on a new device doesn't mean you should throw it out and start over from scratch.
• I see the issue of allowing Flash to run as a browser plugin on the iDevices and the issue of letting Adobe provide a tool for developers to translate Flash code into a binary file that runs on the iPhone OS as two separate things, yet the way the letter is written it seems to combine the two issues. Perhaps it was done as a means of using the earlier arguments to sway some options regarding the Flash-to-iPhone compiler issue.
• A lot of these complaints Jobs has regarding Flash (valid or not) can be or are being rectified. Instead of encouraging Adobe to address the things he has issues with, he "suggests" Adobe should drop Flash and stop criticizing Apple. That certainly implies to me that even an open, secure, battery-friendly, and efficient version of Flash would still never be allowed on the iDevices.
• I have to wonder what he thinks this letter will accomplish. The fact that he wrote it at all seems to imply either some desperation or annoyance over the fact that that Apple's anti-Flash stance hasn't been as widely accepted amongst the industry and amongst consumers as he'd like.  Perhaps he's looking to gain a few more converts to his stance at the cost of making his opposition that much angrier with him?

Today I attended a presentation about a joint study being conducted between the English and Computer Science departments at the University of Maryland regarding the use of e-readers for academic reading. What was interesting about the study was that it wasn't just about whether students preferred using an e-reader device over standard textbooks, but whether the simultaneous use of TWO e-reader devices was more conducive to academic reading.

On the surface, using two devices to read instead of one seems a bit odd, but the premise of the study was based on research that showed that individuals engaged in academic reading (reading to learn, to synthesize information and translate into research notes) often had two or more sets of reading material (books, research papers, etc.) in front of them, and that they would go back and forth between those sources as they took their notes.

So at the beginning of the semester, the students in this literature course (which appropriately is a course that studies the history and future direction of books) were each given one of these e-reader devices developed by the Computer Science department. Each of these e-readers were about 7"x10", used E-ink for the display, allowed students to write notes with a stylus, and were optimized for quick page refreshes and overall book navigation. Now that the students have had a few weeks to acclimate to the use of the readers, they are each going to get a second one and try using them simultaneously. Although the presenter didn't go into great detail, the e-readers apparently have the ability to transfer and synchronize data with each other, so the students can decide to tackle the same source material with both devices or perhaps create references between two different documents.

To me, studies like these really highlight the fact that the e-reader market is still a young market and that no one has all the answers. Mainstream e-readers like the Kindle, the Nook, and the almost-here iPad may lead the e-reader market when it comes to casual reading, but there hasn't been as much of a focus on what works when it comes to e-readers for academic or professional use. As was discussed after the presentation, there may be a shift in the very concept of a "book" is as people explore not only different ways of consuming text-based content, but ways of producing and presenting the content, perhaps with the addition of other types of media.

It'll be interesting to see what comes out of all of this several years down the road.

One of my favorite podcasts is Buzz Out Loud, a weekday live video stream and podcast from CNET.com that reports, analyzes, and banters about the tech news of the day. This past week, they conducted an interview with Federal CTO Aneesh Chopra, which I just finished listening to today.

The entire interview was quite interesting, but there were two particular discussions that struck me.

The first one was about broadband penetration: the Buzz Out Loud podcasters wanted to know what plans, if any, were being made to promote the rollout of broadband to those areas where such service was limited or unavailable. Chopra said that they hoped to address that issue with a national broadband plan due to be revealed in February 2010, but he said that his personal focus was more on encouraging innovation in developing applications that would further the adoption and development of a robust broadband infrastructure. In other words, it's not just about building the infrastructure for people, businesses, and government organizations to have, but creating compelling applications of that infrastructure that bring people on board and give them more reasons for wanting ubiquitous Internet access.

As web/Internet application developers, we tend to think of broadband, high bandwith, and Internet access as the infrastructure that allows us to build robust applications. It's kind of exciting to look at it the other way around, that creating useful, effective, compelling applications that people want (or perhaps even need) could promote and justify the expanse of the broadband infrastructure.

The second discussion was in response to a viewer question about the use of open source software within government agencies (SUSE and RedHat were specifically mentioned). Chopra said that that was really in the federal CIO's arena of concern, but that he personally was more interested in promoting the principles of "open collaboration" and the "sharing of intellectual property as we build value." He went on to explain that what he meant by that was that he didn't care so much if an application built for the government was built on a proprietary platform so long as that application became shared intellectual property between government agencies. That again was another point that I hadn't heard anyone make before.

I'd encourage anyone who has an interest in how the federal government hopes to leverage technology to the country's advantage to listen to this podcast episode. You can watch the video version or listen to the audio version, either streaming or as a download, at the following address:

http://www.cnet.com/8301-19709_1-10302978-10.html?tag=mncol;title

• Charlie Arehart's new CF411 site has a MASSIVE amount of links to tools and resources for CFML and web development. Stop what you're doing right now, go to the page, and store it somewhere (your bookmarks, Delicious, wherever).

• The announcement that ColdFusion 8 Enterprise is now available for free for educational use (in other words, for learning purposes) was made on Monday. You can find out more at https://freeriatools.adobe.com/coldfusion/

  While I'm glad the announcement is out, I just wish it had been promoted better. There's still nothing about it up on the Adobe home page or even on Adobe's ColdFusion product page. Why not?

• Last (and least...), Google surprised everyone this week with their new Chrome web browser. It got so much attention that everyone stopped talking about the iPhone, which is admittedly pretty impressive.

  Like everyone else, I've played with it. Here's my take on it (yep, more bullet-points):

  • It runs pretty well.
  • It does seem to run JavaScript more quickly than other browsers.
  • It has a few nice innovative features.
  • It can be quirky at times and it has some flaws (but it is a beta).
  • It has promise, but it doesn't provide any new functionality that I find particularly useful to me.
  • FireFox will remain my browser at work and at home.

If you're a FireFox user and you haven't tried out the new Ubiquity plugin created by the folks at Mozilla Labs, you should.

What is Ubiquity? The short answer is it's a command-line interface for retrieving and re-purposing web content. For example, the "wikipedia" command built into the plugin takes the word you type in, retrieves data from the top 5 matches for that word (as you type it, no less) in Wikipedia using an API, and displays that data with clickable links to the Wikipedia pages in the command window:

You can see even more interesting uses for Ubiquity by watching the video clip in the Ubiquity blog post.

One of the things about Ubiquity that hasn't been talked about very much is that you can create your own Ubiquity commands using JavaScript and then share those commands with other Ubiquity users (note to jQuery users: Ubiquity commands can use jQuery functions as well as regular JavaScript functions). To that end, I created a very simple command that lets me call up a particular CFQuickDocs page by typing "cfquickdocs" and the name of the CFML tag or function I want to look up:

As Ubiquity commands go, it's not that impressive, but it does let me pull up a particular entry faster than I used to (which involved going into my bookmarks, clicking on the bookmark, waiting for the page to load, and then entering the tag or function I want to read about). And all it took was one function call with four parameters:

makeSearchCommand({
  name: "cfquickdocs",
  url: "http://www.cfquickdocs.com/?getDoc={QUERY}#{QUERY}",
  icon: "http://www.cfquickdocs.com/favicon.ico",
  description: "Searches the CFQuickDocs for the CFML tag or function you enter."
});

Sharing a Ubiquity command is simply a matter of putting the command in a JavaScript file and then creating an HTML page that calls that file. If you already have Ubiquity installed, you can install this CFQuickDocs command into your Ubiquity plugin by going to the following URL:

http://www.swartzfager.org/ubiquity/cfquickdocs.html

If you don't have Ubiquity installed but want to learn more about developing Ubiquity commands, there is an online tutorial that explains the basics. Once you have the plugin installed, you'll have access to a command editor that lets you try out your commands as you code them, and you can read the code for all of the functions that come built into the plugin.