Get With The Times! Flash Ain’t A Player Hater!

Flash has received some well deserved criticism over the last year in regards to its performance. I have found that its image in the web design community has become damaged for many reasons that are not relevant to today’s player. Adobe and developers of the platform have made some mass yet unappreciated improvements to the player over the last few.

Search Engine Optimization today is not such of an issue if you build the site well and also deep link it. Even accessibility isn’t a huge issue with great tools available to make your content text to speech friendly. But what Flash is really getting criticized for is performance.

Fortunately Adobe was quick on the ball to resolve the problems, but in turn they expect device manufactures to play ball and work with them in the process. Google have recently brought out the Nexus One which is a Flash Player 10.1 capable phone. Google worked closely with Adobe to ensure that the player ran great on the system and from what I have seen so far it looks awesome. Flash Player 10.1 brings huge advancements in performance especially on the mobile platform and in delivering HD content, such a huge progress should warrant it its very own version number ‘Flash Player 11′. Adobe has proved time and time again since Adobe Max 2009 that Flash is ready for the mobile platform and have added Flash support to many awesome powerful phones supporting full Flash Player with accelerometer and multi-touch support. This I call progress.

So why no Flash love for the iPhone?

Apple are greedy, and they want revenue, if you could jump onto hulu to watch a video why would you buy video from iTunes. I agree this is just business sense but with the iPad people really thought that they can’t use the same old excuse again that it runs too slowly, but Jobs pulled out that card again. The people want Flash and Apple have received some serious bad press from the lack of it.

People say that Flash Player is inaccessible, but I ask you which is more inaccessible the 99.9% of internet enabled computers with Flash Player or the percent of people with HTML5 capable browsers.

Flash isn’t the processer hungry application it used to be, both Adobe and developers of the Flash platform are learning that keeping their code optimized will go a long way into keeping the platform alive.

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Fun With BitmapData & Webcams!

I’ve been playing around with BitmapData and Webcams for the last few days for an Interactive Pool Table that I am working on. Today I got side tracked, after visiting Decode at London’s V&A museum I felt as though my programing is becoming more art orientated by the day. It’s not much and it’s very simple but here’s what I’ve been playing with today. Simple but fun!

[Hit The More Link For The Flash File - Requires Webcam]

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Casey Reas at Decoding the Digital! – Video

I was fortunate enough to have recently gone to the Victoria and Albert Museums conference Decoding the Digital. Decoding the digital was a conference that discussed new media’s place in the art based community and the issues and controversy of digital based art. Casey Reas was one of the great artists there and has work featured in the Decode exhibition at London’s V&A as well as around the world. Caseys work is about processing data to create beautiful pieces of work. In 2001 Casey and Ben Fry created a tool called Processing, this tool allowed them to create wonderful graphics such as the one seen above. Fortunately for you all I recorded Casey Reas’ talk on ‘Form+Code’. If you get the chance visit Decode and Digital Pioneers at London’s V&A.

[Hit The More Link For The Video]

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