Thank god for flash ads!
Everybody seems to share the opinion that flash in the browser makes the web slower, kills your battery, crashes the browser and makes everything insecure. That slow animated flash ads come from the devil himself! Javascript is the way to go and so much cooler and faster and a standard and stuff!
A world without flash…
Don’t get me wrong, I love javascript! But let’s just imagine for a second that there was no flash, only javascript. You think the evil advert-creators would will stick with animated gifs forever and be happy with that? – Well, I don’t.
There’d also be animated adverts – with javascript and videos and whatever one can think of, but you know what? By the time being most badly coded flash animation runs smoother than most badly coded javascript animation (You don’t think advert creators will optimize their code, do you?). You get a bit of performance from upcoming hardware accelerated css transitions, and maybe WebGL in the future, but that’s about it. And I don’t want to hit the day when there are openGL adverts running in my browsers! You think having thousand of different javascripts running on each page is fast and secure? I don’t think so.
Evilness is out there
There is evil stuff around the web: adverts, click counting, measuring stuff, badly developed slow scripts… – all this makes the web experience worse. But those things would also exist if there was no flash. And at the time being it’s easy to block most ads with a simple flash blocker, because most ads are made with flash (hey, it’s easy and it tweens!). Simply unblock the few real flash apps you need and there you go with a “fast” web. Would it be as easy if there was only javascipt? How to separate the good scripts from the bad? Just pick one of your favorite web portal pages and inspect all the scripts that are included from lots of different sources that mess with the dom and the global namespace at this very day. You’ll get a headache (and so does your browser).
We’ll get what we deserve
There’s only one thing I assume for sure: Whatever programming language will be “the winner” in the future, we’ll get our ads and scripts and they’ll make the web slower, kill your battery, crash the browser and make everything insecure.
jQuery plugin: one_time_action
jQuery plugin: Makes submits and links work only once - and can reactivate them after a given time if you want.
This is just the demo page. For more info follow the thinks below.
See the github project (with documentation) or download the source
Demo
The future of flash: enrich old browsers with HTML5 abilities?
You might have noticed discussions about flash versus HTML5 and it’s a fact that some modern mobile phones have quite solid html + javascript implementations running but no flash player that’s worth speaking of (if any).
Due to the increasing usage of mobile devices the distriburtion of flash gets worse nowadays. That makes the use of javascript for application (and game) development more and more attractive.
Let’s see, what do we need to develop a basic game?
- Graphics and animations
- Capture user input (keyboard, mouse)
- Sound output
- Also good: Save game states to local storage
Javascript has long enough been capable of the first two points, but sound and local storage was a problem. To get sound output with javascript the common practice was to use a hidden flash application to play the sound and control it via javascript.
Now with HTML5 you can control sound natively in the browser and use flash as a fallback for older browsers that don’t support it (like IE6) – Soundmanager2 makes it this way for example.
Same thing could be done with local storage (or a socket): Use HTML5 if available, flash as fallback.
So with more and more javascript applications to come, will this be the future of flash? Enriching old browsers with HTML5 abilities? I’m eager to find out.
When to use Arrows-and-boxes
What it is
Arrows-and-boxes is there to visulaize the simple Ideas.
Ever ran into a simple problem that’s easy to understand but needs several sentences to describe? In most cases a simple diagram can show the point with 2 or 3 boxes and arrows, and you get the idea at a glance.
() > ((Idea)) < ()
I hate that the only way to get diagrams to the web used to be by uploading images. What if I want to change something?
The old way:
- Open diagram-tool
- Open diagram file
- Change diagram + save
- Export image
- Upload image to server
- Link new image in blog/wiki
What if I’m at a different computer? Where’s the diagram tool and my file?
Noone goes through this for a tiny diagram with only 3 nodes!
A simple diagram can often help to get the point a thousand times better than just text. With Arrows-and-boxes you’re able to just create diagrams for your posts as you type… no external tools, no uploads, no pain.
What it is not
It’s not the all-in-one diagram tool! It has two differend node states (normal + highlighted) and two different arrow states (again normal + highlighted). That’s enough! If you need more, you need another tool or rework your idea. Maybe you can visualize what you need more simple?
Don’t do complicated diagrams!
You think arrows and boxes would be cool if it just had crossing prevention, or hundret different node styles, or smooth curved arrows, or…? – Then you’re doing the wrong kind of diagrams with it!
If you need a difficult diagram, use a different tool. With too much nodes and arrows, the “simple” markup for Arrows-and-boxes becomes pain to read and edit. As long as the markup is easy to read, it’s the right tool to use.
Why this is good
Don’t think too complicated!
Every idea can be separated into simple pieces. Arrows-and-boxes can’t visualize complex structures with thousands of nodes and relations – so it makes you think simple. You’ll be surprised how much you can express with just a few boxes. And that’s good!
(Simple) > is ((good))
Arrows-and-boxes
Easy to use javascript plugin to draw nice boxes and arrows to your website from simple markup like (Dennis) >likes (Food)
Example screenshot of dynamically created drawing with javascript:
How to install Ruby 1.8.7 on windows
It happens that Ruby 1.8.7 is recommended for the current Rails version but there is no one-click installer available for windows the time being. Not a problem, just follow the few steps below…
