Then you have to consider that HTML5 gets mentioned in mainstream tech news, partly thanks to Flash issues with mobile devices or more specifically the Adobe vs Apple spat. I don’t recall any mainstream buzz about web technologies that came before it. We’ve turned a corner it seems.

HTML5 has already gotten more momentum than any previous web standard I’ve ever used. And CSS3 is right there with it. I’ve heard that HTML5 is “not going to happen” (unnamed Android developer I know) and I respectfully think he’s wrong. The snowball is already beginning to roll.

As seen within the masthead on Boing Boing.

All was fine with the same server software on an old Windows 2000 Server behind the same firewall. We’re talking about moving a DNS record and a few gigabytes of user inboxes here, not having to diagnose a completely new non-standard port.

As usual, no decent site exists for explaining just what port 4310 really is. Most search results are link bait or lead to useless sites. Note: I even consider Experts-Exchange useless.

One of these days I’m going to start an actually useful IT site or forum if this keeps up. Even Microsoft’s own Technet is riddled with 404′s and badly written content for most of the admittedly obscure errors I’ve run into over the years.

Anyway, port 4310 is for the “Mir-RT exchange service” which I assume means Exchange (the Microsoft email server). Makes sense until you consider that I’m not using Exchange at all. All third-party this time. Apparently that port had to be open on our firewall to get normal IMAP with SSL working on a Windows 2008r2 Server. If this is standard in any way nobody has it documented.

Until now.

It’s easy:

1. Format the flash drive with Disk Utility making sure to select GUID from the advanced options. If your Flash drive is large enough, partitions are OK.
2. Insert your bootable DVD or CD disc.
3. Run SuperDuper and select your bootable volume as source with the Flash drive as destination and start the copy process
4. Profit!

That’s it. SuperDuper does exact sector copies, so everything should work out. I’ve done this with my Snow Leopard DVD-ROM as well as with a Mac Mini Server Snow Leopard Server DVD-ROM (the Mini Server has no DVD-ROM drive).

Not tested with DiskWarrior, but I’m keen to try that next given the slow boot time that DW discs have.

Like it’s older and smaller brothers, the iPhone and iPod Touch, the iPad doesn’t allow the Flash plug-in to run within the included Mobile Safari browser. This was a hot topic with the iPhone, but it’s even hotter with the iPad largely because Steve Jobs hailed the device as the “best browsing experience” and also because more folks seem to understand that the Flash overhead wouldn’t make sense on the iPhone; the iPad is a faster beast thanks to Apple’s new A4 chip after all.

The amount of arguing and discussion on this is still snowballing as I write this, but in summary here are the better posts that have come up so far:

The iPad provides the ultimate browsing experience? – a visual point well-made from Adobe Flash Evangelist Lee Brimelow.

Sympathy For The Devil – Adobe Photoshop PM John Nack’s excellent post on the subject

Adobe, Apple, Flash and Flash on iPhone Political Calculus by Daring Fireball’s John Gruber

Flash Headed The Way of Director – by Michael Pinto

What If Flash Were An Open Standard – John Gruber again

Adobe isn’t in the Flash business, again by John Nack (as a rebuttal)

The Withering Away of Flash – by Nathan Peretic

Flash, iPad, and Standards – by Jeffrey Zeldman

And finally, but not least check out these bonus post from Steven Frank, who needs to talk to you about computers and also The Failure of Empathy by Mike Monteiro.

I personally believe that no matter what happens to Flash, we are seeing the turbulence that comes with the next evolution of personal computing (hence my link to Steven Frank’s article).

Flash may become a casualty. It may not. Folks will have to move on and learn new skills. As Michael Pinto points out, it could fizzle the way Director/Shockwave did. Boy, do I remember the loads of Shockwave developers in college, many of whom did indeed go on to working with the stuff professionally, for a little while. It went downhill fast once Flash really took hold. Director (and therefore Shockwave) was really huge. I don’t think anyone expected it to fizzle.

What could replace Flash? Web standards (specifically CSS3 and Javascript served with HTML5). Probably not Silverlight, Microsoft’s “Flash Killer” that nobody really asked for. Although Silverlight has DRM support that Flash couldn’t handle, so Netflix streams their videos through it.

Probably not another plug-in either. I really do think we’re moving past that.

My point is that this huge explosion of naysayers and pundits is proof that something big is going to happen. We’ll look back on this years from now and hopefully laugh.

Update: see also this more technical but interesting post over at Diary of an X264 Developer.

The always excellent A List Apart published what has so far been an excellent summary of the debate so far: Flash and Standards: The Cold War of the Web.

I’m sure I’ll want to refine and update it later, but right now I felt the need to jot this down. I won’t get into ripping, transcoding or conversion, this is all about playback.

Based on the news that the VLC team has had roadblocks from Apple I have only one thing to say: Apple is a corporation that has to abide by contracts and that means DRM (Digital Rights Management). VLC can ignore or remove some DRM restrictions, especially with DVDs, hence it’s usefulness. To expect Apple to openly support a product that might violate any of the undisclosed contractual obligations they must have with big media corporations is silly. Love it or hate it, that is our system. Plus, the market is still reeling from the boom in digital content delivery and it’s a mess.

Next, Apple’s long-in-the-tooth Quicktime API is finally getting a rebuild starting with Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard. If you asked me I would tell you that it’s going to be transitional for a while, but this is probably a good thing given the long life that Quicktime has had with an older “Classic” Mac OS code base. That means Quicktime APIs are a moving target. That is possibly one reason Apple hasn’t published a lot of info or willingly assisted an open source project like VLC. There has to be a lot more work to do before that can happen.

I like and use VLC from time-to-time. If anything I’d congratulate the team for getting this far while dealing with so many confusing formats and APIs. It’s a little engine that could, GUI for Mac OS X aside. I hope the news of their current predicament helps rustle up more support.

In the meantime what can an OS X user who aquires a MKV (Matroska Multimedia Container), M2TS or any other video container do? As of this writing it comes down to these tools:

VLC – Well duh. Been a standby for a long time. Worth having around for more than one reason. Much buggier than the other players I’m about to mention, but still a worthy app.

Perian – the only one of it’s kind, a Quicktime Plug-in that adds support for MKV, DivX and a slew of other confusing and convoluted formats. Load it and Quicktime Player 7.x is your bitch for the most part. Note: I don’t have an Intel Mac, so I can’t comment on the Snow Leopard compatibility with Quicktime X and Perian, if any. This is the easiest way to start playing a whole boatload of non-Apple native codecs. Includes 5.1 surround sound or DTS passthrough if you have the hardware for that.

Movist – nice slick player that is in a league of it’s own. Runs great and plays everything I’ve thrown at it.

MPlayer OSX Extended – a cleaned up MPlayer derivative that works better than VLC (for me). Some 1080p clips might need some tweaking of the “frameskip” pref, but otherwise this is a easy to use way to play most everything. Also includes 5.1 surround sound or DTS passthrough.

Plex – A media center/player that is Intel and OS X 10.5 Leopard only. It’s designed for keyboard or Apple Remote control and is essentially Front Row on steroids. Slick.

Miro – A media center/player for PPC and Intel Macs that ties into torrent networks. More features and complexity than some might want. Offers lots of subscriptions that foreshadow what TV is going to look like in a few more years.

If you’re struggling with playback on OS X these are the better tools to try.

While I was at work today I noticed a tweet that ever so casually mentioned that Apple announced, nay, was shipping both Final Cut Studio and Logic Studio upgrades. So I’m like “woot” and spent part of my lunch scanning what’s new.

There are a lot of joyous tweets and surprised blog posts, all fo which amounts to very little information that isn’t readily available on Apple’s product page. As is often the case some reading between the lines is needed and then there is the fine print:

Required: Mac computer with an Intel processor

The big one. The last nail in the PPC coffin.

Logic Studio is no different. It’s all Intel from now on.

Final Cut Studio also is $299 for the upgrade. A nice price. I bet that’s partially because it has omitted the twenty or so pounds of printed manuals – check out the smaller box in the photo above. Yup, time to save some trees.

This will probably not surprise anyone too much – I personally was shocked that my Final Cut Studio 2 box was the same behemoth that previous versions were (albeit no extensive Color manual). No doubt UPS and Fed Ex drivers everywhere burned some extra calories after Apple shipped new Pro Apps.

The biggest new awesome improvement for me is the beefed up ProRes codec, now supporting the ubiquitous alpha channel, a staple in my workflow.

Curse you Animation codec! You were grand back in the day, but now I want my lossless compression and my full frame playback too!

And as I tweeted, it’s the little things that are the core of this upgrade, some of which are long-standing Avid features that Final Cut Pro hasn’t had all these years.

It should be fun to take for a spin – after we’re done with my current project which is tied up in ProRes and Red Raw workflows that would have loved the new features had they come before post production.

The other problem for me is that times are tough and I still can’t afford a suitable Intel replacement for my PPC G5 Quad core Mac. The writing is now on the wall and it started with After Effects CS4 so hopefully that day will come.

It’s important to note that not having the latest and greatest right when it comes out is also a great thing – the bugs won’t be a problem and in the end I can still make great things. These days the tools aren’t as much of an obstacle as the creative process anyway.

Cheers to Apple for what looks like a fantastic upgrade (Logic too!).

I recently took a trial spin of Adobe’s CS4 suite and it’s looking like some of my favorite tools are in jeopardy of becoming less polished and annoying. As nice as every Creative Suite upgrade can be, the quality has dropped off of each release since the whole suite became a unified product. It’s not that they’re aren’t some nice things to embrace with each update either, plus the software clearly required a lot of hard work from lots of talented people, but someone at the top is letting this stuff out prematurely – which isn’t something I would’ve complained about as much in the past.

Adobe needs to make money and grow, but now it would seem to be at the expense of a lot of seriously bad bugs, mostly with how the UI works (or doesn’t work). Some of these bugs are the result of Apple’s growing pains and Adobe’s huge legacy source code, others are just little reminders that the honeymoon may be over as money overshadows quality in software development.

Seriously, I could’ve waited a few months for CS4. It’s not like we’re switching from Intel to another architecture and we need it to run natively right now. If anything the CS3 suite could’ve used a 0.5 clean-up that ideally would have better hooks for a lot of the changes in CS4. But hey, it was time get more revenue and it all has to ship on schedule, finished or not. I almost worked at Adobe once, in tech support, a job I would’ve probably loved. Now I’d be embarrassed to field the kinds of questions that must be coming in.

CS4 has some painfully embarrassing glitches that slide past QC, or perhaps nobody cares because they know we’ll all buy it and say “it’s the best yet” anyway. It’s easy to think that but if you poke around online you’ll see that lots of folks at Adobe do care, it’s just that the suite is too big to revise radically on a tight schedule.

Things starting sliding years ago when Adobe started adding graphical icons with links in palettes (I know how to go to adobe.com, thank-you-very-much), then they came out with the precursor to Bridge (which I never used), then Bridge itself, which was useful but didn’t do contact sheets efficiently which sort of made no sense given that this is a major tool for graphics professionals. And via the slow launching and crash-prone Bridge Adobe tried to be your stock photo source (again) as well as your collaboration center and design portal.

The Adobe Bridge Home service has been discontinued in order to focus resources on other efforts.

Most of these extracurricular services were dropped recently to “focus resources on other efforts”. Amen. Thank you recession for weeding out the crap. However, now we have Adobe TV and Adobe Drive which are installed via the controversial Creative Suite installer regardless of choice.

Here we go again. Too much, too fast, at the cost of losing ground with the core audience. This seems to be a consistent problem with success, especially with software.

Adobe has taken it on themselves to create their own UI and it’s a hit and miss to the point that my workflow stutters more than ever. With great power comes great responsibility – Adobe you need to polish this UI more before you drop it on people who weren’t asking for it. At least nobody I know asked for it, both power user or otherwise. Except for Flash I don’t think anyone was asking for you to buy Macromedia and adopt their awkward Flash interfaces either.

C’mon, you can do better than this.

There, I said it. Sorry John.

I don’t know if it’s because the entire set of software products have the same release date (except, oddly, Acrobat). If so, it’s a focus thing as too many resources are being shoehorned into the same development schedule – roughly every two years we get a new Creative Suite when a lot of nagging glitches are left un-patched in the original. CS4, more than ever, needs some polish and probably more than the usual one or two patches that will come out in it’s lifespan.

I mentioned above that Apple’s growing pains are part of Adobe’s struggles, and they are. But one thing that sounds right is that Apple claims that their next OS revision, Snow Leopard, is a refinement release, one that isn’t about new features but is about cleaning up and getting all the kinks worked out before doing another huge revision. Kudos to that, but we all know that this isn’t a popular way to make money. I don’t think it’s as bad as it seems though – most folks bought Tiger or Leopard and claimed not to notice the differences and that’s because many of them are under-the-hood, where only the geekiest of us look. The new features are already overlooked anyway.

And in the end some of us just want to get our work done without having palettes, licensing and traditional UI conventions breaking.

I’ve sort of felt that there is some risk of implosion with the Creative Suite as many buy it and maybe use 1/3rd of it, just like another suite that has been sliding in popularity. Adobe is trying to clean things up and I know it’s because of Apple’s Intel move and Microsoft’s Vista problems as well as the smattering of video card issues as CS4 uses those, but they’ve let too much slide this time. My confidence is greatly reduced.

These problems are long term chinks in the Creative Suite and Adobe brand. Here’s to hoping they can pull it together soon.

Mr. Gates is dead on in his critique. The sad thing is that his comments were made in 2003 and my personal experience is that these usability issues have not actually been fixed.

Seriously.

Here’s a great example coming from my personal experience:

Microsoft bought a small company called iView Multimedia and re-branded their core product iView as Expression Media and added it to a larger suite of similar products. The transition to Microsoft was completed over a period of six months – at the end of that time iView’s web presence was frozen and pointed to the new Microsoft product page. Additionally new user and support forums were set up.

Expression Media itself then went through a series of patches and updates most of which were nearly impossible to find if you didn’t frequent the support forums (Do most users have time to “live” in a forum? I think not.). Then they added Expression Media to the Microsoft AutoUpdate program which made keeping up with the frequent bug fixes a dream come true. I was like “yay!”.

Time passed and Microsoft revamped the software to version 2.0, a paid update. No announcement was made via email (I was on the iView list for such things, what happened to that?). Getting the software to try out for 30 days or purchase required clicking through several pages of links just to download something – I almost gave up.

At this same time it turned out that the Expression Media team released a “post” service pack update to Expression Media 1.x that fixed some awkward bugs. This is a nice gesture considering the paid update superseding the prior version. Again, I was like “yay!”.

The thing is, even with the auto update checking feature in Expression Media 1.x this SP1 patch never showed up. I found out about it by accident while I was reviewing user feedback on the 2.0 release. Again, most users in the target market aren’t going to be able to find an important patch even though a built-in update checker exists. To this is misleading with an end result of a bad customer experience.

I would appendix the above that prior to Microsoft buying iView Multimedia it was a breeze to hit the product web site and get to downloading. When the acquisition was announced the usual justifications were made, my favorite being that the team would benefit from the large resources that Microsoft offered as far as testing and development. These resources did little to help the user get to the product, much less keep it updated.

After watching an internal Microsoft promotion video about the acquuisition (warning Silverlight plug-in required to view), I began to feel that the iView team was a fish out of water within the Microsoft culture. Some of that is because Expression Media is still a cross-platform application as iView was, but it’s not handled by the (infamous?) Macintosh Business Unit as the Mac version of Office is. Basically this is not normal for Microsoft and clearly they don’t entirely know how to present it.

In summary, a small focused company gets acquired and is buried in an existing complex system where getting patches or even basic product information is far more work than the average Internet user would expect. How does Microsoft expect to maximize sales of the Expression Media product when it continues to clutter the usability of it’s product information and support the same way it has with Windows? Seriously, even if I didn’t work on interface design for web pages I could see how awkward this is. Reading Mr. Gates email from 2003 only adds concern to these issues.