http://gizmodo.com/5574821/uh-oh-adobe-porn-industry-prepping-to-ditch-flash

So looks like the biggest Porn house is going to stop using Flash tech as soon as IE8 starts supporting HTML5. (I won’t hold my breath, IE8 has really lagged behind the other browsers in supporting CSS3 and HTML5 but that’s nothing new. They’ve historically done things their own way…

The point though is that, whether people like it or not, Porn leads in technology. VHS Tapes? Porn. They got into VHS (and picked it over Betamax) before most people had a VHS machine in their house. They led that technology. Same with CD-ROM’s and DVD movies and High Def DVD’s. Blu Ray won partly because of Porn. 3 months before Toshiba gave up on the HDDVD format all the porn studios had stopped producing in it, and had moved strictly to BluRay.

The point is that where porn goes technology wise has been a pretty big indicator of where the rest of us soon will be, and one of the biggest houses in Porn just said “Flash, it’s been fun but…”

Throw on top of that the previous talk from Apple about how they’ll pretty much NEVER put Flash on their iPads and iPods and iPhones and iWhatevers….So companies interested in all those people and the growing alternate means of accessing the internet will be avoiding Flash more and more.

Honestly… I’m glad. I’ve disliked Flash for a decade. Oh I’ve done stuff in it, and I’m not going to get into every single reason I dislike the format, but I will say this. Adding Media to your site, adding content to your site…that’s a good thing… But locking it to a format that god knows how many of your customers won’t be able to see, is just dumb.

Like if you’re a restaurant. Why have a flash website? One of your customers might be trying to check out your website from their iPhone before lunch to see whether they should go there. Not only should you not have any Flash on your website, you should probably have been smart enough to pay additional money for a mobile version of the site.

“I want a flash splash screen that the user has to play a game on to get into the site, like nothing hard, but it’d be cool if they have to drag like say pieces of a puzzle together in order to enter the site.”

That’s a paraphrase, but it’s pretty close to something I once heard. Is the customer always right?

Lord no.

Flash crashes browsers. Flash is STILL not well read content and SEO wise by the search engines (it’s made forward strides in it, but it’s NOT as good as HTML) not to mention throwing in usability issues…You don’t want to make accessing your site and information on your site difficult.

I’m sure people will abuse HTML 5 to make poorly usable wesbites. It’s probably inevitable. Usability is important, and it’s tricky, but it looks more and more like the technology that will be used to implement usable solutions in the future won’t be flash, and I’m glad.

Ok so I mentioned this before, but I highly recommend NoScript as a plugin for Firefox.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/722

I use Firefox as my primary browser, even though I have to look at everything for my work, I use it for most of my first looks, and as my personal browser. I do this because it’s become as close to industry standard as you can get on a Mac which my primary computer is.  Interestingly my primary browser on my PC is Google’s Chrome. I test on IE8 of course, but I really don’t like that browser for numerous other reasons I may or may not go into someday.

Anyway… Firefox has it’s problems, and generally the problems aren’t even with Firefox. It’s with all the scripts that people put on their pages these days. Scripts, more fully called ‘Javascripts’ are programming code that live in web pages.

Ok let me take one step back.

Ok no two steps back.

I’m going to simplify this for the layman a little bit, so if you’re a technogeek and you start sputtering at this, just relax. I’m not teaching a college class here, I’m trying to explain something to someone who knows nothing technical, so why confuse them…

Ok So lets have two things “Markup” and “Code”.

Markup is like…. well if you use a word processing program like Word and you highlight a word and hit the “b” button to make it bold. Back in the file itself it makes marks around that letter so that it will be displayed as bold. In HTML it goes from looking like this…

I took the bolder route to Boulder.

to this…

I took the <b>bolder</b> route to Boulder.

Now when your browser, or word processor, comes along and sees that it knows to make it look bold for you. It doesn’t really think, it’s all just interpreting how to display the file.

I took the bolder route to Boulder.

That’s what HTML is. It’s a Markup language. Hypertext Markup Language. All it’s doing is throwing in those tags into the text document that tells the browser how to display the text. You can add images, tables, layers, and lots of other words that make no sense, but most of what appears on the web is essentially just a text file that has markup in it that describes how to display things.

Ok so that brings us to the second thing, which is Code. That is, it’s programming language. In the case of browsers it’s Javascript. This is stuff that isn’t just display, it’s asking your browser to actually think, and run things with logic and different reasoning. It can be as simple as checking to make sure the email address you entered is actually formed like an email address, or it could be incredibly complex.

It could be thousands of lines of code, running massive mathematical computations in order to do something ‘cool’ on the page.

Or it could be something usefull.

Or it could be something that tracks you on the web and invades your privacy without you even knowing it. For instance some banner ad companies put a cookie on your computer, and then track it via scripts in the page to watch where YOU go across the web from one site to another.

But more often than not these scripts are written by, gasp, humans, and they’re not infallible and their code can be bad. I’ve seen it frequently. And when this happens your browser gets slower and clunkier and worse off. Scripts, particularly in Firefox, can slow down your browser, and even cause it to crash.

Now on top of this we have Flash. It’s ubiquitous on the internet thanks to Adobe, but it’s really just a piece of bloated crap. It’s bad on so many levels, and it hogs up your browsers system resources. Like code, it can be written so poorly as to bog down your browser, computer, and even crash the browser entirely. Plus it does annoying things like force music upon you when you go to a site, and it’s terrible for people who want Search Engine Optimization (I don’t care what Adobe says, I’ve never seen a Flash site with as good SEO as one without).

So Noscripts..

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/722

It’s an addon for Firefox, that blocks all flash and scripts from loading on a page until you give it permission. You can whitelist scripts, or pages, and block other ones entirely.

You get something at the bottom of your browser that tells you how many scripts were blocked, and what they are, and you can allow them line item or you can allow all temproarily, or you can permanently whitelist entire pages, or entire scripts. It also stops flash from working automatically on a page. It puts the flash in place, but it doesn’t load it, and you can click it individually to load it up.

It takes awhile at first. Trusted sites you go to you can just whitelist, or cherry pick one script at a time until it loads the way you want. Even just whitelisting whole sites is good, because then if you click on a bad link, or get shunted somewhere you don’t want to go, the scripts don’t function, and you’re much safer. Ever get a popup you didn’t ask for? Ever go to a site you couldn’t get off of? This prevents that from happening.

Since I enabled this addon my Firefox has been 100x more stable, and I’ve felt more secure in using the web, and I’m pretty much at expert level.

I highly recommend this addon to anyone using firefox. It’s easy to install and use, just go to that link and follow the directions and then you’ll be good to go. It’ll be a little bumpy at first as you whitelist your regular sites, but after that you’ll be in great shape.

Sometimes I really like being a Jack of All Trades, and sometimes I really hate it.

Now, first, I don’t think many people truly are Jack’s of all Trades. More people probably actually think they are, than actually are. I, however, really think I am one. I know a little bit about everything. Name something and I probably can talk about it. Ask me to do something and I probably have a decent idea how. Anything from playing musical instruments, to working on the house, to programming, to art and design, to politics, science, history, you name it.

Yet, along with being a Jack of All Trades, comes the second part that people often forget. They think that someone claiming to be a Jack of All Trades is bragging. I guess it’s better than being an ignoramous of course. Yet it’s the second part, that is the counter balance. Master of None.

Jack of All Trades is a brag only if you leave off that part. I see people who do fantastic in their field, and I’m just jealous. Whatever it is. Whether they’re snowboarding in the olympics or they’re putting together amazing book cover designs in 6 hours that I get to watch in time lapse.

If you don’t enable Flash by default (you don’t do you?… I should write on that…. don’t enable Flash by default….) that video above is a time lapse of the making of a book cover “Blameless by Gail Carriger”.

Maybe it’s just because it’s sped up but these time lapse photoshop videos always impress upon me that I’m a Jack and not a Master. Part of my job these days, and today in particular, is web design, and sometimes I don’t suck at it. I’ve done some designs before that I’m really proud of. Yet more often than not I feel like I’m just spinning my wheels, and can never truly do what the Masters can do.

And I know I’ll never BE a Master. It’s just not how I operate. Part of it is an ADD like lack of focus, but it’s not ADD. I just get to a particular level of decency at something and then I move onto something else. Design ok? Great, time to work on cocoa programming. My iPhone app coming along? Ok time to work on my woodworking and build that entry bench for the house.

Obviously Master’s do more than one thing. This isn’t Victorian England. Still it’d be nice if I had one or two things that I loved to do, and could make money at (key), that I could be a master of.

Or maybe I need to find a way to embrace my nature as a Jack and figure out how to leverage that to understand how everyone works, and better manage them…

Lastly DONT ENABLE FLASH BY DEFAULT.