August 2011 Archives

It's been a long time since i've made a drastic change on a blog of mine. Now is the time for that to change. As of today, this blog is dead. The physical blog, not the content, that is. I'm moving my blog over to wordpress, and giving it a little bit of a facelift. Wordpress is seemingly much more stable and easy to use than MT is or ever was, which is why i switched.

My new blog can be accessed here, at my new web site. The landing page for this blog will automatically redirect to the new blog, however old entries will be preserved to keep permalinks alive.

Enjoy my new blog, everyone!

The recent hype and hullaballoo surrounding the Amazon Appstore has made me think. Do I ever really want to post any of my apps there? Short answer: No, never. Here's why.

First of all, I am immediately turned off by the sign up process. It says that initial sign up is free, but then after a year it will automatically charge you $100? I see a few problems with that. One, is there a way to cancel my account? I don't believe there is. I believe that, once you sign up for it, you're going to loose $100 to them per year no matter what you do. And secondly, $100? A person can get on the Android marketplace for $25, and that's a once per lifetime purchase. Simply for the money reasons, I won't be signing up.

Second, what's the real draw behind the Amazon AppStore? It says Amazon on it? That's not enough for me. The Android Market comes preinstalled on every android device that gets made. The Amazon market gets preinstalled on no devices, and can't even work on most AT&T droids. I don't see why, then, I should publish there.

Another problem with the appstore, which is a minor one, is the fact that there is no easy way to remove an app from sale. One has to go through an email channel, and plead to have an app removed from sale. Every other appstore has an easy way to remove it from sale, in most cases just a button. Even the struggling AppWorld has this. Seriously, amazon. Get with it.

Lastly, the free app of the day. This is the thing that's been getting the most negative publicity. Amazon, every day, decides to take one paid app and make it free for every Amazon AppStore customer. As a consumer, this is great. "Free apps!!" everyone says. But from a developer standpoint, this is really scary. Everyone will download your app for free. What if 1,000 people download your $1.99 app? You're out a large sum of money. Why? Amazon doesn't give you anything but free marketing, and no profit as a result of being the free app of the day. As a developer, i have no desire to loose all my possible profit for an app I put time into. No way.

In short, i will never put any of my apps on the Amazon AppStore. I see absolutely no compelling reason to do so, and even more reasons to stay far away.

All for now!

To everyone saying that Adobe Edge is a flash killer, i have this to say:

No, it is not a flash killer. Let us first remember what Edge does, and is targeted for. Edge is targeted mainly at advertisers on the web. You open edge, create a new document, and the default format is that of a banner ad. Perhaps, it may cause the downfall of Flash as an advertising platform. In my opinion, that would be a great thing. For no reason should a tiny little banner ad on a website use 50% of my CPU when i'm visiting that site. There's no reason for that. It's not because of flash per se, it's because of terrible flash developers trying to run non-optimized content and deliver it to the user. But i digress.

Also, all Edge can do is create animations and basic interactivity. It is not built to make RIA's or mobile applications in the same way that flash is. It is built for creating ads.

It wouldn't be such a bad thing if HTML5 and CSS replaced Flash in the advertising market. Advertisers would be able to reach people on mobile and devices much easier, without the dependency of flash. That makes sense to me. But, to say that Edge and HTML5 will *kill* flash is a complete falsity.

Flash (AIR) is currently, in my opinion, the best mobile app platform that allows users to build one app on one code base and target just about every major mobile platform out there. One cannot do that with HTML5, no sir. You have to use Flash, or Appcelerator or something. But, out of all of the mobile development platforms that i've tried, Flash is by far the easiest. You can create a beautiful mobile app that  functions with speeds sometimes greater than that of a native app, and you get to avoid all of the Java or Objective-C headaches that might come from native development. Plus, with the advent of AIR 3, developers can build native extensions to give their flash apps the exact same functionality of a native app on any platform they choose. 

In short, no, Edge will not kill flash, nor is adobe trying to kill flash with Edge. Flash will live on for a long time, both on the web and on mobile devices. Edge and HTML5 can never fully replace all of the functionality that Flash has built over the years, and it will never equal it's performance or ease of development.

All for now!