I will be attending the festivities of BarCamp Conway on August 20. Hosted at the University of Central Arkansas College of Business building, the un-conference will have lots of attendees (over 60 last time I checked) with plenty of topics for everyone. Lunch and swag will be provided. I’ll be making the three-hour trek there to meet and enjoy lots of new company.
I received a link on Twitter yesterday to an article on The Daily Collegian Online by Andrew Metcalf, who is majoring in computer science and apparently writes regularly for the site. His article, “Apple, Jobs creating illegal monopoly with HTML5,” attempts to explain away gaping holes in Metcalf’s theory that Apple is trying to take over the open standards that make up HTML and force its own version upon the entire world.
Frankly, this idea is stupid.
I won’t bother with explaining the simple stuff since anyone who has interest in reading this probably knows a decent amount about HTML and coding for the web. But I am going to quote Metcalf and show how his statements are just stupid.
The reason for this incredibly long gap [in finalizing the HTML5 protocol] is largely because of the difficulties the leading browser manufacturers — Microsoft, Apple, Google, Mozilla, etc. — have in agreeing to a common standard. Experts have predicted it could take years before an HTML5 specification is finalized.
He’s got his facts partially right. The companies listed are the leading browser manufacturers. But, he leaves out the votes of the other 327 members of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), the governing body of web standards.
My biggest problem with Metcalf’s argument is that he values a closed, proprietary platform (read: Flash) of which a single company (read: Adobe) has final say over development, accessibility, and usability. Metcalf’s argument is flawed—how can he find fault in Apple’s position, claiming the company could control a platform that over 300 members must vote on, while he completely ignores the fact that Flash is a closed system in which only one company decides its fate?
It has prohibited Flash from running on its iPhone in any capacity and is requiring developers to use its version of HTML5 to play audio, video, or display highly interactive content.
True, developers should use vendor-specific prefixes to access all of Safari’s HTML5 elements, but vendor-specific prefixes are only temporary in nature. They are used so developers can target specific browsers to add style and functionality. These prefixes are adoptions of draft elements that may or may not make it into the final standard. If, for instance, the border-radius style in CSS3 makes the standard, Apple will drop the -webkit-border-radius prefix in favor of the standard border-radius. But HTML5 elements are widely supported among most modern browsers, from Safari 4-5, Firefox 3-4, Opera 10, or the currently-vaporware Internet Explorer 9. Alexis Deveria’s extremely helpful website, When Can I Use…, shows specific elements and styles and which browsers are capable of rendering them. Safari follows along with all the other modern browsers. Internet Explorer is left in the dust except for the current vaporware version 9.0.
Flash can be a memory hog and certainly isn’t perfect, but I find it pretty obnoxious that Jobs wants to single-handedly decide the future of the internet while ignoring its evolution for the past 10 years.
I hardly consider evangelizing the continued development and future standardization of HTML5/CSS3, the language which, as Metcalf says, “is the most basic language used to make websites,” as single-handedly deciding the future of the Internet and ignoring its evolution.
On a note of personal taste, I hate most Flash. These “developers” and “designers” are polluting the web with inaccessible and horrid user interfaces.
Jobs occasionally blames the technical requirements of Flash, claiming it wouldn’t run well on a phone.
I believe Jobs doesn’t believe Flash will perform properly, not run well. It’s a matter of choice words. Any program can run on a platform if it’s coded for it. Not any program can perform properly on a platform though, especially if it’s not coded for it. This is Flash’s circumstance. Sure, it may run well on iOS, but will it perform well? I doubt it.
What’s funny to me is that this sort of anti-competitive behavior is exactly what Microsoft was sued for in 1998. Back then, Microsoft was accused of maintaining an unfair monopoly in the browser market by packaging Internet Explorer with Windows. The prosecution alleged that Microsoft could require developers to code specifically for its browser by supporting non-standard code, and therefore control the development of web standards.
Sound familiar? Whether that lawsuit was fair, legal or necessary is up for debate, but judged by that same standard, Apple is equally guilty.
Microsoft’s case was clear and absolute negligence of web standards. Apple is pushing web standards forward. The use of vendor-specific prefixes is and will be up for debate, but the progress in the last two years shows that Apple (and many other companies) are pushing for HTML5’s standardization and success on the Internet.
Update #2: After three and a half days, the Mac froze up again while idle. It wasn’t being used nor was it hot (because everything was running well below 100° F). I guess it’s failing for good.
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Update: After about a week of tinkering, I think I’ve narrowed it down to an overheating issue. I used the Fan Control Preference Panel to increase the base fan speed from 1500 RPMs to 1800. This has helped, and I can even play Call of Duty 4 rather well. There were a few pixel glitches, but nothing that caused system-wide hangs. The GPU heatsink was actually hotter than the actual GPU, reaching 135 degrees while the GPU reached 130, as did the CPU. iStat Pro gives the old Mac an uptime of 1 day, 17 hours as of this update, so looks like I may have solved the bulk of the problem (for now).
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My wife bought me a new 15″ MacBook Pro for Christmas, completely unexpected. So, last week I sold my first-generation MacBook Pro to a friend for her daughter’s birthday. This 2006 model MBP has run near flawlessly for three years now, except for a failed hard drive over a year ago. I replaced that myself with a new 500 GB Samsung drive. Except for the occasional software glitch, the machine was great.
Until I sold it. Today I got word from my friend that the Mac’s monitor was displaying random colors and lines, getting pixelated, and freezing up. So tonight she brought it by for me to look at. What I found was rather disturbing.
After some Googling, I found out this type of failure isn’t a first with this MBP model, and it’s quite saddening to see that Apple will do nothing for you. Granted, the product is way beyond the manufacturer’s warranty, but these cases all show that defective materials went into the production of the machines.
I’ll probably give my friend her money back and keep the MBP until it completely dies. All I can say is I’m grateful my wife had the foresight to get me a new one, because I’d be lost if my only machine was acting the way this one is, and I’m sad the company who is supposed to care about the product and its customers doesn’t seem to.
I guess I could e-mail Steve Jobs himself. That seems to work.
I was driving home from class today, when I remembered I had not checked in on Gowalla while on campus. Then I recalled the rumors about the possible iPhone OS 4.0 update enabling some method of multitasking. This is some mighty fine news for us iPhone owners who, after three years, are still stuck running one user application at a time (which excludes Mail and Safari, apps Apple allows to run in the background). The only feasible way around this is to run Backgrounder, a jailbreak-only app. It’s decent, but due to the iPhone/iPhone 3G’s low memory, programs will be forced to quit after a while.
Back on track. As I recalled the rumor of multitasking for iPhone OS 4.0, I thought how cool it’d be to have Gowalla run in the background, automatically checking you in when you get close to a known location. Then I thought of the main stretch in town, where over half of my local Gowalla locations are within one or two kilometers of each other. How would Gowalla know exactly which location I wanted to be checked in if it became an automated process? (Because let’s face it, checking-in is a work-around method for these popular iPhone apps because of the lack of running apps in the background). And how would it know I moved from place to place, with such proximity to each location? Sure, GPS can be pretty accurate, but sometimes it’s not. So how would Gowalla know? Then I had an idea.
Gowalla could be setup to automatically check in a user to a location if that user has been to that location x amount of times. For instance: I have checked into my home over 50 times, so it stands to assume I like people knowing when I’m home. Gowalla could incorporate some settings the user could change, something like “Check-in automatically at locations with over x visits.” This could be user-modifiable, allowing a personal degree of automation.
It doesn’t solve the issue of GPS-reliability, which is really beyond Gowalla’s control any ways, but it keeps the check-in process on an interactive level (in that you must choose to let people know you’re at different places), while giving you the opportunity to automate the process for the locations you visit the most.
Of course, this idea is moot with such a shoddy battery life for the iPhone 3G/S. I live two hours away from the nearest 3G-blanketed area, so my 3G is always disabled. I keep my screen’s brightness around 75%, and WiFi enabled. With this, I’m lucky to get a whole day. Toss an app running GPS services in, and you’ll be lucky to make it to lunch.
I hate reading blog posts that are simply a bunch of lists, but I wanted to share a list of books/sites I’m currently reading from to help hone my skills.
These are the most recent books I’ve delved into. Actual, physical books are so much better than PDFs or online sources. I just picked up five PDFs from SitePoint for $25 (as part of their Christmas specials, wrapping up with this sale today), but they won’t be read “cover to cover” like the actual books will be. I dig the paper so much better.