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Today Adobe released their new version of the flash player 10.1 and I will say it was a much anticipated update for me. I love flash and have developed in it since it’s early day when it was another product altogether. Flash started out as a way for me to program desktop apps that looked and felt the way I wanted as I have always loved to be able to create the interface and then program it to do what I want. Since then my love of Flash has faded in and out as changes and flaws where found in the system. I almost completely wrote off flash until YouTube and Air had launched. I had been writing projectors for autoplay cd’s for years and air gave me a whole different type of application delivery mechanism. Anyway I love flash and even though I use Silverlight quite a bit, when someone needs a project completed in a hurry and want it to look custom my default is always Flash. So with that here are my thoughts on the release.

The Good:
As you all are aware Apple recently hit Adobe below the belt saying that security flaws and memory errors. I would have expected that in Adobe’s press release they would have addressed that first. But instead they slyly take on the mobile market slating that performance and low power was their main focus. This should make Google happy as it show them that Adobe is not lying down and taking Apple’s low punch lightly.
Better Hardware video decoding… they already own most of the video market. HTML is too early and silver light is just now hitting the market hard. I would have liked to have seen more about HTML 5 video and how Adobe was going to provide tools for video publishing compatible with HTML 5.
Mac Specific Improvements: this is a straight jab at Jobs. I read this as here you go. You wined and we fixed it, now put us in the iPad

The Better:
Mulitouch: I have been having to use third party apps to accomplish this thusfar it is great to see this come to the mainstream and is also another sideways jab at Jobs
Multi-Tab memory usage: This is much improved and a much anticipated release. If you have a ton of windows open and multiple flash objects they each have their own memory space. Adobe has streamlined this now.

The Scary:

Ok this one paragraph scared the heck out of me:
“Now, content that runs in Flash Player will automatically shut down when the available memory is running low.”
This is scary because what if you are running a mission critical flash app and you run out of memory? They also did not state whether it was physical RAM or paged? Scary stuff.

Hope you enjoy
David Bates

You may say to yourself one day, “I seek help elevating my electronic promiscuity, so I paid astronomical dollars for a product as an idiotic higher echelon of retarded dimwits member.”

Fear not my friend, there are those of us willing to help.  But first, we need to break down your statement to better understand the complexity of your issues and to be able to give you the help you are so desperately crying out for!

“I seek help elevating my electronic promiscuity” – The solitary reason you buy Apple products is because everyone else has one, right?  You don’t want to seem “uncool” so you “just have to” buy one too.  Failure to do so will decrease your chances of being viewed as cool, which, when dealing with gadgets, seriously lowers your potential promiscuity.  This is known as an “iSheep” syndrome.

“I paid astronomical dollars” – $499 for the cheapest model, but did you stop at that?  Of course not.  You *need* that 32GB model, I mean after all, where are you going to store you movies, right?  You know, the ones you more than likely already own on DVD or Blu-Ray and enjoy watching through that 35″+ wide screen TV with sweet surround sound setup, but are about to forget all that to watch them on your beautiful 9.7″ LED with audio heard through the Built-in speaker.  Not to mention the hundreds of thousands of books that you, as an avid reader who somehow sidestepped purchasing a Kindle, are going to now purchase for your new device.  But, as said avid reader, at least you don’t have to toss out all your physical books, right?  I mean, you can’t toss what you didn’t purchase.  We call this the “iPad” syndrome.

“idiotic higher echelon of retarded dimwits” – The definition of insanity is sometimes thought of as “repeating the same process and expecting different results.”  Well, based on my observations, I can safely redefine the definition to state “when consumers buy first generation Apple products.”  The observations, you may wonder?  Simply put:  Apple releases a product and a consumer buys it.  One year later, Apple releases a second generation of the product with one or two more features, and the same consumer rushes out to purchase it.  Repeat a year later for the third generation.  It is with this third generation that the Apple product finally reaches that I would say is the “complete product” – yet the consumer isn’t asking why these mundane and basic features were left out in the first two generations, oh no.  They are to busy with their “shiny new innovative” toy to even stop and ponder the common sense questions.  This issue is collectively called the “iHerd” disorder.

An iSheep, buying an iPad to remain in the iHerd!  You, my friend, are a true and through, Apple fanboy!  But fret not, we have the cure!  Merely submit to us ten* payments starting with the forgettable amount of $0.99 and doubling every payment.  Before long, your disease will be gone and the light will have shown you the way!

*Some treatments may require twenty “doses” to be 100% effective, if you are in doubt, please do not take any chances!

This post was made by Inacurate a friend of mine I met on twitter. He is a great Nokia enthusiast and leader of the iSheep resistance.
Check out his blog here. His twitter profile reads: I am me. Learn to love me because I do everything in my power to always be right or hate me because you can’t see the effort and think I am arrogant.

Just confirmed it. The Motorola Droid by Verizon has pinch support or rather full multitouch support.

Check out the verizon site about the update here.

Thanks
David Bates

Today I was invited to join BEM Interactive’s March Madness Google Analytics event. It was a great overview of Google Analytics that I used as a refresher since it had been 2+ years since I had taken any real time to mess with GA. However I also come away with some high level tips from BEM’s GA Ninja Jeremy Shaffer. This guy really knows his stuff and can speak to a crowd very well… something I am still trying to master So without further adieu I would like to share you with what I took away from today.

1. Without a good foundation IE. hosting/website design analytics won’t do you a bit of good. Analytics are meant to help you streamline and custom tailer a site for a visitor, not fix a broken site.
2. You will not magically gain traffic by installing analytics. It takes a full market strategy to drive traffic and analytics can quantify if a strategy will or has worked.
3. Just running reports showing numbers will not get you anywhere. You need to be qualifying questions instead. How can analytics tell me I sold a product from this campaign for example.
4. Define conversions for your site. Having traffic is cool but at what point in your site do you deem their visit valuable? Is it when they click order now? When they visit your careers page? Fill out an email sign-up sheet? define these conversions and then use analytics to quantify them.
5. Quantify valuable metrics. You may have had 43,00000000 visits to your site over the last year but where did they come from and what did they do? How long did they stay? Did they bounce? (yeah that one is for Jeremy Shaffer for those of you who where there.
6. Segment traffic. It is great to know what is happening with all of your visitors but when you get down to answering questions about specific ad campaigns segmentation really helps you find out about your traffic patterns and customers.
7. Analytics should help you come up with solutions to problems. You can report a problem but you will really shine if you can also suggest a solution based on traffic patterns.
8. Don’t get in the mindset that web based analytics cannot help quantify your traditional advertising. You can give customers unique urls or include tracking data in the url so that you know that traffic to that url is from a traditional campaign.

Hope this is helpful to you, if you have any other tips leave them in the comments below.
David Bates

So Windows is making a mobile operating system. Yes is the short answer, and it is brilliant but it seems up until now people never associated windows mobile with Microsoft maybe it was due to Microsoft itself never hyping the OS or maybe it’s the manufacturers fault. Who knows, who cares… As the local tech person for everyone I know I have had a lot of questions that start something like “why would Microsoft try to get into the mobile os business now? Is it because both Apple and Google have one? They must be trying to copy them huh?” I just smile and say well windows has been in mobile phones for a very long time… remember the Motorola Q? They all shrug and then say “yeah but it sucked”… and I say yes that is why they put so much effort into windows phone 7 series, because they needed to to stay in the game.

So now that I got their attention I delve into why Windows Phone 7 Series is an OS worth having such a long name. I think they got it right. First they are requiring the device manufacturers to have certain features like touchscreen, accelerometer, and three hardware buttons along the bottom. Then they are basing the phone on an already existing platform, Silverlight and XNA both of which are highly used on the xbox 360 Microsoft’s gaming platform. Finally they are making the tools free. This is a big step for Microsoft and you can still see on the http://developer.windowsphone.com/ they still charge $99 per year for developer access to legacy SDK’s and samples. What freelance developer wants to pay that… especially when Apple and Google both have free tools (Apple is not completely free as you have to buy an Intel mac) and the phone up till now did not have powerful processors or GPU’s. Windows Phone 7 Series even goes one step further to make the software on the phone support full multitasking or as some like to call it multi-APPing. Combine that with a slick UI and sound UI standards we have a real contender on our hands. I wish this phone would be released a lot sooner than the Christmas time-frame that they currently predict.

Now I have downloaded the SDK and even followed the keynote given at http://live.visitmix.com/ to make a picture viewing app. It worked great, was easy to follow given I already knew the tools from silverlight development and fast… on my computer the emulator outperformed any picture app I ever had on my IPhone. I can’t wait to see what comes of the app store and I hope that MS takes a hint from Apple and Google and decide to make it free to publish apps but charge for advertising and take a cut of sales. If so I’m in.

Thanks for reading
David Bates