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The Adobe Apocalypse

[ Comments Off ]Posted on February 19, 2010 by admin in Technology

Friday, February 19th, 2010

Why I hate Adobe, and how their products could bring down western civilization.

I’ve been deriving secret glee from Steve Jobs’ repeated slams against Adobe Flash. Although I have a lot of friends who are hard-core Adobephiles, I have to admit I’ve always quietly loathed the company’s products. I always found the interface of two of their flagship products – Photoshop and Illustrator – immensely counter-intuitive, and the software itself ridiculously expensive. As a web developer, I’ll also never forget the sneering contempt of a lot of Adobe-centric print shops when bringing them files that weren’t in their beloved .ai, .eps, or .pdf formats. Their most pervasive products – Acrobat and Flash – have also brought me agony in a variety of other ways. Who hasn’t struggled at some point extracting content from or converting a PDF file? Or had one crash while loading in their browser? One of many stories I could share about Acrobat would include the time I had a friend working for the Peace Corps in the Ukraine (Hi Ben!) who needed some simple training materials for classes he was teaching. He could find the material from free legitimate sources in PDF’s, but guess what? The security settings that some nitwit had added made it impossible to print them from the print menu. Enter the questionable legality of the Advanced eBook Processor, which made a joke of Acrobat’s security and encryption and allowed me to free up the restriction for him. Don’t sue me; I did it in the name of international cooperation and education! And Flash? Although it was an amazing product when in the hands of Macromedia (the company that developed it), Adobe acquired Macromedia and rolled their two coolest products (Flash and Dreamweaver) into their Evil Empire of Creative Suite (pick up a copy today, it’s only $2300!). Dreamweaver became much more buggy and cumbersome, and Flash? It’s a browser-crashing system hog riddled with security holes. When you consider the fact that Flash security issues effect THE ENTIRE INTERNET (Adobe claims 99% market saturation of Flash amongst web users) and the recent report that malicious PDF files comprised 80 percent of all exploits for 2009, you can probably stop worrying about the Internet Explorer facilitated China/Google hacking; Adobe’s buggy and vulnerability-riddled products could bring down western civilization as we know it.

Cool New Search Tools That Aren’t Google

[ Comments Off ]Posted on February 11, 2010 by admin in Technology

Thursday, February 11th, 2010

Google still hasn’t found what I’m looking for, but fortunately there are lots of cool new search alternatives.

Yesterday’s underwhelming launch of Google’s Buzz highlighted something that’s frustrated me for a couple of years, mostly since Google achieved search engine dominance. That “something” is the ability to search productively from a small variety of sources and get useful results; something Google has made it a little difficult to do, first by crushing the competition, later by failing to innovate in many ways, much like their predecessors. It would be idiotic of me to not give them credit for the ways in which they have innovated, especially web advertising (we’re using it all over this site!), but the fact is, the web is always evolving rapidly, and business models aren’t always keeping up. And Google’s ideas are generally focused on increasing Google’s revenue, not pure, user-centric innovation. Fortunately, we seem to be entering a new era of real search innovation; the only downside is that key players are going in so many directions that you almost need a search tool to find the right search tool. As an example, take a look at TheSearchEnginelist.com, one of the best-organized and largest lists you’ll find. Even this list omits a fairly large number of newer useful tools, which collectively take a rather diverse set of approaches to the problem. One approach is centered around the idea that you need help figuring out what you’re looking for in the first place. Like InstaFound.com, which tries to pick the “best of the best” from other engines and give you a single result, or Jamesoo, which assembles a newspaper-like results page from RSS feeds. But the former can also lead to the “worst of the worst”, and the latter can just be utterly irrelevant. Of these types of engines, WolframAlpha is pretty impressive, but not really geared toward daily use by the average person. There are also some cool new specialized search tools, especially when it comes to images and multimedia. TinEye and Gazopa both offer “similar image search”, which helps you find images based on existing images. Their predecessor Pixsta.com was acquired last year and put to work as the shopping site Empora, which demonstrates the value of this kind of search. There are also cool tools like Fizy (requires log in), which searches for song files and YouTube links based on simple song or artist input, and is REALLY FAST. It’s likely that all this innovation will lead to a few useful search tools rather than a single behemoth like Google. A couple of likely directions would be customizable aggregators like yourversion.com, or social search like Aardvark. Or as we’ve mentioned before, recommender engines. Along the way we’ll see lots of gimmicky approaches like Greenseng, a “green” search engine, or g8search, which is sort of like AdSense on steroids. And there are a few mysterious startups with dramatic homepages like RockMelt, which we touched on previously, or DiscoveryEngine, which apparently has an active crawler called DiscoBot but on their “about” page is only saying “We will sell no wine before its time”. There are in fact so many new tools that we’re going to revisit the topic in another piece soon. I personally use all three major search engines and a variety of aggregators to find stuff, but if YOU have any thoughts or tips, feel free to share them. Social search is where it’s at! Read the rest of this entry »

You Won’t Find The G-Spot With Your iPad

[ Comments Off ]Posted on February 4, 2010 by admin in Technology

Thursday, February 4th, 2010

If you’re an Apple or Google lover who thinks Microsoft is The Evil One, you really need to get up to speed. No, One Bing Shall Not Rule Them all.

If you’re the sort of person who thinks of Microsoft as The Evil One, you haven’t really followed what Google and Apple have been up to lately. And if you think that tablet devices don’t have a big future you’re probably also fortunate that you don’t have investment dollars either, because you’d be kicking yourself down the road for the opportunities you missed. Yes, the tablet wars are on. Steve Ballmer rushed the announcement of the HP/Windows Slate to beat Steve Jobs recent unveiling of the iPad. And hot on the tails of Jobs’ announcement, Google released a rather feeble concept video of their Chrome Operating System in use on an imaginary tablet device (images here). And then of course there’s the lawsuit against the Indian company that allegedly stole the CrunchPad and renamed it the JooJoo. But what’s really going to be interesting about how this all plays out is that it’s not about the devices per se, it’s about who controls how you do what you do, and all the big players know this. Yes, Apple kicked Adobe in the face over flash, but in a way, who cares? Flash has been a crashmonster since its inception. What’s really at stake here is how you get on the web, where you buy things, and how you do your business. And Apple’s closed system on the iPad is geared toward this end. Google already has search pretty well locked down, and they additionally want you phoning and creating all your office documents through tools like the Google Phone, Google Voice, Google Docs, and G-Mail. Imagine a future in which the coolest new device doesn’t play nice with the coolest new tools you want to use on it. And if you can’t even install your own software, because it’s all located on a remote server that you have no contorl over. And to take “Evil” to a new level in this realm, now that Apple makes their own chips for their exclusionary device, they’re essentially like Intel and Microsoft rolled into one. Adding a little irony to all of this is the fact that Apple is talking to Microsoft about replacing Google on the iPhone with Bing. Who is your evil nemesis now? Read the rest of this entry »

What Do Kate Moss And An iPad Have In Common?

[ 2 Comments ]Posted on January 29, 2010 by admin in Technology

Friday, January 29th, 2010

My obligatory “Why I’m Not Buying An iPad” monologue.


Help Us Name This Product

Here we go again. I get to admire an Apple product from a far. It’s sort of like admiring your friend’s gorgeous model girlfriend who has a drug problem, while being absolutely confident that you’d have no interest whatsoever in dating her. Why do you tease me, Apple? It happened with the Cube, the iPod, the iPhone…in fact, it even happened with the Newton in the 90′s when you ditched the product. In each case, an amazingly conceived and engineered product just barely didn’t suit my needs, and in your brilliant obstinance, you offered no options. So what is it, that after months of drooling over its arrival, will stop me from buying an iPad? Well, this time it’s a few things; some of them simple. Like the lack of USB, and the lack of Flash. And the proprietary Safari Mobile browser. Who do you think you are? Microsoft? It’s also the lack of multi-tasking. That’s just absurd. But what it really is about for me is that I don’t want to pay someone 500 bucks to buy an advertisement and a retail store, which – aside from its amazing interface and innovative hardware – is what the iPad represents. It’s like Apple is saying “We will develop amazing technologies for you, but only if you buy lots of stuff through it“. Which is brilliant on their part; I really admire the genius. The closed loops of iPod/iTunes and iPhone/Apps have made billions for Apple, and I’m sure the closed system that is the iPad will do the same. Unfortunately, I’m from the No Logo subset of the Free generation. I don’t wear advertisements, beyond things like the tags on Levis. Actually, I’ve been known to remove those too. And I don’t like being told where and how to buy things. No, if you want me to walk into your store, Apple, make it free or affordable. Why would I pay you money for the ability to buy things from your closed markets? You should pay ME. You’ve proven that you could afford to do so by developing a product that typically could and should cost a thousand dollars (remember, the iPhone was 600 bucks on release), and then choosing to price it just low enough to kill the Kindle. No Apple, I’m onto you, and I won’t play. But I do have to thank you once again for pushing the envelope and raising the bar. Other vendors will certainly enhance their products because of you, and maybe even create one that I’ll buy in the near future. I’m sad I won’t be able to multi-touch your gorgeous glassiness for now. Maybe I’ll see you at the price drop.

The Virtual Revolution On BBC

[ Comments Off ]Posted on January 23, 2010 by admin in Technology

Saturday, January 23rd, 2010

Ironically, I’ll probably watch the latest TV show I’m excited about on the Internet, not on TV.

It’s a little ironic that I’m as intrigued as I am with the upcoming BBC Television series The Virtual Revolution, because I haven’t had TV since 2002. Since I don’t have TV, I have no idea how well they’re promoting the program through that medium, but I do know that – true to the concept of the series – they’re promoting it rather brilliantly via the web. If you follow any of the mainstream tech blogs like Gizmodo, you may already know about the program, but if you fall a little lower on the Social Technographics ladder, you’ll hear more about it soon. So why am I so excited about it? Well, aside from my minor crush on the show’s host Aleks Krotoski, the PhD-bound tech journalist who (among other things) writes a tech column for the Gaurdian, the show has been open-sourced in a fashion reminiscent of Trent Reznor’s recent concert DVD. The BBC web site for the program features a blog to keep you updated, and they’ve already had a mashup contest to highlight the series’ special content that you are allowed to download, edit and republish under a permissive licence. They even open-sourced the name of the series. View the intro teaser at left, and the mashups and other clips below; the program launches on BBC2 Saturday January 30, 2010. Read the rest of this entry »

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