Web Architecture, Web Production, Web Marketing

Adobe Flash is not available on the iPhone yet they will be hosting the first iPhone developer conference of sorts called iPhoneDevCamp.  What does this mean?  There is an FAQ on the site with some corporate speak and this Q and A specifically about Flash:

Q: Does this mean that the iPhone supports Flash?

A: We suggest that folks speak to Apple directly about what technologies the iPhone will support and integrate. Our relationship with Apple continues to be strong. Naturally we believe that support for Flash is essential for any mobile device that wants to deliver a great experience for customers.

The answer about the iPhone supporting Flash, as of the 1.0 launch is no.  I do not have one but have it on good authority.  This FAQ says that Adobe is hosting the event because they believe that CS 3 is a great tool to develop web apps.  And yet they also say that Adobe reps will only be available as participants and will not be there in any official capacity.

It seems to me that Adobe has more plans to getting in good with the early adopters of developing iPhone apps than just schlepping more copies of CS 3.

The iPhone supporting Flash seems like the most obvious want for Adobe but the idea of Adobe Air being ported to the iPhone is really interesting.  At some point, development on the iPhone will need to be opened up a bit more than just allowing web pages if the success of the phone is to continue.  Adobe Air may just be the route.

It seems like there has been a resurgence in a video file with an audio track automatically starting when a website loads.  I see that there are two reasons for this, the first is new video ads, the second is that people think it’s cool.  This is really annoying.  I was checking on a page on the ColdFusion developers journal just to be blasted with some stupid video ad starting up.  I’m listening to a podcast right now!  Sometimes I’m listening to music.  Eitherway, it’s arrogant to think that someone coming to your site isn’t doing anything else but looking at your site.  There should only be one reason that a video file with an audio track or an audio file should start playing right away and that’s when links used to get to the page make it clear that sound is expected.  For adverts, this means NEVER!  Everyone should know by now that marketing on the internet is a conversation because more interesting stuff is just a click away.  When you start to talk at someone without them wanting to talk to you, the best you can hope for is just to be ignored.

The new version of Camino for OS X came out recently. I’ve been using it for a week and am impressed by the speed, thin RAM usage and relaibility. Plus I just noticed something I’ve sorely missed from Linux.

Linux or Windows users switching to OS X on a Mac will probably notice that when using a web from and the tab key to move from one field to the next, you can’t tab to drop down lists. This drove me nuts for the first few weeks I got serious about using a mac. I ended up just re-learning how I’d fill in forms and begrudgingly put up with the speed bump of having to go to the mouse when I got to a drop down.

Not anymore!

Camino has an option in the web features tab of preferences that allows for tab selection of form buttons, pop-up menus and lists. As well there’s a separate option to turn on selection of links and linked images. This small feature alone makes me switching to Camino full time a compelling choice.

The main drawback to Camino is the lack extensions available for Firefox. This is due to the user interface being written in OS X native Cocoa rather than Firefox’s XUL. The site PimpMyCamino has a few extensions and enhancements available including a link to Camino builds specific to Intel Core Duo and Intel Core2 Duo machines. These versions don’t contain the extra bloat of the code for the PowerPC chips of old.

Time to give away a secret. Squidoo. This site allows you to create a page on something you’re interested in (a lens). On this page you can include items for sale that you’d get a cut from, books from amazon, itunes tracks, etc. The cut you end up getting is pretty small though. The big benefit of Squidoo is the authority given to page in google results. Search for my daughters name, Georgia MacDougall (search) or how about Learning Adobe Flex (search). You should see my Squidoo Lenses as result #3 at the time of this writing.

I didn’t give any marketing related thought to either of these pages and still ranking is pretty solid.

Think about it a bit and put up something useful on Squidoo … you’ll end up becoming an authority on the subject pretty quickly.

I’m converting usercore from BlogCFC. Now that my wife is going to start blogging and we’re going to co-write a blog for my daughter, I have seen it wise to chose a unified more polished platform with smooth edges, doilies and the like. Foof on … wordpress, here we come.

I ran across a little experiment I setup earlier in the year. I’ve had an email account that hasn’t changed for about 10 years, matt@funkcat.com. That account got picked up my many email harvesters for years and I have since used it as a spam collector to train bayesian filters. On March 7th of this year I took the spam filter off and let it just collect mail.

I just remembered that I did that.

I have 38,878 messages in my inbox.

This has got to be close to the record of most spam collected by a single email account. Maybe not. That’s about 13,000 spam emails per month. Has anyone beaten this?

I’ve been exclusively using CF8 for development, leaving testing environments on CF7. In some rough testing, I’m clocking the new engine to be about 15 percent faster. I’m still using JRun4 and Java 1.4.2 on my

. I expect even further speed increases on Linux where I do not need to use such an old version of Java. When I’ve bothered to time the improvements, I’m get roughly 15%, yet it feels like more. Much of what I’m doing recently involves working with Fusebox, which when set in developer mode basically recompiles the whole site at every hit. This can get pretty heavy when testing out new stuff. I made the switch on my dev machine to CF8 about midway through the project and do really notice the improvement. So even with the boring stuff like speed enhancements and stability, CF8 is looking well worth it. I look forward to a public launch soon, problems with RC1 have been minor.

I was just taking a look at some of the new iPhone ads and noticed that a 2 yr minimum agreement is required for iPhones. Ouch. Of course the phone companies prefer you to sign on for 2 years but you’d think they’d give you a break for agreeing to that … not 2 years or blow.