September 2010
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Category: Development
The real issue with Flash and mobile appliances.
Written by Jeff
Thursday, 18 March 2010 15:48
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Yes Flash is slower on a Mac and Quicktime is Slower on a PC…  That is not really the root of the problem.

I tend to be software agnostic, as long as a tool does what I need, I am fairly content…
However, Touch based interfaces open a whole new area of possibilities and problems for developers.  The seemingly biggest problem is that current tools like Flash are built around mouse based input.  For example, the concept of hover goes out the window with a touch screen.

This example is easy to overlook, because at first it seems trivial.  After all, who really “needs” the hover functionality?  Well… many sites that I visit use hover for contextual help.  Many online games that my kids frequent seem to use hover to track mouse position.  Flash does not currently take this into account for things like touch screen interfaces, so if I want to also give quality access the ever growing number of smart phone users, I had better find a better tool for the job.

Now it seems obvious that Apple, Google, and to some extent even Microsoft, think the answer is HTML5 .  It does look like HTML5 has the potential to replace Flash in most situations if not all.  Here the biggest current problem is that not all browsers support HTML5.  Fortunately it seems that the browsers in the latest smart phones and, of course the upcoming iPad appliance support HTML5.

Is HTML5 really the answer?  I don’t know for sure, but I would bet that the answer sits somewhere in the middle with Both Flash and HTML5.  Flash won’t go away, at least not right away, and the smart ones will not want to leave the upcoming “Coffee Table Network Appliance” users in the dark.

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Getting really good at moving WordPress around
Written by Jeff
Friday, 02 October 2009 21:13
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Two of my latest projects revolve around WordPress. Both were developed on a staging server, and they needed to be moved to their new homes once development was done.

This is not nearly as hard as one would think… As long as you are comfortable with dumping MySQL databases, editing the dump and restoring it to the new server. Vi as usual was my friend. I had to do global search and replace of the urls and system paths to match the new home.

The rest is even easier. just copy all the wordpress files into there new home, edit the wp-config.php file to reflect the new database/password info. Do some quick sanity tests and I was done. With one exception. I ran into two plugins that lost their settings in the transition. Fixing was as simple as disabling/enabling the plugins to reset to the default settings and customizing as needed. Still looking at the db dump to try and figure out what happened, with little luck so far. I will however prevail, even if I have to ask for help. :-)

 
2009 New Media Awards
Written by Jeff
Monday, 17 August 2009 21:41
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Tonight I received some cool news.  One of the projects that I help with, won the 2009 New Media Awards in the insurance category.  We have some great people using great technology on this team, and I am very proud to be a part of it!