Appollo? Flash? Flex? Other buggy apps never fixed, just versioned up for sale? Why do we need web apps online and offline? It is little more than DRM, lock-you-in-to-a-platform, Microsoftian mess. We don’t need it. We don’t need word processors online, or anything else like that. It’s bunk. This is the Adobe/Macromedia attempt to sell more books and training material for crap that is never finished and needs to be downloaded constantly to annoy web users with the latest version. They’re slowly just giving up the ghost as Apple and the Linux world beat them senseless with better stuff, so they just start emulating Microsoft. Dumb.
Apollo: More Microsoftian Crap From Adobe
March 22nd, 2007 | JavaScript, Software, Web Graphics
3 comments ↓
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Have you even tried to consider the uses of Flex + AIR (formerly Apollo)? And if we don’t need all these web apps online and offline, then why are so many people signing up for them? Online Word Processors are useful. I can see heaps of benefits in having online software, but I would still require offline versions as well, and what better way to provide it than Flex/AIR?
In Perth, Western Australia, (actually throughout most of Australia) our ISPs aren’t giving us fast enough connections to make the best use of an online office suite, once they do, I’ll be pushing for the company I work for to adopt an online office solution. Just imagine, anywhere you have a net connection, you have access to your office documents, you don’t need to install a bloated word processor on your computer, you don’t need to worry about applying the latest patches, and you don’t have the trouble of rolling out a software solution to hundreds of computers (as huge corporate offices would).
For the online/offline apps, that goes with the online office suite: you might need to make changes to that project proposal while you’re in the waiting room of some huge multi-national corporation, so having a Flex+AIR based offline office web-app sitting on your system makes that possible.
And, just so you know, AIR, Flex, and Flash are less like Microsoft products and more like Sun products. They are multimedia-orientated alternatives to Java. Microsoft has started work on Silverlight - its own answer to Adobe’s AIR, which is looking to give both AIR and Java a run for their money.
Please, enlighten me, how is the Apple and Linux world beating Adobe? I mean, yes, Final Cut tops Adobe Premier, and Apeture has started making inroads to the market previously held by Adobe Photoshop - hell, even Adobe’s Lightroom has started taking marketshare from Photoshop.
On your zendoor site you state that flash “degrades accessibility and makes site navigation more difficult and indexing more difficult for search engines”. I doubt you’ve given the situation much thought. Have you ever considered using php to provide a way to degrade flash in a graceful manner to allow easier accessibility to a website? Ever output an xhtml page with the same content as your flash page for the search engine to index?
I myself don’t like sites created purely in flash but that’s from a development point of view. I like being able to make modifications to my website with access to no more than a text editor and a web-browser. But flash has to be part of every web developers toolkit these days. If you ever enter into serious web-development - working for a professional firm/boutique or competing against one for clients, you will be forced to change many of your narrow minded opinions towards different technologies. Sure, you’ll be able to maintain a bias against ASP in favour of PHP or Ruby, but in the end, the platform you build the site on isn’t really that important to the end-user, it’s the stuff that appears in their browser they care about, and users like online spreadsheets and word processors, they like flash interfaces and animation.
Wow, you really are fervent about Flash and Flex huh? I’m not a fan. Flash is just not secure enough for one. It’s not reliable enough either. Sure, some users like it, but the fact is most users only use what they are familiar with and understand. That doesn’t include 10,000,000 different ways to make swooshing buttons with sound effects. Building a site twice just to degrade from Flash is ridiculous. It’s nothing personal, I feel the same way about Javascript and it’s return under AJAX.
There are few apps that need that stuff. Really. Most database driven web sites all do about the same and need to be reliable.
I do a fair amount of Rails stuff these days, but I generally avoid AJAX. It just increases the complexity and fragility of the whole application tremendously.
In the future, everything will be or will at least resemble Flash. But this is a decade away almost. After the W3C establishes a standard that is widely supported. (or Apple and/or Microsoft push something, since they really pull a lot of real weight in web standards). Granted, ActionScript is technically a variety of ECMA script and basically a sibling of JavaScript, but it does leave a lot to be desired in a lot of areas such as accessibility, indexing, maintenance, et. al.
I’m not against all Flash and AJAX by any means, it’s just not something for me. I’ve already got a fair number of technologies running at the same time. I don’t want more for me to work on at one time. I’m a pretty deep believer in MVC (a.k.a. model2) not MMMMMVC.
Flex is certainly interesting in its potential, and some of it is just an outgrowth of something Macromedia had already done with Shockwave (an outgrowth of Director) in the late 90’s. So if you think this stuff is new, you’d be wrong. Adobe bought Macromedia, partly because Macromedia could never really market or manage their products well. The products were generally good though, and literally sold themselves sometimes. Unfortunately, Adobe doesn’t do that much better with maintaining/updating all of their products either. How many times do they have to re-invent Acrobat and its varieties without adding and truly significant features or improvements? It’s still a document platform that is for either reading or printing primarily. The new Flash/Flex version is no better, no faster, no more reliable than the binary distributions. It’s just theoretically cheaper to produce and maintain, not better.
Just like Java.
But hey, let’s be all cheerful and smarmy and pragmatic! Truth is, there is lots of room out there for lots of technologies. But I don’t have to use them all, and neither does anybody else.
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