Shopping Product Reviews

Apple’s hostility to Adobe products: the impact on websites

As a web designer/developer, search engine optimization specialist, and website manager and supervisor for my clients, I’ve tracked many of the websites I’ve created with Google Analytics, a hugely useful tool for monitoring sources, interests, and visitor preferences. Each day, after checking my email, I spend a generous part of my morning looking at their reports that include how many visitors viewed each website, how they were referred, what keywords they used, what pages they visited, how long they spent on each page, and what service provider use, among other things. I check the last item because it often specifies the name of a company, university, government agency, or other specific source rather than a giant IT provider like Verizon or Comcast. Often this is critical information about who visits our sites.

Recently, and I admit I was late in addressing this topic, I have been intrigued by the page they “landed” on. The reason for my interest has to do with a concern about its ability to receive Flash, currently a contentious issue due to Apple Computer’s refusal to include this technology in some of its latest and most popular products, including the iPhone, the iPod and iPad. .

As a lifelong Mac user and lover, I generally admire and support anything Apple, based on positive first-hand experience with its great products and stock performance. I have benefited greatly from both. However, having purchased Adobe’s Creative Suite software several years ago and having put in the painstaking effort to learn Flash, I have a vested interest in continuing to use those sophisticated files on many of my major websites, especially as my clients have paid for their creation and add glamor and pizzazz to any page they appear on.

But sadly, this recent development appears to be little more than a nasty competitive rivalry between two outstanding tech companies. Whether it’s gluttony for market dominance or a lack of commitment or cooperation under the guise of a better user experience, it has impacted everyone who has a website that uses Flash in their presentations. In researching what the consensus of opinion is on this subject, I read the account of a professional woman who was entertaining business guests in Britain. One of the guests was proudly showing off her new iPad and asked for the hostess’s URL so they could admire her website together in this new setting. What happened next is what triggered my concern. When he got to her website, all they saw were big black holes because her website relied heavily on Flash. Her shame was mortifying.

Realizing that the home page of my own company’s website is made up of three fairly large Flash files along with some necessary HTML text, not to mention that some of my clients’ recently displayed home pages also feature large Flash movies To inspire, dazzle, and impress, I focused on my recent curiosity about some of the Google Analytics reports I’d seen showing 0:00 time spent on landing page. In the case of my own website, the landing page is almost always the home page. It occurred to me that if visitors came there to see nothing but black, who could blame them for immediately defecting? Could those visitors be using the latest Apple products? Although Google Analytics does not specify the brand or type of computer or device used, it does indicate the operating system and browser, which in this case would be OS X and Safari.

Changing what happened in the past is a fruitless quest, so my focus now is on monitoring future website visits. Having used Adobe’s Dreamweaver software to create my Flash files, I was aware of and had already used behavioral monitoring that places a sensor on the page to identify whether a visitor has the Flash software necessary to view a Flash movie. Otherwise, the visitor is automatically redirected to an alternative page created specifically without Flash to accommodate this somewhat unusual situation. But as with everything we find these days, the sensor doesn’t work with all browsers (in this case, the old culprit in waiting: Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, which historically, in my experience, has always included pervasive obstacles to ease of use). of use), so the web designer is left with a dilemma. To do? While the intuitive sensor gives you the option to choose to redirect the visitor to a new page or just allow them to stay on the original Flash page if it can’t be detected, it doesn’t solve the problem. Everyone knows that Windows and Internet Explorer have been the predominant platform for most Internet use, despite Apple’s rise in popularity in recent years. But it looks like Google’s new Chrome browser has just surpassed that honor. That means it probably makes sense to allow those visitors to stay on the original Flash page, since they would most likely have the Flash reader. After all, it was the Mac user who caused this dilemma, and only certain Macs. And supposedly the sensor could detect the presence of Flash in a Mac OS. To confirm this assumption, I did some more research and found that Flash 10.1 from Adobe is officially tied to WP7. This new update will be released for all WP7 devices; this means that the entire Internet will be available in the browser of the latest mobile platform from Microsoft. The Google Android operating system was the first to receive support for Flash 10.1 in version 2.2 Froyo of the open source mobile platform. According to Adobe, the Flash player will also be adapted to other operating systems, except for Apple.

Next hurdle, how do you replicate the sophistication of Flash on an alternative page without Flash? After some research through a variety of Google searches, I learned that Apple is promoting an open source coding language called html5 for that problem. For me, that was not an option as I recently did not update my operating system beyond Mac OS X 10.4.11 to the required level of advancement, 10.5.8. The other possible solution was to use javascript in some kind of slideshow. There is also another solution, but it is not very effective if you have large original Flash files. If you have a small subtle effect created in Flash, you can choose to convert that file into an animated gif file which may be larger than the original Flash file, but may still suffice as a replacement in this case.

While these suggestions may be an acceptable stopgap strategy, I believe this conflict of interest is the beginning of a changing of the guard on the Internet, as I see more and more websites removing Flash from their archives and converting to using Flash. html5 or javascript instead. Similarly, RedmondPie.com reports that an entrepreneurial startup is seizing this as a business opportunity with the launch of a new product to get Flash on iPhone: “…now you can get a very alpha version of Flash (aka Flash) to run right on your iPhone 4″. How many more innovators will soon follow this trend? I’ve already seen that the mobile phone market has quickly jumped into the fray with blatant marketing messages about Flash’s warm reception by their customers. Apple, meanwhile, has clarified its “hostile” stance by saying that its decision to restrict the inclusion of Adobe Flash Readers on its newer machines that can still receive Flash was made out of concern that users receive the latest version of that software that you can get. for free directly from Adobe. Okay, that makes sense. But where is Apple going to draw the line? What’s the plan for Adobe PDF technology? Will they ban it too?

Although I was hoping to try and squeeze another year out of my current operating system and dependent software, I think I’ve faced one of the main reasons why I need to upgrade soon, probably before the end of the fiscal year to get the benefit of these necessary ones. business expenses. Unfortunately for me, that will mean a potentially expensive or cumbersome conversion to OS X 10.6.5, along with the need to reinstall Parallels to run Windows simultaneously, allowing me to check how each browser and operating system renders my website creations. And as if that wasn’t enough, doing such an upgrade will truly be the proverbial “opening a can of worms” because now I’ll have to upgrade all my other creative software, the least of which will include Quark 8.0 (which, BTW). , now offers Flash creativity, a feature I’ve been turning down so far), Adobe CS5 Photoshop, Adobe CS5 Acrobat Professional, Adobe CS5 Illustrator, and Adobe CS5 Fireworks. Most missing from that list is my beloved Adobe CS5 Dreamweaver. Without being able to predict the future, who will prevail in the tech wars over open source vs. proprietary encryption, or will we all eventually switch to smaller devices to access the Internet, the question remains: Flash or not Flash?

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