Flash vs html5 pong fight!

Posted on November 2, 2010 by IdeaMonster

All of those comparisons between html5 and flash could give anybody but batman a headache. Good to know that someone with a sense of humor decided to make their clash a bit more “fun” than numbers, predictions and angry “thoughts on flash”. As with every technology, things have their advantages and disadvantages. And true, HTML5 is better battery-to-performance-wise, but Flash has some pretty cool tricks up it’s sleeve too. And even if the web moves away from flash video completely (which it has started to do) there will still be plenty of use for flash – gaming, “creative” showcase type websites and cartoons for which it is perfect.

The cool people at Code Computerlove decided to make a pong game (for two players) that uses FLASH to render one side of the table, and HTML5 to render the other. And they work together in harmony. Maybe it’s a hint towards the future? Huh, Steve?

You can check out the game and play it here. Enjoy!

The web is moving away from Flash

Posted on October 27, 2010 by IdeaMonster

Many people were skeptical at first about the Flash VS html5 war, but it seems like HTML5 has already won, as after 6 months from apple’s decision to ban flash, HTML5 has now over half of the online video. Which leads to a simple conclusion, that in a year we won’t be seeing flash all that often. Maybe it’s start to learn some new tools?

Adobe Ideas for your iPhone

Posted on June 25, 2010 by IdeaMonster

Whoa, didn’t expect Adobe to release such a fun and actually useful mobile app for free. Since mobile photoshop for the iphone is a big disappointment I wasn’t expecting much from “Ideas”. But trust me it’s perfect.

What does it do?

It let’s you sketch just like other sketch apps do (but with more style) but that’s not all. Aside from the standards like brush size / opacity and color (with a great interface – seriously) you can also draw on photos (which isn’t new but done beautifully) and what’s super cool you can “extract” color schemes from pictures. Which basically means it can generate matching colors from any picture you take – so if you see some nice colors somewhere you can snap a picture and extract them easily.

It also categorizes your ideas (sketches if you must) and organizes them. I’ve tried many apps like that and this one simply owns them all. Seriously. Having (mobile) ideas can be fun!

David and Goliath

Posted on May 26, 2010 by IdeaMonster

Today something a little bit creepy had happened. For the first time (probably ever) Apple’s Market Cap exceeded the one of Microsoft. Yeah, I know. We’ve been always under the impression that the Microsoft empire will forever be there as the most powerful and evil monopoly. As they say in cheesy movies – with great power comes great responsibility. And since Apple right now has the upper hand, we’ll probably see a lot more “influencing the world” on their part. Remember apple fans being mad that people were choosing Windows platform and PC’s? Well right now they’re forced to choose HTML5 over flash for instance. And there’s a new iAd (html5 of course) going to be released soon. So is apple going to be evil?

Or maybe in the modern world, where google, apple and microsoft each try to stand by google’s “don’t be evil”, no big corporation can actually be the good guys or they’ll loose the fight? As I always said, I use apple products and I like them, both the operating system and the devices. But I don’t want MSFT to fall, just like I don’t want to see Google fall. There needs to be competition! There need to be windows7 tablet devices. And Android tablet devices! And if both of those run flash, we’ll just wait and see who comes out of that little fight alive. Because being first doesn’t always guarantee success.

I personally hope that we’ll be able to still creative memorable and innovative advertisements instead of being stuck with all that “interactive html5 toy story bullshit” that we’ve seen a few months ago.

Testing Content Aware Fill in Photoshop CS5

Posted on May 12, 2010 by IdeaMonster

I downloaded the trial version of CS5 today and of course the first thing I wanted to see is how well does it really handle the hyped content aware fill. Below are my results.
Note that sometimes I had to use the content aware fill a couple of times to fix little mistakes previous fills had done. But overall it’s a very powerfull tool. The results are not as perfect as their promotional video but jaw-dropping nonetheless.

Test 1 – removing me and my snowboard from a cellphone picture. So there’s dirt and heavy jpg compression at the start.

contentawaretest1b

The before picture you can see above, the after just below.

contentawaretest1a

Continue reading →

Apple – Adobe war has ended in a retreat

Posted on April 25, 2010 by IdeaMonster

Adobe announced a few days ago that they’ll discontinue supporting the iphone OS in flash and other products. Sure that was a battle they couldn’t win but in a way it’s pretty sad we’ll be limited to a closed platform. But maybe it’s good for the quality control, since a flash app is pretty easy to make so there would be millions of new “fart apps” and we have plenty of those already right?

So while it’s sad that adobe skips the iphone, I think it might be for the best here. Let’s just hope they won’t get mad and stop making the Creative Suite for the mac, because now that’d suck ;)

Apple vs Adobe part II

Posted on April 15, 2010 by IdeaMonster

flashvshtml5

After a serious analysis of the capabilities of HTML5 I can say the following : Flash video is FAR better than it’s HTML5 version. Really.
It’s smoother, has better quality and runs faster. And people were complaining about flash being a resource hog. Well not entirely true.
As for other things – advertisements in HTML5 are a better option, just like simple animations on the web. It’s a standard that generally will take over eventually. But what Steve Jobs was saying is that it will replace Flash entirely. And that won’t be the case – if you want proof go watch some videos on youtube and vimeo in html5 format and then watch them again in flash. The difference is actually visible even with the images themselves. HTML5 is nowhere near being good. And since youtube hasn’t implemented it yet fully means it’s not ready yet. Because they have enough money to do it if the technology allows it.

So what’s next?

We’ll see a division or if you like a “hole” between the two platforms, growing bigger and bigger over time. And since apple is the only company not accepting flash it’ll end up having them shut off from the “decent video streaming”. The rest can be done in HTML5 and it probably will be in time. Even Adobe has some tools to make HTML5 sites that will be released in CS5. It’s all for us to wait and see, but my prediction is that both the technologies will stay with us for much longer, unless the HTML5 video will be improved, because currently it just sucks.

New photoshop functions to make designers obsolete?

Posted on April 12, 2010 by IdeaMonster

Designers will loose their jobs?

Or are they? So content aware fill, puppet tweaking and many more things that seem to make very hard and complicated tasks oh so easy. So now anyone can retouch a photo easily or remove a person from a photograph while preserving the background. So is it the end of designers? Will the clients do their work themselves now with all those “easy to use” automatic tools?

No, not really

Do you bake your own bread? Even though it’s not that hard now is it? Do you print your own business cards? Nah, I didn’t think so. The tools are still for us designers to use and abuse (because the abuse is actually the path to using the new tools creatively and not just as automatic gizmos). It is still up to us, maybe until apple starts to attack Adobe even more and buys Pixelmator or something to create a competition ;)
Don’t be evil, right?

New, easier tools will make our lives easier but they won’t make us disappear. So don’t worry fellow designer! You’ll keep your job. Better worry about paying Adobe their share and as usual it ain’t cheap…

HTML5 – is the end of Flash near?

Posted on April 9, 2010 by IdeaMonster

flashvshtml5

HERE is an awesome demonstration of HTML5 capabilities. This including the online video streaming and better power / resources usage might just be the thing to tip adobe flash over the edge and into obscurity. Let’s see what they respond with, but it seems like HTML5 is the future standard. Too bad 3/4 of people still use IE6 and will be unable to see it. So is Adobe counting on people staying with IE6? Probably so ;)

Is it the end of Flash online?

Posted on February 3, 2010 by IdeaMonster

It seems like Apple is trying to kill Flash in it’s mobile devices, and looking at the percentages it seems almost as if flash already IS dying on the web. But the truth is, apple selling millions of those portable devices changed the scales a little bit. But do we really miss flash ? Bloated, slow and cpu heavy websites? Well sometimes they’re a must, like in web games, animation, cartoons, children games etc. But in many, many cases the initial overexposure of flash it slowly starts disappearing from many sites in which it was used as an addition. Sure there are those big, in-site banners communicating stuff and that sometimes is still useful, but sites totally in flash? Nope, thanks. They’re sluggish, with poor text support and weird anti-aliasing. So yeah, maybe it should just be limited to those cartoonish-game things and stay out of serious sites. And then maybe adobe would get off the couch and do some work on a plugin that works well on a mac. The windows version of the flash plugin is very stable and reliable, can’t be said about the same thing they made for the mac tho. Will Flash go away? Tell us what you think.