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NZ Aperture plugin
Thursday, 29 April 2010
Jobs on Flash – his open letter: Apple CEO Steve Jobs has posted an open letter entitled “Thoughts on Flash,” in which he explains the company’s motivation for leaving Adobe’s Flash off of its iPhone, iPod, and iPad devices. Jobs divides his explanation into six key factors, including Flash’s proprietary nature, the fact that the vast majority of web video is now accessible without Flash, reliability, security, and performance issues, battery life concerns, Flash’s reliance on mouse-dependent interface elements, and the fact that Adobe wants to allow its developers to use Flash for creating cross-platform applications that will run on Apple’s platform, as well as on competitors’ devices, without exploiting any platform’s unique and innovative features.
The crux of the 1684-word letter, says iLounge, is an attack on Flash as a battery-hogging middleware solution that is no longer necessary or desirable in an age of advanced mobile devices.
Ars Technica has posted a poll on this you can take.
Adobe's reply: Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen replied on the open letter on The Journal. The thrust of the reply is that Adobe believes in Open Source.
My thoughts: Is this all necessary? Apple actually relented slightly, lately, giving Adobe help to wring better performance from Flash Player in the form of the new Video Decode Acceleration Framework. Not all Mac users will see the benefits, but Adobe confirmed it would roll support into an update to Flash 10.1 (and it's out: 'Gala').
Meanwhile Flash Catalyst in Adobe Creative Suite 5 makes it easier for non coders to get terrific amounts of Flash out there, which is great, but could also be seen as a ploy to ramp up the presence of Flash out in the wild.
Meanwhile, you can code in HTML5 in Adobe Dreamweaver with the correct plugins.
Adobe may be hindering the development of HTML5 (which is Open Source, BTW) but it must see the writing on the wall. Likewise, how is Flash Open Source? Eventually both companies will have to back down a little. And eventually, the ’net will be HTML5,
Local developer releases Aperture plugin: NZWidgets has released SmuginProForAperture. SmuginProForAperture (pic) is a standard Aperture plugin designed for fast and efficient uploading of images to the SmugMug photo and video sharing site. With it you can upload multiple images to SmugMug directly from Aperture.
It supports flexible caption and keyword handling, hierarchical gallery selection based on category and subcategory; manual or template based gallery creation and SmuginProForAperture adds custom fields to the Aperture metadata for exported images.
SmuginProForAperture v1.0 is available immediately for US$19.99 and a free demo is available.
In demo mode. you can only upload 5 images at a time and it expires after 30 days. Images have 'smuginproforaperture' added as a keyword in the exported image.
Requirements: Mac OS X 10.6 or later; Aperture 2.1.4 or later including Aperture 3.x in 64 bit mode; a SmugMug account.
Cult of Mac says you should have Dropbox: Dropbox is a virtual folder that sits on your computer and is quietly synced to the internet while you’re busy doing other stuff. You can use it on as many computers as you like, and it will do all the syncing so that you can forget about it. (I have it – it's great.)
Starcraft Beta II for Mac is out: Blizzard Entertainment is developing a new real time strategy game, StarCraft II, that’s causing a lot of excitement for gaming fans. Now Mac users can join in the beta fun. To participate you need to have a Battle.net account and have your beta settings activated, as well – more details are available from Blizzard’s Web site.
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