I think it is great. Flash has certainly been a tool to help us get to where we are today and no one could argue with its ubiquity. It is a tool that was good enough to get the job done and pretty much everyone had it.

But tools have cost and some are more expensive than others. Flash has proved to be a bit too expensive on the Mac for some people. At the cost of performance and battery life – some would rather do without that particular tool and go with another one. One that costs less, seemingly has the same quality but maybe less features. HTML5 video playback, on most up-to-date Macs, outperforms Flash video playback in nearly every way except features. But, arguably, most every day uses for video do not need many features.

So why do I think it is great that so many are uninstalling Flash? Because there hasn’t been enough pressure on Adobe over the years to improve Flash’s performance on the Mac. Adobe has been updating Flash for years but (and this point is probably arguable) they’ve been worried less about performance on the Mac then they’ve been worried perhaps about features. They’ve spent more time making Flash do more instead of simply doing it better.

Apple started putting pressure on Adobe by releasing the iPhone without Flash. Apple never said Flash didn’t do anything useful – they simply pointed out what needed to be improved in Flash for it to run on the iPhone. Performance and stability were the two biggest complaints from Apple. The two things Adobe seemingly hadn’t been focused on. And Apple also thought Flash didn’t have very good interactions with a touch-based interface. Something Adobe could probably address rather easily.

With the success of both the iPhone and iPad obviously the guys at Adobe should have been striving pretty hard to make Flash run much better on these mobile devices. Obviously they haven’t done that or been able to accomplish that because – well, Flash still isn’t on the iPhone.

Then Apple decided that the new Macbook Air performs much better without Flash being installed and so they’ve left it out of this model by default. Something they learned from not having Flash on the iPhone and iPad. The new Macbook Air can boast a considerably longer battery life and better CPU performance simply because it does not have Flash installed.

Sure, many new Macbook Air owners will still install Flash the moment their browser tells them they don’t have it – but I’d bet they are selling boat loads of these Airs so there are still going to be a lot of people without Flash running around the Web.

This recent fad of Flash being uninstalled en masse by the Mac tech crowd, the Fireballers if I may, is simply the next squeeze on Adobe. Yet another reason for Adobe to step up and alleviate the reasons people are uninstalling Flash.

Put simply, if Flash didn’t cause our Macs to melt and our batteries to die this conversation wouldn’t be happening. The iPhone would have shipped with Flash, the iPad too, and we’d all be happy to have Flash installed on our Macs. But the truth is Flash really sucks on the Mac. And as a Macintosh user and someone who works for a company with a very big Flash product – I’m hoping that Adobe is being squeezed hard enough now to make something finally happen. To finally make Flash better on the Mac.

It seems everyone is playing Oregon Trail online.

Quite possibly the most impressive emulator I’ve seen in recent memory. Super Mario Crossover allows you to play Super Mario using Mario, Mega Man, Link and more – all with their own individual controls, sounds and gameplay. Superb.

/via Chris Coleman.

I noticed that Bing.com’s home page features have little arrows in the bottom right where you can, or seemingly can, go back and see past home page features. There’s just one thing – when you try to go back to previous home page features you get this message.

Essentially: You need to install Microsoft Silverlight – which is Microsoft’s competitor to Adobe Flash – in order to see the home page archive.

No thanks Microsoft. Although I’d love to page through Bing’s home page features I’d rather not install Silverlight. I’m not sure why I can see the current home page feature without it installed – but I’ll chalk it up to the developers of Bing being pigeon-holed into using Silverlight instead of JavaScript and/or Flash to create the home page archive.

My suggestion: Go with JavaScript so that everyone can see the home page archive and there is no real competition argument to be had.

I played around with Odosketch for a few minutes and at first glance – it is one of the better ‘in-browser’ sketching tools out there. I look forward to working with it in the future. Via David Kaneda.

Pickles helps out. Circa January 2007.

Viddler’s player is, in my incredibly biased opinion, the best Flash video player available. Especially if you’re of the sort that likes to engage in conversation or put an incredible amount of metadata in your videos.

Using Viddler’s API for various projects has always resulted in some sort of learning experience for me. Not only in using APIs in general, but in how to best utilize Viddler’s platform, player, API, etc. etc. to get the best results. This helps to improve Viddler’s services, but also the Web at large.

One of the things I, and the entire team at Viddler, have learned is that most people want their player to perfectly wrap their video. That is, they’d like their video to be as chromeless as possible while retaining the conversational quality of the enhanced timeline that Viddler affords.

Knowing this we were excited when oEmbed, and its underlying methodology, allowed for this to happen programmatically.  This made it rather easy for developers, such as the team at Pownce, to use this service on Viddler to embed videos knowing only the URL assigned to it, in a way that shows off the quality of the player, and keeping the aspect ratio of the video that the publisher created. Perfect.

That one underlying and undocumented feature of oEmbed, that is, that the response from oEmbed was an embed code with the dimensions perfectly suited for your video based on a maximum width – is what I think will make the following JavaScript useful to developers using Viddler’s API.

The response from the API method of viddler.videos.getDetails includes the dimensions of the original video uploaded.  It does not, however, include the embed code of the proper dimensions given a specific width. You have to either figure that out own your own, use oEmbed (which is yet another call), or do the math yourself.

Included in this simple ZIP file is both the JavaScript and PHP functions you would need to determine the appropriate height for a video given a specific maximum width.  These files do not include the ability to use the oEmbed service. For that, you will need phpViddler or your own homegrown way to call that service.

Happy embedding!

When I saw that Mahalo Daily was sharing Vlog Idol on Viddler, I actually started watch all of the episodes when they came out.  I wanted to create a way for other people, like me, who needed to catch up on the series quickly.

 

From this page you can watch all of Mahalo Daily’s Vlog Idol episodes starting with episode one.

Source: Mahalo Daily Vlog Idol: All Episodes.
Shared by: Jason Calacanis: Mahalo Vlog Idol / Bachelon.

We were able to cover some pretty interesting topics including some of Viddler’s most recent projects, the future of flash video on the Web, and how advertising is going in the world of online video. We also got to speak about a brand-new site that the Viddler team has recently put together, but you’ll have to listen to the show to get the scoop.

So be sure to take a few minutes out of your day, or maybe just throw this episode (MP3, 27Mb) on your iPod to listen to it on your way to work, and then come back and let me know what you thought of the show.

Thanks to Leo and Amber for having me on the show!

But, instead of focusing on what has yet-to-come, I wanted to point y’all towards a few things that have already been done.

The flash player and buffering technology behind-the-scenes is constantly being refined. If I remember correctly I’ve been through well over 12 iterations of the player (thought it appears the same as the day I first saw it) in my short time using Viddler. Obviously the better your bandwidth the better the experience, but for the quality of video that Viddler is capable of serving I can not believe how responsive their player is – and it continues to get better. A little birdy has told me to watch for some updates to the player in the near future that will separate the men from the boys. I think updates like this show that Viddler is dedicated to making the best possible experience, even if you do not know they are making the changes.

Though most video bloggers rely on their own systems of content distribution, and they should, there is no reason that they can’t take advantage of Viddler’s superior player for the audience that enjoys viewing their video in their browser and interacting with the community. Having the best of both worlds is very possible and we’ve taken the time to document the process as well as provide an overview and demo video. Obviously Viddler has some improvements to make to become video blogger’s one-stop-shop but they definitely are moving in the right direction.

Listen up video bloggers. Viddler is the place that you need to invest your time and effort into if you are looking to use a really great flash player and community service in conjunction with your downloadable and distributable file formats. I foresee many video blog archives being time tagged and searchable like ever before.

Something that has been mentioned before on Viddler is the ability to switch videos inline without refreshing the page. This is going to be extremely powerful for people who have multiple episodes in a single interface (especially as people start using the yet-to-be-released API, shhhh). We’re refining this process too as you can see from the latest featured videos post. More on this soon.

I am hoping to talk less and use more Viddler on my site soon. If you are remotely interested in this stuff, I’d suggest subscribing to the Viddler Blog. That is where all the juicy announcements will be happening.

[tags]viddler, video sharing, video blogging, flash, javascript, api[/tags]
[slug]viddler-new0206[/slug]