Recently Apple’s CEO Steve Jobs wrote an open letter discussing Apple’s stance on Flash. As you may know, Flash is not permitted to play on the iPhone, iPod, or the new iPad. Here are a few choice words on the matter from Mr. Jobs:

Flash was created during the PC era – for PCs and mice. Flash is a successful business for Adobe, and we can understand why they want to push it beyond PCs. But the mobile era is about low power devices, touch interfaces and open web standards – all areas where Flash falls short.

The avalanche of media outlets offering their content for Apple’s mobile devices demonstrates that Flash is no longer necessary to watch video or consume any kind of web content. And the 200,000 apps on Apple’s App Store proves that Flash isn’t necessary for tens of thousands of developers to create graphically rich applications, including games.

New open standards created in the mobile era, such as HTML5, will win on mobile devices (and PCs too). Perhaps Adobe should focus more on creating great HTML5 tools for the future, and less on criticizing Apple for leaving the past behind. Source: Apple

A representative of the browser software company Opera also chimed in with a few thoughts:

“But at Opera we say that the future of the web is open web standards and Flash is not an open web standards technology. Flash does have its purposes and will have its purposes, the same as [Microsoft's] Silverlight and others, especially for dynamic content. But flash as a video container makes very little sense for CPU, WiFi battery usage etcetera – you can cook an egg on [devices] once you start running Flash on them and there’s a reason for that.” Source: TechRadar

Even Microsoft’s General Manager for the Internet Explorer, Dean Hachamovitch, had nothing positive to say about the future of Flash:

“The future of the web is HTML5. Microsoft is deeply engaged in the HTML5 process with the W3C. HTML5 will be very important in advancing rich, interactive web applications and site design. The HTML5 specification describes video support without specifying a particular video format. We think H.264 is an excellent format. In its HTML5 support, IE9 will support playback of H.264 video only.” Source: Microsoft Developers Network

Apple has thwarted Adobe’s efforts at every step of the game in bringing Flash to the iPhone platform, and Adobe is now responding by requesting an antitrust inquiry into Apple’s new policy of requiring software developers who devise applications for devices such as the iPhone and iPad to use only Apple’s programming tools.

Adobe really ought to take Jobs’ advice, see the writing on the walls, and start building HTML5 tools instead of wasting it’s time complaining.

At Simple Station we couldn’t be happier to see Flash slowly going the way of the dodo. We stand behind open standards, fast loading interfaces, and interactions that make good common sense; we will continue to recommend open-source solutions over Flash to all of our clientele.

Posting to Locomotion has slowed down over the past week as my team has focused exclusively on the release of our first big Open Source web application codenamed “MediaCore.”

MediaCore is a free open source video, audio, and podcast publishing platform. It is built for organizations who wish to distribute media in a variety of formats on their website while maintaining the ability to control the user experience.

• Check out the project, features and docs at http://getmediacore.com
• View the demo at: http://getmediacore.com/demo
• Watch the screencast on how the product works
• Give us feedback over at Concept Feedback

Over the past year we have built the entire platform from the ground-up to create one of the most cutting-edge podcasting and media platforms available anywhere on the net. In coming months we will be documenting the process of how we created MediaCore, the stumbling blocks we hit along the way, and the lessons we have learned in designing and marketing an Open Source project. It has been an exciting road and we are looking forward to the next few months as the project unfolds.

A huge round of applause should go to Nathan Wright, Anthony Theocharis, and Melanie Wright for all their hard work in making this dream a reality for Simple Station. I couldn’t have done it without them! I would also like to thank the TurboGears development community for the valuable feedback they have provided us with throughout the development process.

We have already enjoyed some early success including a glowing email from Leo Laporte of TWIT.TV, and a whole slew of feedback from various web design agencies. As the project continues to evolve we will be leaning heavily on the community for guidance on design feedback and feature requests.

If you are a fan of MediaCore you might want to consider following us on Twitter or becoming a fan of MediaCore on Facebook

One of the problems in developing large feature-rich AJAX web applications is that page load times can really suffer once you start using the larger JavaScript libraries such as JQuery, MooTools, Prototype, or SWFObject. Most of these libraries are larger than 50Kb in size and once you start combining libraries you can easily add 100Kb+ to your page loads.

At Simple Station we are adding the finishing touches to optimizing our first big open source application and we have been looking for every possible way to optimize the JavaScript we use. Today I came across google.load(), which promises to significantly decrease JavaScript load times.

The benefits of using Google to provide these libraries instead of your own server include:

• Google’s huge CDN (content delivery network) can deliver the file much faster than your own server(s). Since Google has large data centers all over the world, these files will be served from data centers geographically closer to your users. This helps to reduce network latency and works to increase reliability, scalability, and website speed.
• The more sites that include Google’s google.load() API the greater the chance that a user has already has the file cached, thus enabling your site to load faster as the script will not need to be downloaded.
• You save bandwidth as you no longer have to serve the file(s).
• The versioning system that Google has created makes it easy to include specific versions of these libraries.

All you need to utilize Google’s google.load() technology is this JavaScript snippet:

<script src="http://www.google.com/jsapi" type="text/javascript"></script>
google.load('mootools', '1.2.1');
google.load('jquery', '1.3.1');
google.load('jqueryui', '1.5.3');
google.load('prototype', '1.6.0.3');
google.load('scriptaculous', '1.8.2');
google.load('dojo', '1.2.3');
google.load('swfobject', '2.1');
google.load('yui', '2.6.0');

View the complete list of ajax libraries hosted by Google.

Advanced Beauty 7 of 18 / Directed by Jelle Feringa from Universal Everything.

Advanced Beauty is “an ongoing exploration of digital artworks born and influenced by sound, an ever-growing collaboration between programmers, artists, musicians, animators and architects” that was developed by the bright minds of Universal Everything.

What happens to your website when you type in www.yourwebsite.com? Does it automatically redirect to http://yourwebsite.com or does it keep the www? If it keeps this prefix you are essentially telling Google and other search engines that you are running two websites. Google treats www.yourdomain.com as a seperate website from yourwebsite.com (More information on this issue known as canonicalization).

What should happen is this:
http://www.simplestation.com/

Which automatically reroutes all requests to:
http://simplestation.com/

We’ve had some debate at our office over whether it is better to redirect all http:// traffic to  http://www. or take it out and we’ve decided to go without the www. because if you start using sub domains it starts confusing people when you switch from www.simplestation.com to www.subdomain.simplestation.com.

Additionally www. by the definition of the acronym (world wide web) is redundant since obviously you’re browsing the web when you visit a domain with this prefix. Lastly it just adds unnecessary lines to marketing text. Since yourdomain.com is shorter and simpler than www.yourdomain.com why would you still want to add this unnecessary complexity? More information on this is below. (more…)

After a year and a half of running Mac OS X Leopard things have become extraordinarily slow on my MacBook Pro. After googling how to speed up Mac OS X Leopard I have decided to write my own brief tutorial on a handful of things you can do to effectively increase the performance of OS X. This is meant as a programmer’s quick reference guide so if you are not technically savvy you may want to google “performance tune mac os x” for more verbose explanations. (more…)

We have also just finished our first ever open-source application called Simple G. Simple G is a ready to roll-out PHP calendar application that reads information from public or private Google Calendars and displays it by day, month, or event.

See it in action, here: http://simplestation.com/calendar
(more…)

This pretty much sums up exactly how we feel about flash animation. We’ve recently started getting a lot of inquiries about creating flash websites and our standpoint on this issue is that we simply do not provide these services specifically for these reasons mentioned in this article. If you are thinking of creating a website with flash as a main component we would highly recommend reading over this article before committing yourself to the technology. We do think flash has a great place for use in videos, audio, and photo slide shows but its use in the implementation of an entire website is something we strongly disagree with.

While I was looking for a decent project management suite that had the ability to create tasks, track tickets, and manage users I came across a few websites that have a huge list of “Web 2.0” sites. For those of you who haven’t heard of Web 2.0 yet I’d recommend checking out Wikipedia’s article on it.

Excerpt:

Advocates of the concept suggest that technologies such as weblogs, social bookmarking, wikis, podcasts, RSS feeds (and other forms of many-to-many publishing), social software, Web APIs, Web standards and online Web services imply a significant change in web usage. Source: Wikipedia

Check out the giant list of all things Web 2.0:

• Web 2.0 List
• Sacred Dung Cow: All things Web 2.0