Flash Reliability- ZDNET Exposes Problems that are less than anomylous..

by Don Burnett

EDIT: Please note some people will see this as me attacking Flash, if you read through it with an open mind you will notice that I am not. I use Flash myself and like the plug-in. I just want to know if there really is truly a reliability issue here and trying prompt to see if Adobe will talk about their process for feedback and how they work to address issues with customers.

Don't think of this as an "Attack" believe me, if I were I'd have more juicy things to say.

-Don

Original Posting:

Over at ZDNET, Adrian Kingsley-Hughes has a great story that exposes some issues with Flash Player. Before a ton of Adobe Evangelists jump my blog here, let me say I am not attacking Flash here, I want Adobe to address these reliability issues. With a product as important as Flash Player is and the number of machines out there running it (some say it's about 98%) this could be an important issue and if Flash is crashing as much as we think it might be, that could account for a lot of problems people don't really see or know about.

Adrian does a blog for ZDNET, and his most recent discourse is about looking at 3 months worth of reliability data gathered by Vista x64's Reliability monitor. One of the problems it exposed was Flash kept crashing his machine or at least his browser. I have to say this wasn't a shock with me, I have Flash installed myself because it has happened with me to on a regular basis. This is not the only community that I keep up with. I own a Mac Mini computer, and the other day I was reading on another ZDNET blog, one of the Mac ones that the OSX version of Flash has the same sort of problems. This was something that I noted during a posting on whether Flash should come to the iPhone or not. The Blog writer and readers started tag-teaming against Adobe because they felt Flash crashed to much. The reader reply (an IT guy) stated that he wasn't recommending Flash be installed on the OSX machines that he administrated because of reliability issues and crashes.

I admit I don't do a lot with Flash these days except view content, but considering the fact that I am hearing so much in the way of community backlash about this, it would seem like Adobe with all it's great resources, should be working harder to identify these problems. Someone was talking with me the other day about this at a Mac user group and of course he was exaggerating, but he asked the question that "boy wouldn't it be funny if we found out 1/3 to a half of all the computer crashes over the Internet were from Faulty Flash Player installs ? ".

I really hope that's not the case but I wonder if Adobe has a reporting customer feedback mechanism in the Flash player that identifies this stuff and brings it back to them. I also wonder if they are doing anything about it.. When CS3 came out Adobe was very anti x64 Windows support, but I hear this happens on other OSes and 32-bit Windows (including XP). I am really wondering what kind of things they do to fix errors and find out about them, etc.

Maybe, someone from Adobe will be nice enough to comment on these issues and the crashing issues (or at least acknowledge it). At least with Microsoft stuff (and other vendors) most now have a "customer improvement program" that tracks reliability and crashing and logs and reports errors back. I'd like to see Flash have this too.. It also could be poorly written Flash content out on the Internet causing this as well (something well beyond Adobe's control).

Of course most people see IE 7 crashed and they don't look further than to blame Microsoft.. It's nice that you can at least with Vista find out these things.. Any insight into this Adobe? Of course you will probably minimize the crashing thing being a problem, but I am keeping a list of these issues when I see someone on the Internet writing about these kinds of problems, so I can revisit this with you folks..

Technorati Tags: Flash,Crashes Multiple OSes,OSX,Windows Vista,x64,Reliability Monitor

Electric Rain StandOut Steps Up

by Don Burnett

Today Electric Rain introduced a public beta of their StandOut Presentation solution. StandOut lets you create very compelling and visually exciting presentations. Why am I talking about it here? Well it's a very new professional WPF application and it integrates with the Expression Studio line including Expression Blend. You can actually use Blend with it to produce presentation templates (Design Kits).

StandOut Presentation Solution consists of two software applications: StandOut Designer Edition. For business, StandOut Presenter Edition enables placement of messaging and content into design kits. The results you can achieve with this software is very cool. It allows you to mix design with content to deliver extremely high quality presentations. The user interface is first rate with a drag and drop design surface.

One of the most impressive features of the Designer is that it imports PowerPoint designs, so if you have a presentation in PowerPoint that you want to enhance it will import slides. You get the full power of WPF with this application and the quality of the output will put your presentations ahead of the game of anyone *JUST* using PowerPoint alone.

I will have a more in-depth walk through upcoming. The big advantage of this program is the change in the presentation design workflow, you can have a designer setup the presentation for you with the designer program. The presenter version doesn't even need to go back to design, to edit and change the presentation, if you have fluid changing information in your presentation this program can help you to make changes on the fly if necessary while keeping the integrity of the presentation.

Technorati tags: Electric Rain, StandOut, PowerPoint, Improve your Presentations, Windows Vista

Mac Users don't just switch from Windows..

by Don Burnett

I found this amusing post by Nik Cubrilovic of OmniDrive. I have also seen his writing at TechCrunch.. Apparently back in May he made the "SWITCH" but not the way the marketing folks have you programmed to think. His Mac crashed and he couldn't get back the partition, so he made the switch to Windows Vista. This is a comment from his blog...

Nik Cubrilovic:

"I didn’t expect it to be like this, I didn’t want Vista to be this good - I was expecting to boot back into OS X and living happily ever after, but damn, this is one fast, slick and nice operating system. If you are a Mac user try it yourself, install boot camp and Vista and it will feel like you just added another CPU and doubled your RAM - I can’t see any evidence for any of the reports of Vista being slow or power-hungry.

Some surprises I have had since running Vista: the first was when I ran Media Center (which has been updated with a new interface and with new features) it detected the Xbox 360 and the other Media Center on the network - making it easy to stream and share music and video content. Media Center is also a much nicer and richer experience than Frontrow. The default security model is much better than what it was. As somebody who has published over a dozen security vulnerabilities for Windows I can see how the new security initiatives within Microsoft that started 4-5 years ago have really taken hold in every part of the operating system and applications - IE has gone from being a hacked up toy to a serious browser that keeps users safe from themselves. "

Another happy Vista user running on Apple Hardware..

GOA Winforms Pro Continues to Amaze with Silverlight

by Don Burnett

The nice folks at Netikatech who are doing the product that implements WinForms projects (and WinForms controls) into Silverlight projects are doing a great job of moving forward with the product, in only a few days they have brought together a full WinForms end-to-end application solution. What's really cool about this is it works on the Mac and the PC and now with the Silverlight RC it works great in Firefox Browser environments. The idea of a full database driven WinForms application running cross-platform on the web, is just phenomenal and it shows the power of Silverlight and GOA WinForms Pro. If you are working on projects in an enterprise development and you are thinking about making your applications work in the browser to lower overall deployment costs and give you better ROI, this product is for you.

Here's are some test screens just to show you the "wow" factor and the complexity of the interfacing that is possible. Literally a full fledged interface is available.

The performance is much faster than one would expect from a browser application including anything done with Ajax.. All the WinForms interfacing functionality that you expect is there, and .Net's performance. Of course this looks like an old style Windows application, but that's just fine for corporate and enterprise applications. Developers will appreciate the speed and the UI standards that have been a hallmark in windows enterprise applications for many years, and frankly it makes it an easy port.

Here's an example screen with a modal dialog box enabled (yes the message box windows are draggable).

And here finally is some time scheduling UI, showing some great project management and visualization..

Considering you can take a regular Windows Platform application and port it now to the web as a viable program that works anywhere, this product has more than great potential. As designers we talk about new UI, I can only hope that the final product lets me extend these applications with my own XAML (wait it can! I forgot about the XAMLCanvas control). Even if it doesn't it has great Enterprise potential.

There is also a Flash version to this, but the Flash folks don't seem to be talking about this, as it would be a great boon to their RIA efforts as well. Many people have complained about Rich Internet Applications in Flash and AIR still being a little light in functionality. This product zooms ahead in terms of functionality and bringing REAL applications to life with all the complexities we expect from an application that runs from the OS, not the browser.

COMPANY BLOG

I'd like to thank Jean Gab for keeping me up to date with what's going on with this product, it's a mind blower that they could do all of this in such a short amount of time. This makes ports of windows platform applications so easy and to make them cross-platform. You should be checking this out if you are into enterprise development..

Technorati tags: GOA WinForms Pro, Silverlight, Windows, Platform applications, WinForms to Flash, Netikatech

Deploying a ClickOnce Rich Internet Application

by Don Burnett

As some of you know I have been working to create a Rich Internet Application version of my website. The application is still a "work-in-progress", but I have been making a lot of progress at it. The application user interface was developed in Microsoft Expression Blend and Visual Studio 2005.

The application has four screens.. To minimize screen real-estate, I used the WPF Tab control for navigation.

The splash screen looks like this..

The work screen implements the IdentityMine "Blendables" 3DCarousel Control, which is similar to Apple's "Coverflow", in that you get sorted content cards in a three dimensional space. The control is very cool and can let you databind to an XML datasource.It also uses the 3dTools.DLL from the WPF 3d team, to let you navigate in 3D. You can click on any card in 3D space and have it bring it to the front.

The contact page is almost the standard type of form you find on a website, nothing very exciting there. The media page implements streaming video over the Internet. It places a media element control, Blend was used to setup the play button, which in this case is just an image that triggers a mousedown event when the graphic is clicked on that triggers a timeline and video to be streamed or played through the media element.

And finally the blog tabitem or screen. It embeds a winforms control element alongside the WPF elements, and in this case I instantiated an IE browser control from winforms and fed it my blog's URL. Very simple but effective, and you can embed a browser in about four lines of XAML.

And that's the app at the moment. There are still some finishing touches, but it does most everything the website does and I can set it up to click install into the user's start menu using "clickonce" install or set it up to automatically start up from a DVD. Here is what the web based installer looks like.

Technorati tags: ClickOnce, Rich Internet Application, WPF, Coverflow, RIA, Windows, streaming video, media element, Identity Mine, Blendables