GIMPs
Apollo made it on to Slashdot the other day and was immediately lit up by the natives. I usually stay out of this stuff, but lately the level of ignorance towards all ActionScript based tools (Flash/Flex and now Apollo) is drivin’ me nuts.
For ten years I’ve listened to people crap all over Flash. Then the very same people turned around and wet their pants as soon as they could do Flash like things with AJAX (probably just lost my Rails audience with that one). The latest release of script.aculo.us implements some MP3 playback, possibly via Flash, and they get a case of the vapors:
You’re missing the point. We don’t WANT to use flash. Why bother with
script.aculo.us at all otherwise? Flash can do animations and ajax-
like functions as well.
Ding, ding, ding we have a winner, your prize is a new nose to replace the one you cut off to spite your face.
Extremists be they in any area from politics to web development are ‘programmed’ to cheer for their team rather than the best solution. Which is how any discussion on slashdot of a non open source project devolves into the merits of the GIMP:
People are just looking for an excuse not to use Linux, so they say Photoshop. Most home users don’t need photoshop, probably haven’t paid for it, and could do just as well with GIMP. For professional graphic artists, I guess can see a need for Photoshop, but those are the extreme minority of users. Even some professionals could probably get by with only using GIMP. I don’t think that having Photoshop on Linux would do anything to increase the number of people using linux. People who say they need photoshop are just looking for something to complain about.
If you can’t see that Photoshop beats the GIMP, well like a gimp, is the same reason you can’t see the potential of web apps on the desktop.
They’ll wail away on Apollo because it’s new and scary, but just like they came around to Rich Internet Apps when someone built Prototype for them, they’ll come around to web apps on the desktop once we show’em how it’s done.
GIMPs!
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I’ve always loved flash when used right. But when used like an applet, i think its horrible. For me, javascript animations can be much cleaner and easier to develop for user interface elements. I’ve done half a dozen data driven Flash interfaces in the last 5 years and every time it was like a big sucking vacuum. It keeps making you put more and more stuff into the “flash box” until your entire site is one big flash monstrosity.
I absolutely love Flash for multimedia widgets. For video, audio, and screencasts it cant be beat. But for data display and user interfaces, in my experience Flash is a boondoggle. I’ve played with the Apollo sample projects with great interest and looking forward to it. However its going to take some time for development frameworks as clean and useful as Prototype / Rico to emerge out from the platform.
Comment by jc — March 28, 2007 @ 2:16 pm
I hate to burst your bubble… http://ajaxian.com/archives/slingshot-desktop-apps-via-rails
Flash/Adobe can still suck it!
Comment by jwr — March 29, 2007 @ 7:18 pm
jc: Flash does makes it easy to end up with the monstrosity, but if you plan out your project and load things when you need them (just as you would with XHTML) it’ll run very quickly. Flash player 9 uses far less memory than previous versions and it’s virtual machine turns ActionScript into native code so it runs 10 times as fast. For data transfer Flash Remoting is binary so it crushes XML, JSON, or SOAP in terms of speed.
I think my problem is that I’ve always tried to get around the constraints of the browser. If the browser didn’t exist, and you had to design a tool from scratch for building internet connected apps, I think you’d end up with something closer to Flash than to XHTML/JS.
In my opinion js frameworks have pushed browsers to their limits and I don’t see them going to much further without a plug-in be it Flash or something else. There are some frameworks for ActionScript which don’t get as much press as Prototype/Rico/Scriptalicious, Fuse is one for animation and it’s like Scriptalicious on steroids, ARP or Cairngorm are MVC frameworks for app building (and even Flex could be considered a framework as all MXML gets turned into ActionScript eventually).
My favorite feature of Flash the JS frameworks will never solve, no cross browser testing, Flash on Windows, OS X, or Linux works on looks exactly the same. Doing an app like http://www.picnik.com/ in JS gets saddled with many more hours of testing because IE sucks ballz (something we can all agree on).
Comment by KreeK — March 29, 2007 @ 8:24 pm
jwr: Slingshot looks cool but it’s not free like Apollo, and AJAX Rails apps can run on Apollo anyways. Alas no Linux version of Slingshot so the GIMPs would still be crying (if they hadn’t already dismissed it because it costs more than a penny).
Actually I just reread the comments in the Joyent annoucement (http://joyeur.com/2007/03/22/joyent-slingshot) and they’re already complaining:
“‘general release on both Windows and Macintosh OS X’
Wake me up when you have Linux support.”
or
“Windows and Mac? What about Solaris?”
It’s not open source and doesn’t have a heavyweight like Adobe behind it, I won’t hold my breath.
Comment by KreeK — March 29, 2007 @ 8:46 pm
Flash by Adobe just urks me… What makes websites engaging to me is that they are document based, free form code transferred over the net. Not some vector graphics hybrid package delivered to my desktop.
What Apollo seems like to me is some closed up browser. The free form-ness of the browser will never die. If I’m on a site and I’d like to save an image, I can do it. If I’m on a site and I’d like to surf their FTP archive, I can do that.
Its about all about the “web” baby… and I don’t believe Flash or any other file format will replace it.
How do you search through an Apollo app? Can you Google it? Will there be any sort of Microformats for the content in an Apollo app? Can you send your friend a URL to your Apollo app so he can check it out?
I’m not trying to say Apollo/Slingshot aren’t needed, they serve a speciality niche (or whatever may be slightly larger then that). But the Web as we know it has made some great strides with standards and I just don’t see it advancing much more if we all jump back onto the flash bandwagon! Then we’ll all just pop another bubble! :)
Comment by jwr — April 4, 2007 @ 5:46 am
Sir, my sincere gratitude for enlightening those that follow the latest buzz word out there. I’m too faced with the education task when it comes to that request……”but you can do that with AJAX”…….to which I reply…….”scratch my ballz five times, and by then it’ll be done in flash…1 million times better, faster, nicer”.
Comment by tono atlacatl — April 10, 2007 @ 4:41 pm