The Future of Flash – some thoughts

By Trond. June 15, 2010

Once again Flash is in trouble. It’s not the first time, and I believe it’s still not the last. From Javascript, AJAX, Silverlight, Google, Microsoft… you name them, they’ve probably had some thorn in Flash’s side.

Now it’s piling up for Flash again: Steve Jobs is crusading against Flash accompanied by the entire HTML5 consortium. Atop of this all major video-service providers, mobile phone makers, and a whole lot of others are now leaving Flash behind in the dust.
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Posted in Flash, Flex, Front-end, HTML, RIA | Leave a comment

Speed up your website – Google cares!

By Michał. May 27, 2010

As we all know Google search results are based on many different parameters – starting with most important ones like content or inlinks and ending up with factors like accessibility. The one who will figure it all out and implement on the website will probably become very reach. It’s ‘just’ a matter of fitting Google taste perfectly.

Recently Google announced that there is another element which all webmasters should take into account while thinking on Google search results: SITE SPEED.

Site speed shows us how quickly a website responds to web request.

It’s obvious that speeding up the website is important for both visitors and site owners. Users spend more time on the sites which loads faster. Of course it won’t fix the content or user experience problems, but definitely it matters. And this is why Google has been starting to affect search queries by the site speed.

There have already been some tools on the market which can evaluate the speed of the site:

- Page Speed – Firefox add-on that evaluates the performance of web pages and gives improvement suggestions

- Webmaster Tools – inside Labs > Site Performance webmasters can check site speed and see the results in the chart

Site performance statistics

- YSlow – a free tool from Yahoo! with optimization suggestions

More tools can be found here:

Speed Tools

Site speed is not and will probably not be the key parameter for search ranking algorithms, but for sure it is worth mentioning element when it’s about SEO, and all webmasters should think about it while creating websites.

Posted in Front-end, SEO / SEM | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

Flash and Search Engine Optimization

By Sven. May 19, 2010


HTML, video, and images are indexed by search engines and stored so you can easily find them in a web search. The question is still, does Flash content get indexed by the search engines? Already in 2008 Adobe announced that they had teamed up with the search industry leaders (Google & Yahoo!) to improve search results of dynamic web content and Internet applications. At the time Adobe said:

“Moving forward, RIA developers and rich web content producers won’t need to amend existing and future content to make it searchable—they can now be confident that it can be found by users around the globe.”

Two years later we have experienced that some of our Flash solutions does not get many results when googling them. Now why is this? Has Adobe/Google/Yahoo! failed or is it just that we have missed out on the details on how to really make the Flash more search optimized? Adobe stated in 2008 that all existing SWF solutions, across all versions of the SWF file format should be supported. That is without taking any grips to improve existing solutions for SEO. Can this be true? There are a lot of rumors and myths about Flash and CEO around on the web. I’ll try in this article to figure out what the real facts are…

What does it really take to make your Flash site optimized for search engines?
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Posted in Flash, Flex, Front-end, HTML, RIA | Leave a comment

1
Quick test of the font service from TypeKit.com

By Helge. April 29, 2010

Typekit is commercial service that lets you embed non-standard fonts into HTML pages. It is relatively easy to use and takes care of all the licensing issues. So far, all good. Yesterday, I did a quick test of the service using the font LFT Etica Display.

I must say results were disappointing and showed far too much difference than what’s acceptable. It may have something to do with this specific font, like the font-hinting.

It’s sad to see that Opera is not supported at all, even though the latest versions have native support for font embedding.

All the tests were done on a Windows 7 PC.

Posted in CSS, Front-end, JavaScript, Uncategorized | 1 Comment

9
Testing the iPhone packager in Flash CS5

By Sven. March 24, 2010

Flash iPhone App
A while ago I joined the Flash CS5 pre-release program eager to test the iPhone packager that there has been so much fuzz about. After downloading the latest beta version of the Adobe Flash CS5 I started with some small and easy tests, to test the performance when running a Flash solution on an iPhone.

My first App consisted of an image of the iPhone “homepage” with some basic touch-behavior. Tapping the left side would make the image spin, rotating the Y-axis 180 degrees (.rotationY). Tapping the right side would spin the image the other way, while tapping on the top or bottom the image would rotate the X-axis (.rotationX). I used the Tweener-class to animate the rotation, using a “easeOutElastic” transition effect. The animations where of course quick and responsive on my computer, but how will the iPhone react to this? I worked very fine indeed. I tested on a iPhone 3GS and my old 3G. Both reacted as quick and responsive as it did on my computer. Nice! But hey, this was very basic…

I expanded my tests by using the new Accelerometer Class in AS3, making the image change its rotation-parameters according to how I held my iPhone. This also worked very well and my belief in the Flash iPhone packager continued to grow.

Time to build a real App!
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Posted in Flash, Front-end, Mobile | 9 Comments

On how to play HTML5 video

By Jørn. March 23, 2010

The movie playing on mobile devices

Most web developers agree that the ability to play video on webpages is a must, however the jury is out on how these videos should be played. I’m of course referring to the HTML 5 video format controversy. Throw FlashPlayer into the mix and you’ll end up with a humongous fight leading fast to nowhere. Based on this, focusing on finding a solution, I tried to piece together a player using both HTML 5 video, and FlashPlayer for less capable browsers like Internet Explorer. You can find a demo alpha version of the player here: http://makingria.com/demo/html5/videoplayer/

Browser support

The player supports the following browsers:

  • Internet Explorer 7 (FlashPlayer, H:264 video)
  • Firefox 3.6 (Native playback, OGG Theora video)
  • Google Chrome and Apple Safari (Native Playback, H.264 video)
  • iPad and iPhone (Native Playback)
  • Opera 10.5 (Native playback, OGG Theora video)

How to build it

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Posted in Flex, Front-end, HTML, JavaScript, Uncategorized | Leave a comment

1
Hardware accelerated SVG in IE9

By Helge. March 18, 2010

Microsoft has released an early preview of their upcoming IE9. Be sure to check out the new features at http://ie.microsoft.com/testdrive

One of the great news is the native support for the vector graphics language SVG.
SVG 1.1 became a W3C recommendation already back in 2003, so it’s about time we developers can start use this great technology.

Speedy performance

IE9 uses the GPU for graphic rendering through DirectX, and this gives good performance, currently beyond what all other browsers can perform.

Currently scores 28% in test

In this earliy build, only some SVG functions are implemented. This results in poor rendering of more advanced SVG files. See the SVG test chart where IE9 Preview 1 gets a score on 28% at http://www.codedread.com/svg-support.php
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Posted in Front-end, SVG | 1 Comment