There’s been a lot of controversy over Apple’s decision to ban Flash (and Java for that matter) from the iPhone since the day it was released. Now, with the iPad about to hit retail, there’s been more debate on whether this was a technical decision or not, and whether it’s a severe limitation for the devices, or a blessing. Being both a Flash developer, an iPhone OS user an open source advocate, I thought I’d weigh in on the conversation.

Before I get started though, let me point out that I’m not a fan of Flash. I think it’s a real shame that there’s no open, official standard that lets web designers do the things Flash can. Adobe has the web in an awkward stranglehold right now, and I’d love to see that change. But the reality is that Flash is an integral part of the web today.
More My thoughts on Flash and the iPad

The one feature I’ve always wanted to add to WP-Cumulus is true unicode support. Flash player 9 made this impossible because it needed to have the font characters embedded into the movie, and unicode fonts are simply too big for that. But with Flash 10, Adobe has introduced new ways of handling text, and those now allow for non-embedded text to be animated quite smoothly. There’s also no longer any need to specify an exact font name, you can simply tell the player to get a sans-serif font. Flash player 10 is on over 93% of computers now, so it starts to make sense to use it to finally add this long-awaited feature to WP-Cumulus.
More Help me test WP-Cumulus unicode support

Less than two days ago, Blondmonster asked me to review a haiku she’d written for (if I remember correctly) her employer’s Christmas greeting card. We both love haikus and we immediately started brainstorming. “Cow” stanslates as “koe” in Dutch, and we’d joked before about a “haikoe” (which is pronounced just like “haiku” in English). Sometimes you just need to act on impulses like this, so without further ado, I present to you: Haikoe.nl.

The website is extremely beta, and was hacked together from Snapatar leftovers, the Twitter API and some great artwork by Blondmonster. It will break. Possibly even today. But I’ll fix it when it does, and I hope that in the mean time you’ll feed our little bovine friend some haikus. Simply tweet a haiku and tag it #haikoe. You’ll then need to refresh the page to update.

A few weeks ago I rushed out an update to fix a potentially dangerous Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) vulnerability in WP-Cumulus. With the PHP part of the plugin shielded from ‘outside use’, I was hoping no more issues would pop up. Still, I’m glad MustLive alerted me to another issue that uses the Flash movie itself. The exploit worked by calling the SWF file directly, and supplying link with javascript. I’m not quite sure how dangerous this is, but I’ve modified the movie so it only executes regular links.

Please update your copy of WP-Cumulus to 1.23 asap. For most users it should only take two clicks.

The should not affect how WP-Cumulus works on WordPress blogs. But there have been a number of ports and other projects that use the Flash movie. I urge the authors of those projects to examine the new Flash movie, and see if it still works in/with their product. The exploit is not unique to WordPress, and they may need to modify the security check to fit their project.

Over the last few months, I’ve not been able to dedicate as much time to the WP-Cumulus project as I’d hoped to. Freelance work has been keeping me pretty busy, and I’ve had to deal with acute issues rather than be able to focus on new features. That’s why I decided to look for help. Just around that time, Luke Morton launched a spin-off version of the plugin that implemented something I’d been meaning to work on too. I contacted Luke and I’m very happy he’s agreed to help develop WP-Cumulus from now on.

Some of the things we’ll be working on are pretty major. We’ll finally move to SWFObject 2.x, look into internationalization (both for the plugin and the Flash movie) and make improvements to the admin screen. We hope to be able to release a true 2.0 version sometime this year.

Twitter by it’s very nature is a very limited service. That’s what’s fun about it. Some people manage to be really clever and witty in 140 characters. But there’s only so much you can express in a tweet. The other main way to express your personality on Twitter is through your avatar image (or ‘profile picture’ as Twitter calls them).

Many of the people I follow have carefully designed avatars that they don’t change very often. But what if you could have your avatar be as current as your tweets. Showing you exactly the way you look today, doing what you’re doing right now? That’s where Snapatar comes in.
More Introducing Snapatar: Update your Twitter avatar from your webcam

I guess it was about time I updated my Tagnetic Poetry plugin. WP-Cumulus’ lesser known brother now has shortcode support, as well as several other improvements. It’s not as mature as Cumulus, but it’s definitely stable enough to deserve a 1.0 version number.

The Flash movie now has support for the ‘xmlpath’ flashvar that WP-Cumulus has supported for a while now. This affects you only if you’re attempting to use it outside of the context of WordPress, but is very handy if you do. Putting more than one instance of the plugin on a page should also no longer cause issues, and several other little issues were fixed.
More Tagnetic Poetry 1.0 adds shortcode support

It’s funny how I just discovered a great feature in Vista by reading up on how to install Ubuntu alongside it. I didn’t know Vista could shrink partitions without the need for 3rd party tools. Well it can and I did. To make room for Ubuntu. I plan to move away from Windows for anything but design work. I’ll need Photoshop for that and there isn’t a viable Linux alternative for Flash either. But other than that I can’t wait to switch to Linux full time.
More That’s it, I’m switching!

TechCrunch just posted an update regarding their CrunchPad project. And there’s a ‘launch prototype’, which I assume is somewhat like a ‘release client’ in software development. Feature complete and ready for a last round of testing. The new renderings look even slicker than before, and there’s a nice video of the previous prototype in action that hints at what the software is going to be like. I just knew these prototypes were further along than they’d have us believe back then.
More Crunchpad launch prototype looks like dreams come true

At Computex, nVidia is keen to show off it Ion and Tegra product lines. Ion is a new chipset that turns Intel’s Atom processor into a multimedia powerhouse by adding a proper GPU. The first products are available and have been met with critical acclaim. But I find Tegra a much more interesting product. Not in the sense that I’m going to run to stores when the first Tegra-packing devices hit retail, but in the sense that I’m curious to see where this is going.
More Why am I still not excited about Tegra?