Why Adobe Edge Says Nothing About Flash’s Future
http://www.informationweek.com/news/internet/webdev/231300020

I think “nothing” is a declarative statement that’s flawed. The title should be “Why Adobe Edge Says Nothing About Flash’s Immediate Future” to be more accurate and flexible to unpredictable developments. JavaScript has replaced a number of things people relied on Flash for, because JavaScript engines are a part of browsers that each browser development team has control of. Flash Player can’t be improved on by browser teams. It’s performance rests with Adobe, which has been variable.

CSS3 has animation features, but would I use it beyond animation needs with just a few key frames (like a web widget discoverable transition action) or for experimental work? Not really.

I’d likely use a JavaScript library widget or, for long-form animation, I’d still use Flash or render a video of the animation. If I had web video I wanted people to see, would I just publish it in Flash today? Only if I didn’t care that the growing mobile web audience won’t view it nicely. It’s pretty foolish to limit a growing audience. Maybe I want to prevent anyone from downloading it easily.

The biggest benefits this article mentions about Flash are the familiarity with tools (something that can change rapidly) and that it has digital rights management that web standards methods (HTML5 video tag) don’t. Flash isn’t foolproof though. I’ve seen Flash video capture tools out there. No encoding or tool is a panacea to the reproduction of digital content. Hollywood, the record companies and book publishers can’t sleep easily if their business model is based on DRM. It makes things harder for casual users, but they’ll never stop the motivated.

http://www.apple.com/safari/what-is.html

Nice to see advanced web design/development feature support. It’s nice to see a major computer company pushing innovation on the web.

The browser wars wage on.

They’ve had to reinvent themselves several times since 2000. At this point, I’m surprised it was only 10%. Maybe their plans for mobile web apps will keep the rest of their staff busy.

http://www.evanwiener.com/?p=392 Read full article →]]> A favicon is a small logo that appears in your browser’s address bar or tab, and the bookmarks/favorites drop-down menu.

Here’s this year’s new multi-color version:

Google blogged about how they came to the new favicon here:
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/01/googles-new-favicon.html

Here’s the original (still seen in the Firefox toolbar search box):

The first change was last year’s little ‘g’:

I still think last year’s change was a nice idea. The font has a fun feel to it, but they didn’t match it with the same blue that’s found in the Google logo, for some reason.
The funny thing is, when you turn the new favicon 90 degrees, the background colors match up in the same sequence as the Windows logo colors.

I’m surprised no one at Google noticed this, if they did, they didn’t care.

It’s odd to me that they solicited users for ideas on what Google branding should be. Even though a favicon isn’t a large branding effort, it is for a company so associated with the web. I did find myself doing a double take when I noticed it yesterday, wondering if I was at the right site. That 3-5 second hesitation that I felt was all you need to know about how important brand identity is. Usually companies change brand identity because they want to capture new attention or need a fresh look for a new age. You can’t be too careful about alerting users to new iconography, though, especially when security alerts can be displayed in the same area of a browser (like Firefox 3 does).

Even something as small as a 16-pixel image can give the user a small concern, and no company wants that to happen.

Update: Looks like the blog Brand New picked up the story. Another blog also mentions similarities with AVG’s favicon.