The price is the prize
Blake Gopnik for Newsweek asks: Why Is Art So Damned Expensive?.
Reznor plays the tambourine for Gary Numan
With the 3-hour soundtrack to The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo being released on Friday, I’m obsessing a little over old Nine Inch Nails recordings.
Here’s a gem I’d never seen before.
(via Alan Cross – A Journal of Musical Things)
The ninofficial YouTube channel is full of more awesome HD concert footage.
Khoi Vinh’s Mixel is Addictive
After over a year in development, Khoi Vinn’s Mixel app for iPad launched this week and immediately received a lot of buzz. A video posted on their site does a fantastic job of explaining what you can do with Mixel. The video was done by Adam Lisagor, who has made similar product videos for other apps, and also produces a mens’ style podcast called Put This On. Lisagor also has an iconic beard, which is proving to be a popular element countless Mixels already.
Having been let down by overhyped social art apps in the past, I wasn’t sure Mixel was going to be interesting for more than a few minutes, but between $600k in funding (short-lived Color raised over $40m) and Vinh’s design and UX experience from four-and-a-half years at the New York Times has paid off. I was immediately captivated, and spent almost an hour browsing others’ collages, remixing them, and creating my own.
I have no idea how they intend to eventually monetize this. Peter Kafka over at All Things D asked him just that during a brief video presentation, and although Vinh did offer up things like in-app purchases and marketing tie-ins, he was coy on details (that was too easy, I couldn’t resist).
For now though, Mixel is a hit – notwithstanding the criticized requirement for logging in via Facebook, no doubt to piggyback off a huge existing network rather than slowly build their own.
The next few weeks will show whether this will become as big or bigger a hit as Instagram, and the months to follow will reveal whether they can take this from social phenomenon to viable business.
Going (mostly) Flashless in OS X Lion
With Adobe itself signalling the end of Flash, now is as good a time as any to free yourself of the resource-devouring plugin.
A year ago, John Gruber posted a solution for completely removing Flash while retaining the ability to pull up content should the need arise.
This is a great fix for two reasons. First, it will increase the overall performance of your system by increasing battery life, running cooler and loading pages faster. Second, it will provide passive feedback (via analytics) to the site owners that you are not running Flash, and ideally push those sites to transition to web standards HTML5 more quickly.
Since that post, a few key things have changed.
Starting with the latest generation MacBook Air, new Macs that ship with Lion no longer include Flash pre-installed. While this means that owners of new Macs no longer have to manually uninstall Flash, they still need a suitable way of accessing Flash content when required.
Also, Chrome has since added a feature that automatically updates the browser to the newest version. Unfortunately, this breaks the keyboard shortcut documented in Gruber’s tutorial by constantly changing the application name listed in Safari’s developer menu. This feature cannot be disabled from within the application, enter the following workaround.
First, if your Mac still has Flash player installed, uninstall it using Gruber’s original instructions:
Flash Player was in the default location: /Library/Internet Plug-Ins/. I moved “Flash Player.plugin”, “flashplayer.xpt”, and “NP-PPC-Dir-Shockwave” out of that folder and into a new folder I created next to it named “Internet Plug-Ins (Disabled)”. All you need to do to disable them is move them out of /Library/Internet Plug-Ins/.
Next, disable auto-updates in Chrome by executing the following command in Terminal.
defaults write com.google.Keystone.Agent checkInterval 0
Finally, create a custom keyboard shortcut to open the current page in Chrome, which has its own self-contained Flash runtime. Gruber’s instructions still apply here as well:
I’ve also added a shortcut for opening the current Safari page in Chrome quickly. First, if you haven’t done so already, enable Safari’s Develop menu. (It’s a checkbox in the “Advanced” panel of Safari’s preferences window.) The Develop menu contains an “Open Page With” sub-menu, which lists all the web browsers you have installed on your system. Using the Keyboard Shortcuts section in System Preferences, I set a custom menu key shortcut for the command to open the current page in Google Chrome. Whenever I’m on a page in Safari with Flash content I wish to view, I hit that shortcut, and boom, Chrome launches and loads that page. (Hint: when you create the custom shortcut, and are asked for the name of the menu item, just use “Google Chrome” or “Google Chrome.app” (whichever appears in your Open Page With sub-menu).)
That’s it. You’ve now rid your system of an ever-present Flash installation, but still left a way out for those pesky restaurant menus and auto manufacturers that just can’t take a hint.
Farewell, Flash on Mobile
With yesterday’s ‘leak’ to ZDNet and today’s formal announcement by Adobe that it will cease development of Flash on mobile, Android zealots have lost one of the most common arguments made against Apple’s iOS platform, notwithstanding the fact that Adobe failed to produce a reasonably useful implementation of it on any mobile platform despite repeated claims to the contrary for over three years.
A little history
Of course, Flash on iOS specifically has been a bone of contention for unwavering iPhone fans on the one side and proponents of Android’s self-proclaimed ‘openness’ on the other for a number of years. The lingering conflict came to a head in April 2010, when Apple published a piece by Steve Jobs called Thoughts on Flash. It’s interesting to note the personal nature in which this was presented. Very few communications that were officially published by Apple were attributed to Steve. In fact, going back through the last few years of releases, I can’t find anything else beyond his August 2011 resignation as CEO, a copy of Steve’s letter informing staff of his medical leave in January, and another letter addressing health concerns in January 2009.
Other “open letters”, such as the July 2010 piece addressing antenna issues with the iPhone 4 were simply attributed to ‘Apple’
The Open Letters
As for the content of Steve’s Thoughts on Flash:
[…] Flash has not performed well on mobile devices. We have routinely asked Adobe to show us Flash performing well on a mobile device, any mobile device, for a few years now. We have never seen it. Adobe publicly said that Flash would ship on a smartphone in early 2009, then the second half of 2009, then the first half of 2010, and now they say the second half of 2010. We think it will eventually ship, but we’re glad we didn’t hold our breath. Who knows how it will perform?
Besides the fact that Flash is closed and proprietary, has major technical drawbacks, and doesn’t support touch based devices, there is an even more important reason we do not allow Flash on iPhones, iPods and iPads. We have discussed the downsides of using Flash to play video and interactive content from websites, but Adobe also wants developers to adopt Flash to create apps that run on our mobile devices.
That letter prompted a bizarro personal response from Adobe’s Cofounders and Chairmen. The piece speaks only of free, open markets and PostScript and PDF’s success, but does not address any of the very specific concerns Steve outlined in his piece. The two then go on to accuse Apple of “[undermining] the next chapter of the web”, and imply that they are trying to control the Web. Ironic, given that Adobe has been tyring to force Flash on the Web while Apple is trying to force it away – competitive forces at work.
The End
Over a year passed with little change, until yesterday ZDNet broke the news that Adobe would cease work on its mobile Flash runtime.
Our future work with Flash on mobile devices will be focused on enabling Flash developers to package native apps with Adobe AIR for all the major app stores. We will no longer adapt Flash Player for mobile devices to new browser, OS version or device configurations. Some of our source code licensees may opt to continue working on and releasing their own implementations. We will continue to support the current Android and PlayBook configurations with critical bug fixes and security updates.”
Earlier today, Adobe confirmed the news in a longwinded release that really could have just said “We’re shuttin’ ‘er down”.
Though porn, car and restaurant site developers are no doubt in a panic over this move that sets a clear signal that Flash – on any platform – is on the way out, an accessible Web based on standards came a significant step closer to eventual reality today.
