Apple released the Apple iPad last week. Other than a horrible name, I thought it was a great design and am very tempted to buy one. Three things I think will make this device:

1. It's thin, it's lightweight, and looks good (hopefully they don't break too easily)
2. Battery life is up to 10 hours (we'll have to see real-world numbers though)
3. A simple, easy-to-use OS

But I wondered, what about Adobe Flash support? Jobs said that "you will be able to see the web as it actually is". I figured I'd read about it in a few days. The answer was no. Jobs gave two reasons:

1. Flash will eventually die and give way to HTML5
2. Flash is one of the largest reasons why a Mac crashes. (Really? I thought a Mac doesn't crash :() )

According to Adobe, 99% of all Internet-enabled desktops in mature markets as well as a wide range of devices have some version of Flash installed. While taking into account a little marketing tweeking, it is still used by the majority of everyday web users.

HTML5 is still being developed and accoring to Ian Hickson, editor of HTML5 specification, the expected W3C Candidate Recommendation stage will be in 2012 which means Microsoft will likely not pick it up until after then. So what are we going to do until then? Two choices. One being make the end-users see a broken flash placeholder or second being make and maintain two versions of your website. Neither are a good solution.

HTML5 is aimed at reducing the need for proprietary plug-in-based RIA technologies such as Adobe Flash, Microsoft Silverlight, and Sun JavaFX according to Wikipedia. HTML5 will introduce native 2D drawing, media playback, drag-and-drop, messaging and more. So does Jobs expect that everyone just drop the millions if not billions of Flash apps out on the Internet now and try to convert everything to HTML 5? Besides, flash is still rapidly evolving with new features and frameworks like Flex. It's just not going to die, anytime remotely soon.

Right now Apple seems to have it out for Google. But Google did one thing right with their Chrome browser. They managed plugins that break. So if Flash crashed, only the specific block of the webpage would show a broken-flash placeholder and you could either reload and try again or go on to the rest of the webpage uninterrupted. So wouldn't that be a little more reasonable solution for Apple? In Apple's mobile browser, mimic this great Chrome feature and Jobs second reason would be void and the end-user would benefit greatly.

Jobs needs to step up and not hide behind whatever agenda he has against Adobe. So, I will probally wait to buy another competitor's Tablet until Jobs can get in gear. Not to mention it's limited to AT&T for 3G wireless service again. Ug.

Other resources:

• Adobe Responds: Enabling innovation isn't magic
• Facebook: I Want IPAD to Support FLASH
• TheFlashBlog: The iPad provides the ultimate browsing experience?
• False Apple Advertising: iPad Promotional Video and Images Show Properly-Displayed Flash Content

As a programmer I've had to deal with Microsoft's Internet Explorer 6 since, well... since it first came out. Non-standards driven, needing multiple hacks to make things show up right. It costs me frustration and time and the client time and money.

But today is a good day. The big-wig of the Internet, Google, is stepping up and saying it's had enough. According to cnet's News site "As of March 1, Google will no longer support IE6 on its Google Docs and Google Sites services...". Recently a flaw in IE6 was exploited and allowed access to Google's network.

Perhaps this will force a few more IE users to upgrade their browsers and make my and countles other developer's life a little easier.

I've used Avast as my primary anti-virus solution for close to half-a-decade now. There are a number of reasons for this but the two foremost are it's free and non-bloated.

Anytime I get a new computer or setup a friend's computer, the first thing to go is Norton's solution. At first it was just anti-virus. It would always hog memory and slow down resources. Then came along their Security Suite which hogged even more resources.

After uninstalling Norton, Avast would always go on. I've never had any issues with it hogging up my resources. It's always been fast, clean, efficient, and reliable for me. All you had to do was register each year and turn off the annoying voice announcment every day when the definitions update.

It has caught most viruses through file-copy and file-download for me and have rarely seen one slip by unless someone hit ignore and let it continue. People! Read the warnings!

Today I read on cnet News that Avast 5 was released. It features a new GUI which makes things much more pleasant to look at and even easier to use. But what caught my attention the most is what I've never taken the time to research.

From cnet:

"In November 2009, Avast 4.8 and Microsoft Security Essentials were the only freeware to score Advanced+ in the Retrospective/Proactive Test done by AV Comparatives. It's also the only program that tested faster than Norton AntiVirus 2010, and was tied with Microsoft for second place in fewest false positives detected. The detection score was also high, at 98 percent. That's worse than Avira, but Avast noted far fewer false positives. ...Avast Free 5 [is] probably the strongest, free antivirus currently available."

"Sold"

For years I've done my best to explain to new designers, customers, or just people in general that it's fairly hard to make a webpage look really good on your screen because everyone sees it differently depending upon your screen resolution. Then they ask what is screen resolution and just get lost. Give them 800x600, 1024x768, etc. and they just walk away muttering "geek" under their breath.

Well Google has come to save the day once again. Thanks to my co-worker Jason for letting me know about this, check out http://browsersize.googlelabs.com. This will show you what the average percentage of viewers will see on your or someone else's website with an overlay. You want to make visible what is important to the most amount of people right away without scrolling. This puts it into perspective.

Enter your website address on top and check it out. A great design tool.

Hint: If the website is centered, resize your browser window horizontally until only the main content section is left, otherwise you'll see incorrect overlay.

My favorite software company has to be Adobe. I've made an enjoyable career out of now Adobe's ColdFusion Server for about 11+ years now. I also use other Adobe software on a daily basis such as Flash Player and Dreamweaver and sometimes Photoshop, AIR, and Flex.

I've been looking forward to the new movie Avatar for some time now. I learned from a friend it's based upon a comic, but I've never read it - and probally never will. The movie seems to have a great plot and awesome graphics and action.

I learned today that much of the movie was made using Adobe software. For one they used Adobe Photoshop, the same program I own. They also used AfterEffects, Acrobat Connect, LightRoom, InDesign, and Premier Pro. Watch a video on how it was made at Adobe.com.

I recently bought a new laptop with Windows 7 64-bit. I noticed that there where 64-bit and 32-bit versions of Internet Explorer installed but that the 32-bit was pinned. Wondering why this was I did a little investigation.

64-bit IE will work faster and run with your system better. However apparently the Active-X plugin world needs to catch up first.

For example, you can not play Flash inside of the 64-bit browser. At least not until Flash 10.1 is released.

So for now I will continue to use the lesser of the two for maximum compatibility.

Here's an interesting one. Google released a public DNS services.

Most people use whatever their ISP assigns you via DHCP. But if you set the DNS addresses to Google, they say you'll go faster.

Check it out at http://code.google.com/speed/public-dns/.

Microsoft previewed it's IE9 browser at its Professional Developers Conference recently. Most notably is its dramatically increased performance in text and graphics acceleration. It now uses Direct2D instead of GDI. This makes text and graphics animation very smooth and fast with dramatically decreased processor usage.

They do also mention other enhancements such as Javascript speed, but really only focus on the acceleration. In my opinion, they really need a lot of Javascript work.

Check out cnet's interview at http://news.cnet.com/8301-30685_3-10400638-264.html?tag=newsLeadStoriesArea.1.

I'm the proud owner of a new HP Pavilion dv6 Laptop -- or so I thought...

It's shiny, it's new, it's 64-bit and has Windows 7... and man it's fast. Yep I love it!

But wait... what did I just read? Gulp!

HP Laptops have the highest malfunction rate out of 9 manufacturers studied by SquareTrade.

Asus had the best score (really?), next with Toshiba (which my hard drive failed after a year and a half), then Sony and Apple (which I expected to be the lowest). The top loosers include Lenovo, Acer, Gateway and HP.

Check out the interesting research at cnet News.

I'm the "go to guy" for a lot of my family. A couple of days ago, a family member accidently formatted her SD card with her camera and lost a lot of important pictures. Looking for a solution to recover them, she came to me.

In the past I've used different programs that I've long forgot about. Most want about $40 to use, but I ran across a freeware program that worked pretty good for her. She got most of the pictures back.

The program is called "Recuva" and can be found at http://www.piriform.com/recuva. It advertises recovering deleted windows files from your recycle bin, digital camera card or MP3 player. It also advertises rebuilding Word documents and permanently erasing files.