Rants on Flash Player and Acrobat Reader July 27, 2008

I starting web programming originally in Java, during it's heyday.  Java had the grand vision  "Write once, run anywhere" which turned into "Write once, test everywhere" with all the variances between different VM's and between upgrades.   Ironically Java is still around, I still use it, and despite the massive increases in processor and memory, it's has grown in features to the point, developing with tools like Eclipse seem to be the same speed they were a decade ago.  Sadly, flash appears to be following in it's footprints.

While this has been an amazing 2 years for flash, it's also been one of the most tumultuous..and the change appears to be going faster.   In some ways every minor version of the flash player is more substantial in changes than some of the earlier major releases in lines of code (Just guessing).  I often wonder why they bother calling it Flash player 9, when so many features changes, gaps and issues exist between minor versions, nad the transparent install still somewhat annoying on FireFox at least. Damn marketing people.

While I truly love aspects of flash, there are times like this when I feel like becoming a monk.  One of the reasons I got into flash was I was tired of the issues between different browsers, now I'm not sure how much better we are. There have been nasty surprises where at times even Adobe's own components have been broken, but only on a specific minor version, and only when doing things like tweening  Given the challenge in testing richly interactive sites, the visual nuances that are involved, having to test 8 minor verisons x 2 platforms x3-4 browsers by hand, really sucks ass.

I know from talking to the Flash Player QA team, they are doing I assume the best that can be done, they have a huge battery of Unit tests that are run regularly.  But we rich media developers are a greedy lot. The features they are doing are exponentially more complex and they are facing the law of exponential growth....as the number of features are added, the possible interactions between them grows exponentially, and the normalization of the problems takes longer to stabilize... and this too sucks ass for us developing, I expect more quirks in the next year or two instead of less.  Finding and working around quirks is about as much fun as peeling bubble gum out of kids hair.  Toss in AIR growing pains, Flex considerations, and an already huge ecosystem of vastly different things and strategies calling themselves 'flash'. I know I'm having a hard time keeping track of just what features are supported, it's probably next to impossible task to keep things stable.

While I don't plan to give up on Flash.  I actively loathe what Acrobat/PDF has become in the last year. Little pockets of the web, the Adobe browser...IMO trying to compete with IE, Netscape in a slightly subversive way.  While I'm not a fan of HTML, right now using Adobe PDF on even basic PDF's has been a far worse experience than Browsers has ever been for me.  Tons of hoops of fire for security and user preferences I don't care about. Bleh.

I've gone and only recommend people using FoxIt Reader which is faster, something like 1/10th size and ironically renders every PDF I"ve come across without problems where lately Adobe's version gives me more issues or actually crashes trying to read them...this latter I find completely mind blowing.   For creating PDF's I find the PDF print driver from the PDF995 to be great, fast and friendly.

Like Flash (and AIR, and Flex..) I expect PDF's as a platform instead of document and viewer to solidify, but not anytime soon as they are still busy adding feature after feature.  It's already taken about 1 year to shift gears into AS3.0 and gain about. I still have about 50% of my framework that has to be brought over.  HOpefully this won't end up like the golden gate bridge in that when I get through converting it to AS3.0, that Flash 10 has come out and everything has to be redone again..