A disclaimer -- I work with both HTML/CSS/JavaScript and Flash. I see the value and need of both. They thrive together and have created some of the most interesting interactions when the two are used together.

Unified codecs

To date, HTML5's <video> doesn't have a unified codec. As seen with YouTube and Vimeo, they only support some browsers due to vendors not agreeing on a single codec. This is of course, a temporary issue which will eventually be solved. But until then, it's adding a lot of work to use it today. h.264 is an obvious choice to create the easiest transition. OGG is the obvious choice for licensing. Either way, one needs to be picked. And for the record, YouTube and Vimeo are using h.264, which caused Opera and Mozilla to uhh, get upset.

Content Protection

I'm sure millions of Hulu users are familiar with how great the service is. The reason it's possible is because Flash Player allows for a layer of content protection. If you want content like this, or live streaming video (like NHL GameCenter), Flash is currently the only option. It's fixable in the future of HTML, but that will be years down the road. So if you love your streaming content from Hulu or sporting sites, don't get a device that doesn't support Flash or Silverlight (hint: iPad doesn't support either).

Recording

Video recording is possible in Flash through the use of either FMS or Red5. The client connects to a server and the server records (usually) a webcam stream. This feature is implemented in several popular video websites, such as YouTube, and once again can't be done with a video tag. Whether this is something HTML and JavaScript want to take on, I don't know... it's not overly common, so I'm not sure they'd rush to add it to HTML6.

Advanced (x)

I've seen some people say that the video tag won't be able to do closed captioning, advanced timelines, advertisements, etc... but in reality, it generally can. The element is quite programmable through JavaScript meaning that it can do a lot of the stuff, but it won't be pretty or fun doing them. And since JavaScript is run locally, it wouldn't be impossible to bypass required advertisements through even a simple UserJS/Greasemonkey script.

In conclusion, the video tag should be welcomed, but you won't be uninstalling that Flash Player plugin anytime soon. There's still a few steps before Flash-powered video needs a coffin.

After sitting through some NHL 2k10 and playing the hell out of NHL 10, I thought I would do a comparison of the two. Point out where each game excels. You know, give some pointers to those debating which game to get. Unfortunately I couldn't.

NHL 2K10 feels like an alpha or maybe a beta. So much of the game is unpolished that I actually felt bad. I expected this game to be mediocre, but it failed to meet even that. I found this game so frustrating to play on so many levels. The menu is confusing, the controls are over-complicated, animations are choppy or laggy, graphics are below this generation, gameplay is pathetic, and it's littered with bugs.

It has a few things NHL 10 doesn't (mini-games, winter classic, "Ovi moves"), but they don't make up for the terrible quality of the game. It could be a good party game in the pond and 3 on 3 modes, but apart from that, it's just terrible.

So 2K Sports, I don't know what to suggest you do. The whole game is badly broken. I don't think there's a simple fix for making it a real competitor. But if you don't do something to improve it soon, I could see investors pointing at the franchise graveyard.

Well, it's Christmas time and while I'll be off work from now until the new year, I likely won't be blogging. So to give you something from the past, I'm embedding a high-school student-quality version of Frogger.

Merry Christmas!

All designers need a place of inspiration and ideas. Some use nature, others use other websites for inspiration, and there's probably a hundred other ways too. If you're one of those that get inspired by seeing other sites, you'll probably want to check out The Web Designer's Idea Book.

Basically what you'll find is a collection of sites categorized in a number of ways (type, colour, elements, etc...). So say you're going to be designing a forum theme, you can lookup forums and see examples of well designed forums. You can see what they do to make it pretty, usable, and well designed. Hopefully that will stir the brain with some ideas to create a fresh new design.

I've recently been challenged at work to use a "real" editor instead of Textmate or Netbeans. I had to use both vim and emacs for a full day of work. They're both quite different from what I've been used to, but I've ultimately had more success with vim (likely due to more exposure to it).

Vim is find and dandy with the usual Ruby, HTML, etc... that I typically do at work. However, at home I usually work with Flex or Adobe AIR. And as you may be well aware, that work is often done in Flex Builder because of the robust feature set. Flex Builder is definitely great, but eclipse is very often slow and using an excessive amount of memory. So for those times I just want to quickly work on something without the need for the Flex Builder goodness, I found some vim files for actionscript and mxml.

Being able to edit the files is a great start. You still need to be able to compile a SWF or AIR file for this to really be useful. Fortunately you can pretty easily do it with the mxmlc or amxmlc. I'd recommend throwing command for compiling into an executable file for easy access:

#!/bin/bash
mxmlc -load-config flex-config.xml ./example.mxml -output ./example.swf

I haven't spent a lot of time working with this, just an hour or so this evening, but it was rather nice for a small project. Definitely missing some of the nice features of Flex Builder, but it's also a lot more lightweight.

In Flex 4 (Gumbo), there's some pretty substantial changes in the way you can create an interface, especially when you throw Flash Catalyst into the mix. If you're already proficient with Flex, you'll just need to learn some of the differences and apply some small changes to your workflow. If you're new the Flex world, well, there's no better time than now to get going.

What you'll need:

• Flash Builder 4
• Flash Catalyst
• Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Illustrator or Adobe Fireworks (with an export tool).

Where to learn:

And fortunately for the community, there's a few people keeping ontop of what's new and helping everyone get caught up to speed.

• The every useful Flex Examples blog is pumping out quick examples to show what you can do.
• Or if you're a little on the new side to Flex, you might want to check out Ted Patrick's Learn Flex 4 from Scratch.
• Want to migrate your existing application? Check out the Adobe® Flex® Gumbo Preview Release Features and Migration Guide (PDF).
• Or go to the basics and check out the Flash Builder 4 tutorials.

There's plenty of other resources too, just search on Google or Twitter.

I spent the last couple hours reading various articles and specs of HTML5... yeah, I know, a pretty geeky way to spend an evening. I've been meaning to do it ever since the last Mid-Island Web Workers Users Group meeting. That was the topic of the meeting, and I'll admit now, I went through the whole meeting thinking "but Flash already does this...", because, well, I'm a Flash developer.

And yes, Flash does do a lot of what HTML5 is bringing to the table (most of it isn't really applicable to Flash), but that doesn't mean it's not worth doing. For example, the audio tag. You can drop a simple tag sourcing to an audio file and just have it work. No embedding a player or anything. If the browser chrome isn't enough, or you want to script it, you can! You can make a simple playlist-based audi player using HTML, JavaScript and CSS. Do you get as much power and control as you get in Flash? No, but developers should recognize their needs and use the appropriate technology.

HTML5 is really focusing on making the language capable of meeting more needs without looking to plugins. This is a good thing, regardless of whether you think it's trying to compete with Flash, Silverlight or Java applets. The addition of several new types of input fields is awesome and reduces the amount of custom scripting required to create them. There's a lot to like... and some things to not like.

This came up in the meeting... the addition of some elements are oddly blog-centric. It seems strange to focus on a particular type of website with elements instead setting a standard microformat, which would then be backwards compatible. I'm not against adding new elements, I just think these are too centred around blogging to be all that beneficial.

And I'm sure everyone's heard about the codec issue... which who knows when that will get sorted out. No one will want to use the video element if only one browser supports both codecs and the others are split. In my opinion, MP4 is the better choice for two reasons: hardware decoders and it's already widely used with support in both Flash Player 9 and Silverlight 3. I haven't read much about audio codec support, but I presume MP3 will be the defacto standard as usual... though as a format, kinda sucks in terms of bitrate/quality.

All I know is that as browser versions come out, there's more and more support for HTML5. This will hopefully quicken the adoption once the spec hits recommendation status. It will definitely be nice to take advantage of some of its offerings.

More recently, I've been playing NHL 10 on XBox Live with some co-workers and friends. The first few times I tried to play, the lag was terrible. I tried 5 games or so without completing a single one. I blamed the EA servers for being crappy. Until I heard other people played almost lag-free at about the same times.

Home networks are generally stable, reliable and you never really notice issues. However, they're also quite fragile to certain types of traffic. Two things I've found to make XBox Live nearly impossible to play on are torrents and oddly enough, network time machine back-ups.

Torrents are pretty obvious in their affect. You connect to hundreds of peers and overwhelm your network to the point it generates a higher latency. If you set things up properly, you should minimize the impact, though it'll often slow the potential download speed.

Network Time Machine back-ups surprised me a bit. Network inspecting showed it generally used about 2MB/s to transfer files around. But if it was running, I was getting lag on XBox Live.

The unfortunate thing is that you can't always control what other people do on the network. So at any time someone could start torrenting or start a back-up. But at least you have an idea of what to look for if it starts to lag. 

Upon upgrading to Snow Leopard, I looked over some of the documentation of stuff that no longer works, and found that the list of stuff that affects me is fairly small, and at that, minor.

• Glims (works with Safari running in 32-bit mode)
• Growl
• iStat Menus (Updated to 2.0)
• Safari AdBlock (works with Safari running in 32-bit mode)

After installing, those items listed seemed to be true. They're all somewhat nice to have around, but completely non-necessary and they've all said fixes are in the works. On the plus, I only found a couple other items that seem to be broken too.

• ruby-debug (gem) (Compiled gems need to be recompiled)
• CocoaSuite (works with Safari running in 32-bit mode)

I mentioned this to a co-worker and he thinks a re-compile is all that's needed, which sounds about right. Definitely a good reminder that it'll be smart to wait a while before installing it at work.

CocoaSuite on the otherhand was discontinued. All I used it for was mouse gestures in Safari. I'm not sure whether it's worth finding an alternative or not... I only use them with more casual browsing. I did find an alternative, but like CocoaSuite, requires Safari to be run in 32-bit mode.

These minor things aside, it was a pretty successful upgrade. I won't review the OS though... there's probably a million or so by now.