Thoughts on Adobe’s and Apple’s thoughts.

Apple, Adobe, large innovative brand names, both lacking and exceeding our expectations. I believe that both companies are completely full of themselves. As, someone who spends most of his time developing in the Microsoft world, and designing in the Apple world, I have some strong opinions on all these recent strong opinions by the big boys.

Flash and HTML5

First of all as a technology user, I like flash, it’s just flipping cool, I do want it on my phone, gaming system, and laptop. It provides a great experience. I also love HTML5 and where it’s going. It will be really amazing when it will be fully adopted across all the major browsers. Developing in it already is really great.

It’s the developers’ job to make these products interact correctly with your hardware and software. We love doing it, its fun. When someone tells us it can’t be done, we jump over mountains to prove that it can, it’s in our very nature. Adobe and Apple developers are no exception.

However, consumers are used to believing what they are told. Steve Job’s says no, Kevin Lynch says yes. Who’s Kevin Lynch? I’ll just listen to Steve, he’s never been wrong before, right?

Apple

The truth is, Apple isn’t giving us a choice. Steve Job’s uses the word “Open” a lot in his “Thoughts on Flash” but he fails to mention why so many users utilizing Apple products resort to hacking and jailbreaking Apple’s software. The truth is the consumers haven’t really told Apple they don’t like being babied; they want to make their own decisions. Apple, is going to keep using this to their advantage, because it just simply works. If I had one thing to say to Jobs, I would say without Adobe’s products the Mac would not have survived as long as it has.

Adobe

Adobe is also no exception, to the blame game. First of all, if Adobe thinks it can demonstrate flash working well on mobile devices like the iphone, they should have shown it to the consumers. Consumers love products and services, they will fight for Adobe if they see a fight worth fighting. Second, if Adobe wants flash to survive, its time to fully open up the source to all of your versions of flash, it’s going to be hard, a lot of people are going to scream, but flash will improve drastically. I wish I could say Adobe wouldn’t have survived with Apple, but its been doing fine on the PC.

Conclusion

I want both Apple and Adobe to grow into strong companies, that not only think of their consumers as targets, but as people who can take their products and make them better. This involves a lot of sharing and finger pointing, but it also allows for a lot of growing and happier people.

Updates To CowFarm

I just wanted to let you know that I am currently pushing many updates to the website. So there are going to be a lot of problems here and there. Please, bare with me as I get the site functional again. I have also been hit by a lot of bots recently so I decided that I will have to approve your comment whenever you post. Sorry, about this but having to manually drop 300 posts a day is getting to me.

Also many links are not functional yet. I will hover be slowly rolling out a set of new features such as code dump which will contain lots of uncompleted/completed code projects released under the Creative Commons Licenses.

Thank You,
Andrew

How to save our Applications and our Cows.

We love our applications. We spend years in our development cycles. Pushing, integrating, extending, branching, testing, and refactoring code. Yet our clients always come jumping past flaming arrows and snake pits to demand more changes.

Years out, our applications are massive, unusable, complicated, and that love you shared for them at one point has now slowly crumbled into a cringing hate. The loop ends only when you lose your head and start singing to your development environment. In simple:

“You are a cow, you are in a farm. A cheap car hits you and you die.”

The road was too curvy, the fence was way too cheap, the car was made of too many parts, and the grass sucked anyway. Now let us rewind… You are a cow, you are in a farm. Your farm is far away from the road. You eat some healthy grass.

Patience and simplicity is my point, if your business is too complicated it will destroy your applications, if your applications are too complicated it will destroy your business.

The farmer who put his farm in the middle of a grass field has quality milk. The one who put his farm next to the road so he could deliver more milk, now has a dead cow.

With this note I begin my cow farm and remind you with a strong front end you can cover your rear.

Moo…