On my professional blog, a take on Apple Safari's use of justified text in Reader.

Perhaps the most pernicious proposition of the “everything must be open” crusade is the notion that curation is bad and anti-freedom. Soldiers of this crusade confuse freedom with competition. Our museums are not football-field sized warehouses where art objects are indiscriminately dumped and our magazines and blogs are not amorphous containers of randomly selected articles. Our classrooms, restaurants, hospitals and indeed all our civilized institutions are firmly reliant on curation of one kind or another. The goal should be for curators to compete, not for curation to be declared illegal and unholy by the “open” zealots.

Curated hypocrisy: How Google camouflages its attacks on Apple. A must read.

By the way, Tim, what is it when Google, at will and without any explanation, removes the ranking of a web site and, effectively, removes it from search results, if not curation of the web? Google is itself the biggest curating goggles through which a truly huge amount of people see the web.

The problem isn't with Google curating the web (and a big chunk of the online advertisement business). Actually the point is, precisely, that the relevance in search results is a direct product of curation. And to paraphrase Steve Jobs, if Google enjoys up to 90% market dominance in certain countries, it must be doing something right. Right?

The hypocrisy lies in refuting Apple the right to curate its own ecosystem, which by the way isn't anything as public as the web is.

Flash was created during the PC era – for PCs and mice. Flash is a successful business for Adobe, and we can understand why they want to push it beyond PCs. But the mobile era is about low power devices, touch interfaces and open web standards – all areas where Flash falls short.

The avalanche of media outlets offering their content for Apple’s mobile devices demonstrates that Flash is no longer necessary to watch video or consume any kind of web content. And the 200,000 apps on Apple’s App Store proves that Flash isn’t necessary for tens of thousands of developers to create graphically rich applications, including games.

New open standards created in the mobile era, such as HTML5, will win on mobile devices (and PCs too). Perhaps Adobe should focus more on creating great HTML5 tools for the future, and less on criticizing Apple for leaving the past behind.

Steve Jobs, Thoughts on Flash.

Compare to the "weak sauce" from Adobe's CEO.

I believe that Flash will indeed become obsolete, and not just on mobile devices. I like Jason Kottke's thoughts on the matter:

Jobs sort of circles around the main issue which is, from my own perspective as heavy web user and web developer: though Flash may have been necessary in the past to provide functionality in the browser that wasn't possible using JS, HTML, and CSS, that is no longer the case. Those open web technologies have matured (or will in the near future) and can do most or even all of what is possible with Flash. For 95% of all cases, Flash is, or will soon be, obsolete because there is a better way to do it that's more accessible, more open, and more "web-like".

Ogg objections by Måns:

When challenged, three types of reaction are characteristic of the Ogg campaigners.

On occasion, these people will assume an apologetic tone, explaining how Ogg was only ever designed for simple audio-only streams (ignoring it is as bad for these as for anything), and this is no doubt true. Why then, I ask again, do they continue to tout Ogg as the one-size-fits-all solution they already admitted it is not?

More commonly, the Ogg proponents will respond with hand-waving arguments best summarised as Ogg isn’t bad, it’s just different. My reply to this assertion is twofold:

• Being too different is bad. We live in a world where multimedia files come in many varieties, and a decent media player will need to handle the majority of them. Fortunately, most multimedia file formats share some basic traits, and they can easily be processed in the same general framework, the specifics being taken care of at the input stage. A format deviating too far from the standard model becomes problematic.
• Ogg is bad. When every angle of examination reveals serious flaws, bad is the only fitting description.

The third reaction bypasses all technical analysis: Ogg is patent-free, a claim I am not qualified to directly discuss. Assuming it is true, it still does not alter the fact that Ogg is a bad format. Being free from patents does not magically make Ogg a good choice as file format. If all the standard formats are indeed covered by patents, the only proper solution is to design a new, good format which is not, this time hopefully avoiding the old mistakes.

While I do understand, in principle, why Mozilla wants to promote open and free video codecs on the web, its sole reliance on Ogg Theora and its blocade of the most popular H.264 commercial codec even through a plugin (although it allows one like Flash, go figure), make it look fanatical and not the least pragmatical.

As a citizen, I'm totally against software patents. They're an intellectual abomination and a net burden on society. I do hope Europe will continue to forbid software patents. As a web developer, I'm all for open and free video codecs, provided they are efficient throughout the whole producer-to-consumer chain. I understand and support Mozilla's goals for an open web, but I find that their tactic around the <video> tag is bad and potentially counter-productive.

Good luck to whoever is capable of developing a better (or at least comparable) open and free codec than H.264, but it clearly does not exist yet. Meanwhile, most web videos will continue to be encoded and served using H.264, and the same through Flash for the poor souls browsing with Firefox.

(Disclaimer: I manage the communication for Paris Web, this is a copy of the official call for speakers.)

Hello all,

Paris Web is a French conference organised each year and revolving around questions of web accessibility, quality and design. For its fifth edition, the conference wants to broaden its subject base and suggests that you think of this question:“Improve the user experience through appropriate design and contents” (non-limiting question).

Paris Web 2010 will take place on the 14-16th of October 2010, and we invite all the potential speakers to speak out and get in touch with us at propositions@paris-web.fr.

You can submit one or more topics under the following formats:

1. Conference:  50 minutes, Q&A included
2. Mini-conference: 15 minutes, without Q&A
3. Workshop: 1 hour 30 (or 3 hours for a double-length workshop)

Conferences and mini-conferences will take place in amphitheaters on Thursday and Friday. Workshops will take place in 40 to 60 people rooms on Saturday. They are a moment of intense interactivity, and can be either theoretical or practical (rooms with computers will be provided if necessary).

The deadline for proposals is set to the 31st of May 2010.

Ideally, here is the form your proposal should have:

1. You, in a few lines
   Who are you? What is your experience? Your specialty?
2. Your subject
   In up to ten lines, a title (doesn't need to be the definitive choice)
   and a summary of what you wish to deal with. Please indicate the
   estimated level of the audience.
3. The form of your intervention
   According to you, will this be better suited for a conference, a
   mini-conference, or a workshop? (We can talk about it.)

People who have submitted a subject will be notified personally, whether their subject is selected or not.

If you are selected, you will be able to have your travel expenses and hotel paid. Please bear in mind that videos will be recorded and will be made available for free on the internet (under the CC-By-NC licence).

We can't wait for October!

If you want to have a look at what it's like, there are close to 1,600 pictures of past Paris Web events on Flick.

This is exactly the example I give to my clients to teach them why doing their business site in Flash is, in 99.99% of the time, a really, really bad idea.

And that's not just because Flash is absolute crap on Mac (Adobe, stop crashing my browser please). Or because it's not the right tool for the task, which is true most of the time. Or because it's becoming more and more irrelevant in a mobile world that's turned to HTML5…

I only end up using GMail through the web when I can't use my desktop email client, so I was surprised to be greeted the other day by an invitation to test Google Buzz. I had other fish to fry, so I declined. In retrospect, that was a good decision, and here's why: Google Buzz is a privacy nightmare and Google Buzz is not fit for purpose.

I love what Steve Lawson said, as quoted by Suw Charman-Anderson:

There’s a reason why I don’t keep a ‘who I’ve emailed this week’ page going on my blog, and it’s not just cos it would be dull as shit.

Seen in a Safari crash report today:

Thread 0 Crashed: Dispatch queue: com.apple.main-thread
0 com.apple.WebCore 0x00007fff849031b1 bool
WTF::HashTable WTF::PassRefPtr (*)(WebCore::SharedBuffer*)>,
WTF::PairFirstExtractor WTF::PassRefPtr (*)(WebCore::SharedBuffer*)> >, WebCore::CaseFoldingHash,
WTF::PairHashTraits,
WTF::HashTraits (*)(WebCore::SharedBuffer*)> >,
WTF::HashTraits >::contains WTF::IdentityHashTranslator WTF::PassRefPtr (*)

WTF, indeed.

The Android Market is a terrible mess. Nearly every app I looked at had nothing but spam comments. Literally things like, “Follow me on twitter at @blah” and “Ladies, hit me up on AIM at blah” which is embarrassing and sad. Makes the entire thing feel like cheap garbage. When you add the fact that nearly all the apps are free, and most are a UI mess, it doesn’t come off too well.

Garrett Murray, Initial Nexus One Impressions.

When all you care about is free lunch for all, don't be astonished when you're served shit. This may sound harsh, but if you think the Android Market is going to pressure Apple to relax its iron fist around its App Store walled garden, don't hold your breath.

Or Happy New Year as they say out there. :-)