Adobe’s FlashPaper2 end-of-life FAQ
After careful consideration and analysis of both the marketplace and customer feedback, Adobe plans to discontinue new feature development for FlashPaper. The demand has continually declined to where it is no longer economically viable for Adobe to continue development support for FlashPaper.
Techcrunch: Document startups in chaos as Adobe’s Flashpaper discontinues
Bill: 1, Internet: 0.
After the trip to Beijing, I headed south to spend a few days in Macau & Hong Kong. Macau is a ~45 minute ferry ride from Hong Kong, and currently the gambling capital of the world (surpassing even Vegas).
Flying into Hong Kong International, I was surprised how easy it was to get to Macau. Just like a stop-over on an international flight, you can transfer to your ferry without going through Hong Kong customs or security. You just hand over your baggage claim tickets from your airline & they even pick them up for you. Pretty sweet.
Macau was a confusing series of streets that twist & turn. Luckily casino’s are all over the place, and as I map showing each casino’s location, they ended up being really good landmarks. The other problem was realizing how small Macau really is. I’d walk for a bit, looking for a street. Unable to find it, I’d get to an intersection & try to find that on that map. I couldn’t find it until I realized I’d crossed half map & walked right off the page I was looking at. Macau is small.
I visited a few of the sites, including Largo do Senado, the Ruins of St. Paul’s and Fortaleza do Monte.
Like in Beijing, the Friendlies where everywhere. You couldn’t throw a rock without hitting one in the head. Although if you do do that Panda here is gonna bust a cap in yo’ ass.
Of course, like Las Vegas, the city completely changes at night & come alive with neon. I gambled a bit while I was there, come out roughly even. Right now, it’s a bit early for Macau to become a travel destination by itself. Give it about 10 years though, and I expect it will truly be the Las Vegas of the East.
Next stop, Hong Kong.
I awoke this morning on time at 5:45am, for my 8:30am flight from Hong Kong to Beijing. I was staying at the airport hotel, one connected to the main terminal over a pedestrian bridge, so I assumed I had plenty of time.
I followed my footsteps back from the night before, and seeing a flight board, walked over to find my gate. Hmmmm… No Asiana 6118. Hmmm… and no 8:30 flight to Beijing at 8:30. WTF?
It’s then that I realize I’m in arrivals. Shit. Okay, how do I get to departures? I journey farther in, find the escalators, and head up to departures. Time check: 6:45am. Okay, not too bad. Good thing I skipped the breakfast, but damn, I’m starving. Maybe I’ll be able to get something in the lounge.
I ascend to about 8 different banks of check-in columns. Which one is Asiana? Ah, luck is with me, just one to my right. I walk over, find my checkin line, and look at the flight board. Wait. No flight 6118? No 8:30am departure? WTF.
I pull my flight info out my bag. Damnit, I flew LA to Hong Kong on Asiana, but my trip to Beijing is on Cathay Pacific.
I see a nearby airport information desk and ask them where Cathay Pacific is. Just two to my right. I head over, but again no flight 6118. Now this is starting to get annoying. I just double-checked my printout and headed to the CP customer service desk. Ah, code-share. They send me to Dragon Air… the first bank on my left. *sigh*
I check the time as I wait for the 2 people in front of me. Just after 7. Not too bad, but it is an international flight. And the airport is pretty big. Hopefully enough time.
“Welcome to Dragon Air, sir. Your passport, please.”
The frown on her face doesn’t bode well.
“What flight were you on, sir?”
“I’m not sure, but it was Cathay Pacific 6118.”
Type, type, type, type. “Ah, sir, that is a code-share flight. That flight is operated by Air China.”
And where is Air China? The last terminal on the right.
Air China ended up being the correct one, but my lucked continued when I asked if gate 64 was far. “Yes, a bit, sir.” And the lounge? The other direction in gate 16. No soup for me.
I ended up making it, but finding out I had to take a train for gates 33-80 and then the shift change at immigration right after the person in front me didn’t do much to calm my nerves and sorta re-inforced my half-suspicion that Beijing is out to get me.
Hopefully all my bad luck is out of my system. Tomorrow morning will be one of your last chances to buy tickets for the 2008 Olympics. One of my co-workers emailed me to say people are already lining up. Here’s to a smooth onsale.
Sadly, my genuine fake Rolex has fallen apart.
On the flight back from Chicago, a screw suddenly popped out, landing my folex on the floor with a thud. The screw had loosened previously, giving a warning so that I could tighten it. This time it just went in one go, and while everyone was deplaning so I dismissed any hopes of finding the screw and fixing it myself.
I am, however, still debating if I should try to take it to a real Rolex store. The entertainment of that visit alone would be worth the $10 I paid for it. “Look at what Rolex sold me! You call this quality?! Fake? What, do you mean fake!? I paid ten grand for this!”
The lady at the Silk Market swore it was top quality too.
I think I may have been lied too.
If you grew up in the 80s a fan of PE, you need to check out their latest single, The Long and Whining Road:
I first came across My Yahoo! over 10 years ago. If I remember it correctly, I believe it’s why I created an account with Yahoo, and I’ve been a loyal fan ever since.
In fact, what motivated to join Yahoo, back in 2001, was a chance to join the My Yahoo development team.
For 10 years, eons by web standards, it’s been my favorite website & default homepage.
But apparently for only the next 5 days.
After 5 days, it looks like I’m headed over to Google Reader or something similar.
If you’re a fellow, long-time user of My Yahoo, for the past few months you’ve likely gotten this nag dialog:
Sadly, there never was a way to close or remove it. I even poked around ABP to see if I could block it, but as it’s a dev tag, there didn’t seem to be.
Even more annoying, they changed it frequently.
As if users weren’t converted because they hadn’t noticed it.
From the folks I know, the reason they (and I) haven’t converted isn’t because we don’t know about the new My Yahoo!, it’s because we don’t like it.
Today it seemed to have changed once again:
So here’s my question: whatever happened to the customer being right?
Why don’t I get to decide what I like, instead of having what I’m told is good forced upon me?
Isn’t having a passionate user-base, one enamored with a product, a good thing?
If people aren’t converting, the problem isn’t the people, it’s the product.
Harassment, nagging, and strong-arming are not good substitutes for good product development.
There’s two reasons I can think Yahoo is making this move & there both really bad reasons:
1) Simplify development & support, by collapsing two platforms into one. Now, this isn’t a bad reason in of itself. In fact, it’s a good goal, but it’s the implementation that’s wanting. If the goal is to simplify/reduce the code base, to support a single version of My Yahoo, that’s fine. But it should be done in a way that doesn’t affect user.
That is the onus should be on Yahoo to create “new” interfaces that replicate the “old.” In doing so, they wouldn’t even have to tell me there’s a change. Everything would still look the same — to new users & old — and the code base would be reduced as well.
2) It’s embarrassing for the creators of the “New” My Yahoo, to have such a large portion of the user base on the “Old” system. I can see this being painful. I wouldn’t want to have to give a presentation to Sue, Jerry, or Ash showing only 30% (or whatever) of users have adopted my new product.
But frankly, if this is the reason, someone should be fired.
I’m not joking. Putting the pain of bad decisions on the user base is simply unacceptable. Doing it to save face — doubly unacceptable.
In a good company, management should be the user’s advocate. Pushing against the inevitable lethargy of a bureaucracy to do the right thing. To develop the best product. Think of the horror stories of Steve Jobs getting upset when brought a shitty product. Maybe not the best people skills, but that’s great customer advocacy.
Yahoo says they’re listening. I hope they are.
Let the old My Yahoo be.
I think McAfee wants me to resubscribe sometime in the next 7 days, but I’m not sure. What do you think?
I’ve learned a few things in the last few days.
1) If you submit a CPAN module with unit tests that require a module not in the standard core, you will get over a lot automated emails telling you the tests fail on various platforms. (For the record, this is extremely useful. Seriously, CPANTS rocks.)
2) Amir Sadollah is the real deal, winning this season’s Ultimate Fighter.
3) The wp-cache plugin does a great job of reducing server load.
4) When you taunt their beloved Scribd, the Internet trolls will come out of their myspaces caves and fill your blog with various forms of droll.
The feedback on Scribd was pretty interesting. There were too many comments to respond to individually, so I thought I’d recap a few things in a separate post.
First, about half the comments or so were able to see the big picture and agreed that Scribd was a bad idea. DRM-controlled text files is not something the web wants nor needs.
The other half seemed to either fully or partially disagree.
Those who partially disagreed either acknowledge “but yeah, it still sucks” or seemed to think one detail won the argument.
If you’ve dealt with geeks, you’ve probably had arguments before were the forest is lost for the trees. E.g., Paris Hilton is a vapid waste of space, and with her MTV reality show, constant media coverage by outlets that attempt to pass drivel for news, horrible songs and the rest, it would really would be for the best of society if we feed her into a wood chipper. The response by these idiots would be “PARIS HILTONS REALITY SHOW WUZ ON FOX, NOT MTV!!! EPCI FAIL!!!!!!!!1!!!! PARIS RULES!!!!!!!!!!”
Which was the spirt of a whole series of comments.
“YOU IDOIT!!! YOU CLICK THAT BOX BETWEEN THE OTHER BOXES TO COPY AND PAST!!!! YOU ARE FAIL!!!”
“U USED THE WRONG LINK!!! U DON”T DUE THAT IN FULL SCREENZ MODE!!!!!!! EPIC FAILZ!!!!!!!!!!!”
Seriously, it’s like there’s a whole new generation of biff babies run around.
In every app I use there is a set paradigm on how to copy & paste. I select text, Cmd-C, and it’s copied. It works like this with text files, with Firefox & IE for HTML, Preview for PDFs… even Google Spreadsheets, a web app, does an amazing job following this paradigm.
Scribd does not.
Instead, you apparently either need to be told or fish around in their app for a while and become a power-user to figure it out? You have to click an icon, then you can select text to copy?
There’s one app that I know of that works like that: the Microsoft command prompt.
They mimic the UI of Microsoft’s command prompt (circa 1990?)
I hardly call that progress.
If that’s not Web -0.5, I don’t what is.
Which leads into another batch of comments — that some how it’s my fault for Scribd having a bad UI. That I should have known the URL provided to me restricted functionality & instead should have visited another URL. That it’s my fault they cut off functionality in one mode but not another.
(And so much for their ever doc having a unique URL slogan, eh?)
Listen, kiddies, it’s not the responsibilities of your users to become power users. It’s your job, as app developers, to make the damn thing usable. Stop blaming others for your faults.
The other batch that baffled my mind where people who advocated Scribd where that it didn’t require a non-standard PDF plugin. How’s that again? Scribd is better because instead it requires a non-standard flash plugin? Listen a non-standard plugin is a non-standard plugin. It’s like saying “PDFs suck because it kicks you in the left nut, Scribd rules because it kicks you in the right nut!”
Nobody cases if they get kicked in the left or the right nut. A kick in the nuts is a kick in the nuts.
Add to the fact you can view PDFs on the rapidly growing iPhone, but not Flash, means that all of the documents posted on Scribd is now blocked off from one of the fastest growing drives.
Which is always going to be case with proprietary formats.
Which is why they’re a bad idea.
Which is why Scribd is a bad idea.
In a way, I have to admit I’m somewhat surprised by Scribd’s popularity. But then again, I’m surprised by Paris Hilton popularity.
Which perhaps is fitting, as they both have another thing in common: they’re both a waste of space.
Have you seen Scribd.com? If you haven’t consider yourself lucky. You can try to avoid it, but every once in a while, for reasons I can’t really understand, an idiot will post a link to a document there.
For instance, the other day on Hacker News, someone posted an interesting link to a paper on scalable distributed B-trees. The PDF is here, but the article links to Scribd, scribd.
Take a moment and notice the difference between the two. Now tell me the point of what scribd did in its conversion.
Go ahead, I’ll wait.
So is it just me or is scribd.com the worst thing to happen to the Internet since MIME-based email?
Insofar as I can tell all it does is strip me of basic functionality. I can’t save it like the PDF. I can’t print the whole thing. Fuck, I can’t even copy and paste! And it introduces confusing functionality (TWO scrollbars on the left!? WTF?).
All for what?
So some engineers could do some flash-based masturbation & feel web 2.0?
Scribd.com developers: you are not Web 2.0. You are not 1.0. You are web -0.5. You are what we people did when they had bullshit internal doc apps, before HTML, before PDF, before we all realized that text files are often the best format.
So what do they think the point of their existence is?
Scribd is a Silicon Valley startup creating technology that makes it easy to share documents online. You can think of Scribd as a big online library where everyone can publish original content, including you!
Part of the idea behind Scribd is that everyone has a lot of documents sitting around on their computers that only they can read. With Scribd we hope to unlock this information by putting it on the web.
Bullshit. I call bullshit.
They’re not unlocking anything. If anything they are locking things up by placing it in their own jackass format.
Please, scribd, tell us all what exactly was wrong with text? Or PDFs?
Why exactly are we supposed to embrace your closed-source, proprietary standard? One, because it is so jacked up, makes it invisible to all search engines, including Google?
Now please stop pissing off the Internet & go bankrupt already.
UPDATE: I’ve posted a followup.
The suites are P.I.M.P.
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