As a web designer/developer, a search engine optimisation specialist, and website manager and superintendent for my clients, I have registered many of the websites I have created with Google Analytics, an staggeringly helpful tool to monitor visitant sources, interests and preferences. Each day, after checking my email, I spend a generous part of my morning analyzing its reports which admit how many visitants viewed each website, how they were referred, what keywords they used, what pages they visited, how long they spent on each page and what service provider they employ, among other things. I check the last item because it often specifies the name of a company, a university, a office or other specific source as opposed to a behemoth IT provider like Verizon or Comcast. Often this is critical information about who is visiting our sites.
Recently, and I admit I am late in addressing this subject, I have been intrigued by what page they "landed on." The reason for my interest has to do with a concern about their power to receive Flash, presently a contentious topic ascribable Apple Computer's refusal to admit this technology on some of its latest, very popular products which admit the iPhone, the iPod and the iPad.
As a long Mac user and lover, I commonly refer to and support anything and everything Apple, supported primary positive experience with their fantastic products and stock performance. I have benefited greatly from both. However, after having purchased Adobe's Creative Suite computer software several years ago and exerted the arduous effort to teach myself Flash, I have a unconditional interest in being able to continue to employ those sophisticated files on many of my major websites, particularly since my clients have paid me for their creation and they add glamour and zing to any page they appear on.
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But this recent development sadly appears to be little more than a nasty, competitive contention between two outstanding technology companies. Whether prompted by gula for market dominance or lack of compromise or cooperation under the pretence of a better user experience, it has compact everyone who has a website that uses Flash in its presentations. In researching what the consensus of opinion is on this topic, I read one account of a professional woman who was amexploitation business guests in Great Britain. One of the guests was proudly showing off his new iPad and asked for the hostess' URL address so they could refer to her website together on this new stage. What happened next is what triggered my worry. When he arrived at her website, all they saw were big black holes because her website was primarily conditional Flash. Her embarrassment was mortifying.
Realizing that my own company website home page is composed of three rather large Flash files on with some requisite HTML text, let alone that some of my clients' fresh showcased home pages also flash large Flash movies to inspire, dazzle and impress, I focused on my recent curiosity about some of the Google Analytics' reports I had seen which showed 0:00 time spent on the landing page. In the case of my own website, the landing page is most always the home page. It occurred to me that if visitants arrived there to view nothing but black, who could blame them for defecting immediately? Could such visitants be exploitation the latest Apple products? Although Google Analytics does not specify the brand or type of computer or device used, it does pinpoint the operational system and browser which in that case would be OS X and Safari.
Changing what happened in the past is a unproductive pursuit so my goal now centered on dominant website visitations in the future. Having used Adobe's Dreamweaver computer software to create my Flash files, I was aware and had already employd a activity control which places a detector on the page to identify whether a visitant has the Flash computer software necessary to view a Flash movie. If not, the visitant is automatically rerouted to an alternate page made specifically without Flash to accommodate this somewhat rare situation. But as with everything we encounter these days, the detector does not work with all browsers (in that case, the old standby culprit: Microsoft's Internet Explorer which historically, in my experience, has always admitd present roadblocks to user-friendliness) so the web designer is left with a dilemma. What to do? While the intuitive detector gives you the option to choose to reroute the visitant to a new page or just allow him to stay the original Flash page if no noticeion is possible, this does not solve the problem. Everyone knows that Windows and Internet Explorer has been the predominant platform for most Internet use, despite Apple's surge in popularity in recent years. But it seems that Google's new Chrome browser has just overtaken that honor. That means that it probably makes sense to allow such visitants to stay the original Flash page since they altogether likelihood would have the Flash reader. After all, it was the Mac user which prompted this quandary, and only certain Macs at that. And purportedly the detector would be able to notice Flash presence on a Mac operational system. To confirm this assumption, I researched further and found that Adobe's Flash 10.1 is formally WP7 bound. This new update will be launched for all WP7 devices; this means that the totality of the net will be available on the browser for Microsoft's latest mobile platform. The Google Android OS was the first to receive support for Flash 10.1 on the 2.2 Froyo version of the open source mobile platform. According to Adobe, the Flash player will also be modified to other operational systems - except for Apple."
Next hurdle, how to replicate the sophistication of Flash on an alternate page without Flash? After some investigation via a variety of Google searches, I learned that Apple is promoting an open source secret writing language called html5 for just such a problem. For me, that was not an option since I have not recently upgraded my operational system beyond Mac OS X 10.4.11 to the required level of advancement, 10.5.8. The other possible solution was to employ javascript in some rather slide show. There is one other solution also but it is not terribly effective if you have large original Flash files. Should you have a small subtle effect created in Flash, you can choose to convert that file to an animated gif file which may be large than the original Flash file but can still serve as a replacement in that inposition.
While these suggestions may be an acceptable interim strategy, I believe this conflict of interests is the beginning of a dynamic of the guard on the Internet as I notice that increasingly websites are eliminating Flash from their files and are converting to use of html5 or javascript instead. By the same token, RedmondPie.com reports that a new entrepreneurial company is grasping this situation as a business chance with the release of a new product to receive Flash on iPhone: "... you can now get a very alpha version of Flash (aka Frash) to run right your iPhone 4." How many more innovators will soon follow this trend? I have already seen that the cellular phone market has been quick to jump into the fray with blatant merchandising messages about their products' lovesome reception of Flash! Apple meanwhile has processed its "hostile" position by expression that its decision to restrict inclusion of the Adobe Flash Readers on its newest machines that still can receive Flash was made with concern that users receive the latest version of that computer software which they can get gratis directly from Adobe. OK, that makes sense. But where is Apple going to draw the line? What is the plan for Adobe PDF technology? Will they be forbidding that too?
Although I was hoping to try to get other year out of my present operational system and dependent computer software, I think I have confronted a major reason why I need to upgrade soon, probably before the end of the tax year to get the benefit of these necessary business expenses. Unfortunately for me that will mean a possible big-ticket or cumbersome conversion to OS X 10.6.5, on with a need to also reinstall Parallels to at the same time run Windows, which allows me to check how each browser and operational system is displaying my website creations. And as if that isn't enough, doing such an upgrade will truly be the proverbial "opening a can of worms" because now I will need to upgrade all my other creative computer software, the to the worst degree of which will admit Quark 8.0 (which, by the way, now presently offers Flash creativity, a function I have heretofore been snubbing), Adobe CS5 Photoshop, Adobe CS5 Acrobat Professional, Adobe CS5 Illustrator, and Adobe CS5 Fireworks. Sorely missing from that list is my beloved Adobe CS5 Dreamweaver. Without being able to predict the future, who will prevail in the technology wars over open source vs. proprietary secret writing, or whether we all will eventually switch to little devices for Internet access, the question remains: To Flash or not to Flash?
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