Today I got the latest update to Flash automatically installed. After reading the changelog I was hopeful that Adobe had finally started to address some of the glaring performance problems of their Flash platform. They touted increased HD video performance and finally allowed Flash video to stay full-screened when on multiple monitors. But within five minutes of use I saw again why I have slowly started to hate Flash.

The first thing I did was start watching live.twit.tv, made the video full screen and opened up a new browser window as I always do. Then I started playing Zuma Blitz and the game was unplayable slowing to one or two frames per second. So much for increased performance of video.

My system has processing power to spare to handle simple things like full screen video and simple games. It is an over-clocked Core i7 running at 2.9Ghz with 8GB of RAM and a Radeon HD5750. But to be honest any modern system can handle this sort of work. A Pentium 4 system from a few years ago is plenty for video playback and some multi-tasking.

For me though the biggest indicator that Flash is the problem is that I can watch h.264, Windows Media Player, WebM or even Silverlight Video at 1080p full screen and do pretty much whatever I want on the other screen at the same time. Where as Flash can not even handle a low definition 480p stream from live.twit.tv.

Back to the original point though is that I actually un-installed Flash from my Android device two days after I installed it. It ran like a dog on my phone just like it does on my desktop. Lowered battery life and really does not provide any additional functionality that can not be reproduced in a better way using other technologies.

When companies are touting their Flash support so heavily in their advertising eventually it will start to hurt them. What does Flash provide Android that gives it an advantage over Apples iOS? Video? no, games? no, interactive apps? no. All it seems to do is fracture the Android platform a little more and lowers performance of the devices.

Most end users do not care about Flash or Java or Objective-C, all they will notice is when their Phone seems slow, and when it dies after a few hours of use. Pushing Flash so heavily as a main feature on all these new Android devices will start to hurt Android as users start to realize that Apple products run faster and have longer battery life even when they are running similar hardware.

What struck me the most today though was the realization that I really can not un-install Flash from my system without crippling a lot of my internet experience. I recently installed a Flash blocker plug-in for Chrome and it really is amazing to me that nearly every site I visit has several flash elements on the page. For simple things like file up-loaders, animations but mostly Ads.

In short I think that Apple’s stance against Flash has really helped open up the web, which is a very strange thing to say about Apple. But just image in Apple had supported Flash or even allowed it on their platform from day one. Would h.264 or even WebM video streaming be developed so heavily to the point where they are now maturing to hopefully become the norm. I think h.264 and WebM would still exist but would not be as important as they are turning out to be now.

The day when I have the choice to remove Flash from my computer and still view video on the web and not cripple the interface on many sites I visit, will be a day I am a happier man.

The first problem I had was that the Acrobat 8 PDF Print driver would not install or work correctly on Vista or 7. Thankfully (after nearly a year) Adobe decided to fix the problem and fixed the driver.

The second problem is a little more insidious though. It has to do with Window redrawing in Acrobat 8. The problem I kept having was that if I resized the main Acrobat window the content window (containing the PDF) would not resize to match the main window. So if I made the main window smaller I would cut off the scroll bars and the content of the PDF, if I enlarged the main window then I would get a gray box in the new space.

This was extremely annoying, especially in Windows 7 with it’s new windows snapping and other management tools. However now I think I have finally found a work around that should allow me to move to 64bit without worries for now.

A great forum post about another product pointed me in the right direction. It seems the there is a very low level bug in the Windows 64bit GUI API that does not always send enough redraw messages to programs. This is exactly the problem I was having, and they seemed to be able to fix it. So I had hope.

It seems that if a Window frame is nested too many times then Windows 64 bits a loop counter (of 19! which seems ridiculously low) and will not send the redraw message to any more frames.

Of course Adobe pretty much abandons all software after one version, so I could not hope for a fix from them. But then I found a post on Adobe’s site from another user about the same problem. Apparently when he disabled Sitepoint from Logitech the problem went away. I checked for Sitepoint but did not have it installed, but then I remembered I had Display Fusion installed.

It seems that having programs that might interact with other Windows on the desktop might use up some of redraw counts you have for each window. So when Sitepoint or Display Fusion is running on my system Acrobat does not update the Window.

Very strange bug, and I am sad that this bug has persisted from XP 64bit, thru Vista, and is still in the Windows 7 RC. Maybe it will be fixed in the RTM version I will get on Monday, but at least now I have an idea of the problem and a work around.

The recent news that they will not support CS3 on Snow Leopard is just another sign, but it has been going on for a long time. For me the first time I noticed it was when I tried to upgrade to Windows Vista 64. Back then CS3 was the newest release and people running Photoshop are the most likely to want more than 4GB’s of RAM that a 64bit OS provides. However first off Adobe Acrobat Pro 8 would not even install without several error messages and trips to the message boards. Once it was installed the PDF printer would not work at all. It took several months for them to release a fix, and to this day CS3 still has some more minor visual bugs that stopped me moving to 64bit Vista.

Now they are going one step further and just saying if you move to Snow Leopard you are on your own. So the software I spent nearly $1,500 on (more than the total cost of my main computer) just over a year ago is now unsupported on OS I might want to use it on. I have heard some people say that CS3 runs on Snow Leopard, but that is not the point. CS3 is so large there are many features that may not work properly, and even more situations we can not predict. That’s why rely on Adobe to release patches and fixes when these bugs crop up. With this announcement they are basically saying screw you to all the more cutting edge people trying to upgrade to Snow Leopard, but can not afford the several hundred dollars “UPGRADE” cost to move to CS4 from CS3.

Adobe is creating a lot of bad will by trying to force people to pay $500 dollars a year to get a few features each year. Which is pretty much what you have to do if you want to get updates to your software and keep the thing working.

What scared me more was when I looked around at my alternatives they are really thin. There is no option with the amount of integration Adobe CS provides between applications and bridge. There are a bunch of separate apps that provide some of the functionality. I do not like where this is leading at all.

As an average user, I use a lot of the features of the Creative Suite, but I have not yet had any use for many of the new features of these applications. So as an average user the only change I am really noticing is the new user interface, and that is big.

From the first time I used Photoshop I would hate the way the screen looked with windows floating everywhere, and overlapping my workspace. The problems only got worse when resizing the application window, or opening new palettes (now called panels).

The new user interface is a huge improvement and fixes many of these problems. Now all the panels can be docked into sidebars on the left or right side of the screen. When docked they can either be expanded to show their usual options, or minimized to just an icon, or icon with text. When the panels are minimized you simply have to click on the icon and the panel slides out and allows you to select your options, then you can slide it back.

A simple design, but it makes the world of difference.

So far I am happy with the update, and excited to keep finding new tools to use in the future. The interface alone makes the upgrade worthwhile, so everything else is a bonus for me right now.

This seems like a good time because Adobe is just setting up to release Creative Suite 2.3. Which now comes with the new Acrobat 8 and Dreamweaver. Even though I am hand web coder I have been looking into Dreamweaver and it seems like it is a pretty good hand coding enviroment with some WYSIWYG features thrown in.

Along with Acrobat 8 and Dreamweaver you also get Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, GoLive, Version Cue, and Bridge. I have been using most of these applications for awhile now, and they all rock.

Anyway, hopefully there will be some more graphic design related content up here from now on as I play around with these apps.