What's it all about, Alfie?

Things are really heating up between some groups in Google and some groups in Apple. From what I've read, it seems like it's more of an Executive War, as opposed to a real "can't stand to look at you" war in the trenches. But hey, that's what makes the game of Executive Watching so darn much fun.

Well, this morning I was reading Slashdot and saw that Google announced that they would be working with Adobe on a new plugin API for browsers to support Flash, and including Flash in Chrome. This not only covers the initial install, but also any subsequent updates. This is a major slap in the face to Apple and it's push for HTML5 as the technology moving forward.

In a sense, I'm really happy that Google is doing this. I use Google's Visualization widgets daily at The Shop, and a better Flash in Chrome is going to do nothing but help me. That's fantastic. But in a larger sense, I think the better solution is to see the components I use ported to HTML5 Canvas or SVG graphics like some of the Visualization widgets.

My ultimate goal is to have a visualization platform that does what I need without crashing, or bringing the machine to it's knees. CUrrently, I have to do a lot of little "tweaks" to get a reasonably stable platform, and even that's a bit dodgey at times. Anything that Google does to make this better is a good move in my book.

That being said, if I saw that someone came out with an HTML5 Canvas-based graphing package like the Google Visualizations, I'd immediately check it out. If it had a better system of support and less problems in the deployment (I can't deploy on Firefox, and IE only with the Google Chrome Frame plugin), then I'd switch over and never look back.

I don't think Google is doing the right thing in the long-term, and that's what I've always thought they would do. Engineers giving into silly Executive battles is just silly. It's beneath them. Beneath us.

Stop it. Convert the AnnotatedTimeLine to HTML5 Canvas, and then stop messing with Flash. That's a winning strategy.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 31st, 2010 at 7:31 am and is filed under Coding, Everything Else, Open Source Software. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.