Our future work with Flash on mobile devices will be focused on enabling Flash developers to package native apps with Adobe AIR for all the major app stores. We will no longer continue to develop Flash Player in the browser to work with new mobile device configurations. [...]
HTML5 is now universally supported on major mobile devices, in some cases exclusively. This makes HTML5 the best solution for creating and deploying content in the browser across mobile platforms.
You’ll never have to enter your Dropbox account info into a third-party app on version 1. Instead, you’ll approve access using the official Dropbox app on mobile or via the web at dropbox.com.
And this.
Version 1 adds support for apps that can only read or write to a single folder in your Dropbox.
Authentication is not sent to third party apps, and you can selectively limit access to a single folder which prevents exposing all of your Dropbox data. Hellofax is one example of this kind of integration—they offer the option of receiving faxes as PDFs that can be routed to a Dropbox folder.
[Update 10/24] See this post for a link to the patch Apple released to fix this.
[Update 9/29] The temporary fix that has worked for me to stop the crashing:
(1) Disconnect the external display
(2) Run the free gfxCardStatus app in Integrated Only mode
Still waiting on Apple, hopeful that they have a patch coming soon to fix this.
gfxCardStatus app
* * *
I waited for a few weeks after the release of OS X 10.7 Lion to make sure it was stable, and after feeling fairly confident that it was a solid release I upgraded last month. It was fine for maybe a couple of weeks and then I started having random crashes where the screen would go black. The machine didn’t shut down, it just went black and wouldn’t respond to mouse or keyboard commands, and the only way to recover was to do a hard shutdown by holding the power button for a few seconds. This is not a good way to shut down a computer and can result in disk errors and loss of data.
There’s a lengthy thread on the Apple Support Community forum about this, and it seems to be happening mostly to machines like mine: a mid-2010 MacBook Pro with the NVIDIA GeForce GT 330M graphics card. The crashes appear to be related to graphics-intensive functions—a couple of minutes in Final Cut Pro X will trigger a crash for me every time, and it’s happened a few times in the Mail app as well.
I spent about 45 minutes on the phone with AppleCare support and we tried several troubleshooting methods, including resetting the PRAM and running a hardware test from the installation DVD. No errors were reported on the hardware test and the other efforts didn’t do any good either. I took it to a local Apple Store and they suggested I do a clean installation of Lion, completely erasing the hard drive (after making a backup), installing Lion and then bringing all my data and settings over from the backup using Migration Assistant. So I did.
It’s still crashing.
Some customers are reporting that Apple has replaced the logic board for them and this has resolved the issue, but others are still experiencing problems even with the hardware replacement so there’s some speculation now about graphics drivers in Lion. I assume Apple engineers are working on this as they are good about fixing things, and I have never had an ongoing problem like this with any previous OS X upgrade. I was going to downgrade to 10.6 Snow Leopard but that’s not a viable option—Lion modifies the mailbox format in such a way that it won’t work with Snow Leopard.
So if you have a similar Mac model and are considering upgrading to Lion, my advice for now is: don’t. Check the Apple forums and confirm that a patch has been released that addresses this problem first. The 10.7.2 build has recently been released to developers but I don’t know if it will include a fix for the black screen crashes.
Yesterday’s post on Webmonkey about Google and Mozilla (makers of the Firefox web browser) teaming up on a new set of APIs (Application Programming Interface) for connecting applications and websites. It’s called Web Intents and provides a way for sites to pass data between each other.
So just what are Web Intents? Well, the easiest way to understand them is by example. Take the sometimes overwhelming proliferation of buttons on web pages that allow you to do something with the current page, whether it’s Like, Tweet, +1, Read Later, Add to Instapaper and so on. Rather than adding a dozen little badges to your site, Web Intents creates a bridge that connects your site to any website your visitor wants to use. Web Intents define an API for your site to use and another API for the receiving site to use. Plug them together and transferring data becomes a quick and easy process, both for users and developers.
From Tantek Çelik, creator of microformats, who refers to Web Intents as Web Actions:
“[W]eb actions have the potential to change our very notions of what a web application is from a single site to loosely coupled interactions across multiple, distributed sites…. In that regard, web actions have the potential to become a building block for distributed web applications.”
Last month I published a post—Website Planning Guide—about steps to consider when planning your website (objectives, content, design, maintenance, etc).
Breccan McLeod-Lundy had a good post Sunday with a Website Launch Checklist that’s focused a bit more on the technical aspects like server setup (DNS, backup, monitoring, deployment) and developer tasks (analytics, sitemap, testing, performance).
Good preparation takes a lot of the uncertainty out of the process and helps ensure a successful launch.
Card.io is another new mobile credit card processing solution, similar to Square except that it doesn’t need additional hardware to swipe the card—instead, it uses a mobile app to scan the front of the card. There’s a little more info on the How it works page but apparently it’s targeted to software developers to integrate credit card processing into their mobile apps.
They are currently accepting early access requests on their web site: www.card.io. SDK (Software Development Kit) available now for iOS, coming soon for Android.
Final Cut Pro X (FCPX) was released today and I’m looking forward to seeing what it’s got. Some initial previews and articles I’ve seen show an impressive re-engineering of the application and workflow. Dropping the price from $1,000 to $300 is going to get this app into a lot of hands—I think I’ll wait a few weeks to see if there are any early-release bugs to steer clear of, but I’ll definitely be making the upgrade from Final Cut Express.
Interesting that it’s only available as a download from the Mac App Store. Some early trending in the Twitterverse stating that it has a Vimeo export option and that the project format is a SQLite database like in Aperture, but many pro editors are disappointed with the lack of some key features from FCP7.
With the popularity of Twitter and the need to keep ‘tweets’ within the 140-character limit, someone came up with the clever idea of a link-shortening service. The idea is that sometimes you want to include a link in your tweet, but some URLs are really long, like the following link to a Wikipedia article which has 67 characters in the URL:
If you wanted to include this URL in your tweet it would take up almost half of the available characters, so you might have to shrink your message to accommodate the link. Link shortening services like bit.ly and goo.gl and others provide you with a unique short URL that will redirect to the longer one, so you drop the short link into your tweet—or in your email or web page: you can use them anywhere you would use a link—and when someone clicks the short link it directs them to the longer URL. This leaves more room in your tweet for your message, and minimizes the number of characters used for links.
For example, I shortened the Wikipedia article URL above using my own shortening service I set up yesterday, which uses only 17 characters: http://stacy.cc/4
I used a free PHP script-based tool called YOURLS (Your Own URL Shortener) found at yourls.org. You can register a short domain name of your own, install and configure the YOURLS software on the domain, and you’re up and running with your own service. Domain registrations are pretty cheap as well, so this is a very low-cost solution if you need it. I registered the stacy.cc domain through my hosting provider, Dreamhost, for $25. I had the whole thing up and running in less than two hours.
Why create your own rather than use one of the freely-available services already out there? The best reason I can think of is control. If you use someone else’s service to handle link redirecting for you, then you run the risk of losing this function if the service shuts down, and your shortened URLs will no longer work. For most people I don’t think it’s a big deal if they’re just using it for Twitter, but if you like the idea of running and controlling your own service, and you’d like to use a custom/branded domain for your redirects, setting up a service like this is a quick and inexpensive option.
A helpful post over on Smashing Magazine about planning a web site. There are some good principles to think through, including:
Needs & objectives assessment
Alignment with marketing
Roles & responsibilities
Content
Site design & structure
CMS (Content Management Systems)
Ongoing maintenance & updates
I’ve had people ask me “how much will it cost to build a web site?” That’s like asking a home builder “how much for a house?” — there are so many variables involved, and it all depends on what it is you want to accomplish with your site. It could be anything from a simple one page ‘brochure’ site to a complex database-driven e-commerce machine.
Some content options to think about when considering what your site might need:
Articles
Blog posts
Advertising
Discussion forum
Images
Documents (usually PDFs)
Audio
Video (embedded from YouTube or Vimeo, or self-hosted)
Flash animation (I don’t recommend it)
Content feeds/integrations from other sites
Photo gallery
Twitter stream
Facebook ‘friends’ list
RSS feeds
E-commerce
Forms for contact, quotes or something else
Physical products (how many?)
Digital content (what kind and how many?)
Email newsletter
Event calendar
Event registration
Search
Social media sharing links (Twitter, Facebook, etc)
Personnel directory
Planning and building a web site is much easier when you’re clear about what it is you want from the site.
I used a free 
