Bruno Abrantes

Photo taken by Thomas Hawk

So this Flash vs. HTML5 thing is definitely turning some heads in the web industry. On one hand you’ve got Flash, a time-honored tool which helped propel the Web forward when all HTML did was clumsy tables. On the other hand there’s the spanking brand-new HTML5 spec, which some promise will deliver us from the evil Flash has become. (Disclaimer: yes, I have a Mac, and Flash makes my computer cry.)

Alas, this post isn’t about that struggle, that last paragraph was just for context (phew!). What I’d like to talk about is one of the main arguments people come up with when defending the viability of Flash:

Until there is a tool that allows non-developers to create nice HTML5, JS etc. without the need for code, Flash will still exist.

Ah, the Flash IDE. The sweet calming song of the timeline-based animation, the drag-and-drop magical controls. This stuff is exactly what gave Flash such a bad rep among the Web Development community. Overlooking the fact that these ready-made components are (sometimes) poorly coded, perform terribly and allow for little customization, I’ll try to make my point without sounding like an elitist jerk:

Why are “non-coders” developing websites/web applications anyway?

When did it become acceptable to program without actually writing a single line of code? I must’ve been too busy playing Halo 3 to notice. Last time I checked, hand-coding your application was still the way to go. Even popular Javascript frameworks definitely required some programming skill to be applied to a serious extent. Why should HTML5 be any different? Just because you can now animate stuff, all of the sudden everyone and their mother should be “developing” web experiences?

So I totally sounded like an ass back there. But hey, designers complain when developers try to design their own stuff (and most of the time they fail miserably at it), so why shouldn’t professional designers feel betrayed?. Why shouldn’t developers complain when designers want glossy ready-made controls that wholly trivialize the work of a programmer? As long as we’re at it, let’s allow architects to not only design houses but to engineer them and lay the bricks themselves. That would turn out awesome. No, totally.

What you should take away from this post is that we, as an industry, made up of designers, developers and everything in between, should learn to collaborate. Have this awesome idea but don’t know how to code? Find a programmer that is willing to do it. On the other hand, do you have mad backend skills but can’t develop the whole project on your own? Don’t try to design, just ask one of the many talented web designers out there. Respect the divide, don’t hop all over the place just because jumping is easy to do.

Great animated video that breaks down exactly what drives people to succeed and be all they can be. Although I was mainly thinking of open source as I watched this, I can see the idea working in other industries. Really interesting and fun to watch.

Yesterday, at the Google I/O conference, the search behemoth released, among other goodies, the brand-new Google Font API. This new API lets developers easily embed fonts into their pages for usage with the CSS font-family directive. And it’s really drop dead easy to include a font.

You can insert any font in Google’s catalog simply by linking to it as if it were a stylesheet:

<link href='http://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Droid+Sans' rel='stylesheet' type='text/css'>
</link>

After this initial step, all you need to do is use the font as you’d normally do for regular, web-safe fonts:

body { font-family: 'Droid Sans', arial, serif; }

Easy as can be, right? Oh, and here’s the kicker: the behind-the-scenes voodoo allows browsers all the way down to IE6 to take advantage of linked fonts!
The catalog is pretty barebones right now, but this is Google, and this is sure to be a project that will soon gain traction and favour among the Web Development community. I’m sure pretty soon the list of available fonts (which are all open-source, by the way) will grow exponentially.

What does this mean for the upcoming CSS3 @font-face directive? It’s potential is definitively great, however browser adoption and legal issues have prevented it from becoming as commonplace as other CSS3 novelties. Will Google change the way we think about typography on the Web?

It’s so last year, I’ll give you that. Nevertheless, this video is still oh-so current, and is probably one of the best introductions I’ve ever seen to the theme of social media. Worth a watch!

Finally, some time to breath. This year’s edition of SAPO Codebits was good (although last year’s was better, an opinion shared by all my friends who attended both editions) and, between talks, presentations and rushing to finish my own project within the 24 hour deadline (more on that later, by the way), I didn’t have much time to interact with the outside world. 

The event ended last Saturday, but my forgetful mind made me lose my Macbook charger at the event, so that’s why I’ve been kept silent so far. Luckily, I was able to get it back today. 

With all that said, I leave you with a Flickr set of some photos I took at the event. Not many photos, I know, but since I’m such a pro photographer must of the ones I took ended up blurry :P.