paulofierro.com

14 Essential Xcode Tips, Tricks and Resources for iPhone Devs [del.icio.us]

pfierro — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 05:49:15 PDT

OpenFlow [del.icio.us]

pfierro — Mon, 26 Jul 2010 06:46:56 PDT

Some Flash Android Components [del.icio.us]

pfierro — Fri, 23 Jul 2010 00:24:54 PDT

Apigee: API Console [del.icio.us]

pfierro — Mon, 12 Jul 2010 08:36:38 PDT

Flash Player opt-in vs opt-out

Fri, 09 Jul 2010 11:29:07 +0200

From an article on Inc from 2002:

The opt-out system, however, acts as a "tacit yes." ... It strikes us that companies that limit themselves to these choices aren't effectively serving the needs of customers or themselves.

The article was talking about opt-in versus opt-out email - a debate that ended years ago and its pretty well understood throughout the industry that opt-in is the way to go. The customer needs to make the decision, period.

So colour me surprised when I recently went to download the Flash Player and was presented with other stuff I could install along with it. Incredibly, these "add-ons" were selected by default! Has Adobe not been paying attention? This is "evil" behaviour after all.

If you're on a Mac you won't see these add-ons at all, but I was installing Flash on a VMWare instance running Windows XP. I took a few screenshots in Safari, using the Developer toolbar to fake the user-agent.

If you're running Internet Explorer you are presented with the option of downloading the Google Toolbar. It clearly states that it's optional, but then again its also selected by default.

The Google Toolbar is arguably useful. But on Firefox, on Firefox you're presented with an option to download McAfee Security Scan Plus. What the?

Now I've been told by people that have installed this by accident that it screwed up their existing anti-virus solution rendering it useless.

Lastly I visited the page pretending to be Opera and lo and behold you are presented with no extra options:

Awesome for Opera users, not so awesome for everyone else.

My question is why bother with the extras? Obviously Adobe is earning some money from these partnership deals, but they are also wasting their user's time and effort as well as annoying them. I assume this extra income is enough to ignore the fact that this practice tarnishes both Adobe's reputation and relationship with their users.

Of course I may be wrong and users don't really care.

However as someone who develops for the Flash Platform, I'm disappointed.

How To Make Your iPhone App Launch Faster [del.icio.us]

pfierro — Sun, 28 Mar 2010 03:26:50 PDT

Create shiny buttons [del.icio.us]

pfierro — Fri, 19 Feb 2010 06:06:31 PST

50 Inspiring iPhone Application Websites [del.icio.us]

pfierro — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 04:40:10 PST

Sympathy for the Devil [del.icio.us]

pfierro — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 01:55:31 PST

iPhone PNG Images Normalizer [del.icio.us]

pfierro — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 03:11:46 PST

Software Sea Change [del.icio.us]

pfierro — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 06:49:34 PST

The Awesomeness Manifesto [del.icio.us]

pfierro — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 01:05:54 PST

Cocoa with Love: Showing a "Loading..." message over the iPhone keyboard [del.icio.us]

pfierro — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 02:07:54 PDT

Determine if iPhone is 3G or 3GS [del.icio.us]

pfierro — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 02:07:03 PDT

On Authoring iPhone Apps via Flash CS5 [del.icio.us]

pfierro — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 23:31:46 PDT

"And lest we forget, Adobe can barely write Objective-C apps themselves."

Groupware Bad [del.icio.us]

pfierro — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 15:27:07 PDT