What? No animation?!

by admin | Apr 29, 2010 | Random Postings

Is Flash Going To Survive?

Written By Gerald Bauer, owner and founder

There’s a tremendous amount of debate happening in the tech world over Adobe Flash, its role in website design, and its future as a leading technology.

Adobe Flash was a great way to bring sexiness and interactivity to the web. Animations, cross-fades, “motion tweens” and a bit of music brought a new level of entertainment to the web – and even brought on its own industry of “Flash Banner Ads” that accompanied thousands of websites across the globe.

So where is Flash today? From our perspective at JB Systems, Flash has a very limited role for the web. Current industry analysts and trade journals we subscribe to are telling us that the in the next decade, more mobile devices (such as iPhones, Droids, Blackberries, iPads, NetBooks, etc) will be on the web than actual personal computers. Apple has taken a progressive stance against Flash, and does not support it in their mobile devices (iPads, iPhones, iPod Touch).

Now, we don’t necessarily take every decision “Apple” makes as true testament to our calling, however it’s a pretty gutsy move to make. But taking the time to look over WHY Apple has made that decision brings some interesting points to mind that most companies should consider. I’ve summarized some important notes below:

Performance Issues and Battery Life
Using the new HTML5 Standards, H.264 encoded videos play faster and consume 50% LESS BATTERY than viewing a video using the standard Flash Video Player. This has to do with technicalities in the encoding / decoding process of the video, but the simple fact is that Flash requires more processing power to decode videos and therefore more juice (battery power) to do so.

Reliability and Security
According to Apple, Symantec recently announced that Flash had one of the worst security records in 2009. Instead of progressing, Flash’s security models and cross-domain models make it more cumbersome and difficult to handle security.

Mobility
To quote a recent documented written by Steve Jobs, “…Flash has not performed well on mobile devices. We have routinely asked Adobe to show us Flash performing well on a mobile device, any mobile device, for a few years now. We have never seen it.” As more and more users begin to their daily website surfing on mobile devices, any Flash-based content you have (all of which no doubt contain important messages about your business) will not be seen, seen well, or even supported.

Touch
It comes as no surprise that Apple is leading with the way with touch, and Multi-Touch® technology. Device makers such as Palm, Motorola, and Google have followed suit. Millions of Flash applications rely on Mouse-based actions, such as “Roll Overs” and those actions aren’t supported on these new devices. What does this mean? The Flash app, or banner, needs to be re-written to accommodate. Well, if it needs to be re-written, why not use new technologies such as Javascript and HTML5?

So, where does JB Systems stand?

JB Systems is taking the stance of using Flash, in limited fashion, for our websites. We have recently seen NEWLY developed website using complete Flash-based headers – including the website’s navigation, thus rendering the site useless for a good chunk of mobile phones. More advanced technologies, such as jQuery and other Javascript libraries offer animation and functionality that mimic (or even perform better) than Flash. As a new standard, beginning in June of 2010, all videos supported by JB Systems will be offered in two formats, HTML5 using the H.264 encoding or by embedding a Flash player. We will, however, wait until the majority of web browsers (eh hem, eh hem Microsoft … ) adopt HTML5 and streamline it as only Google’s Chrome and Mozilla’s Firefox have adopted it.

Steve Jobs’ article can be read HERE.

“Flash was created during the PC era – for PCs and mice. Flash is a successful business for Adobe, and we can understand why they want to push it beyond PCs. But the mobile era is about low power devices, touch interfaces and open web standards – all areas where Flash falls short.” – Steve Jobs.

Until next time … thanks for reading! Post any comments below – we want to hear from you!!

JB Systems Supports Cancer Research

by admin | Mar 19, 2010 | Random Postings

Gerald Bauer (JB Systems) and James Chumas (The Chumas Agency)

Written by Gerald Bauer, owner and founder

Well everyone, 2010 marked the first year of JB Systems’ support of children’s cancer research through St. Baldricks, a national organization that promotes “shaving the way” to fighting kids cancer. It also marks the first time I have been seen without hair!

Giving back is something JB Systems takes seriously, and helping out with children’s cancer is a cause we feel is important. Feel free to visit http://www.stbaldricks.org/ for more information about the organization, their cause, and how to get involved.

Thousands of kids per year are diagnosed with cancer, and all have to learn to put their self-consciousness aside and deal with hair loss. So, to pay them tribute, so did I. And in true JB-fashion, lets throw conformity out the window, let vanity take its course elsewhere, and lets make a difference in this world. Let’s set the new standard!

Gerald Bauer (JB Systems) and Aaron Brunette (Coldwell Banker)

In the past, JB Systems has contributed to the Susan G Komen Breast Cancer Foundation, Big Brothers Big Sisters, Helping American Vietnam Veterans, as well as Eau Claire’s Feed My People Food Bank and Eau Claire’s Hope Gospel Mission.

Giving back to the community is a huge factor of our business model, be it monetary donations or time given to help out with projects, or even cooking for the needy. JB Systems plans on continuing our commitment to these organizations in the future – and we look forward to meeting you there.

Top 5 Things to Ask Your Potential Web Developer

by admin | Feb 19, 2010 | Random Postings

Whether you’re transferring your site to a new developer or building a new site from scratch, there are a few key things you need to ask before you make your decision. Regardless of who you choose, these are some things you should know to help you make the best decision.

Ask about contracts

I know that some developers require long contracts that you’re locked into – some go as long as three years. With technology and business moving as fast as it does, things are bound to change in much less than three years. Just make sure you read all of the fine print and know exactly what commitment you’re agreeing to before you sign. If you’re not comfortable with it, ask them to change it or remove it. Their willingness to work with you on that will also be a good indicator of how well they’ll work with you on future requests as well.

Ask about ownership

Your website will be a living, breathing part of your organization and you’ll want to have a great relationship with your web development team. But what if you choose a web provider and things don’t go so great? If you were to ever move the site for whatever reason, you need to be able to own your site – the content, photos, database tools, admin tools – all of it. Otherwise, it will be completely static and unusable when you try to move it somewhere else. The chances that you would have to move are small, but you just never know. Do you want to take that kind of a risk?

Ask about maintenance

Depending on what changes you foresee to your site as it grows, some developers will have a minimum hourly charge for any updates that they make to your site and it can be hefty. If they charge you one hour every time you request a change (that in actuality only takes them 10 minutes), your bill is going to add up quickly. Plus, do you really want to have to worry about every little change and how much it costs? Check to see if your developer offers another option for website maintenance.

Ask about marketing

Once you have the website built, you’re done, right? Um…no. If no one can find your site or if no one knows about it, what good is it? Find out if your web provider will help you market the site so that you can get the most bang for your buck.

What’s the Fifth?
In your experience, what other things should people know before they choose a web provider? Let us know! Comment below…

More Importantly…What’s Backing Your Site?

by admin | Feb 13, 2010 | Random Postings

Written by: Gerald Bauer, Owner of JB Systems

I’d like to spend a moment and bring to attention some interesting points about the technology and more importantly, the programming language, that powers our applications and websites coming from JB Systems.

The battle of web-languages has been fought for years, and several languages still exist today. At our beginning, an important decision had to be made. We knew at the get-go our websites needed interaction – something that set them apart from “table-based”, static websites that were at the time very common. Our choices for a language included Java Server Pages (JSP), Active Server Pages (ASP), Coldfusion (a Macromedia/Adobe language) and Hypertext Pre-Processor (PHP). The acronyms are a bit much – but stick with me.

Why We Went With PHP…

Well, to summarize briefly and to provide you with some valid points – here’s our case for PHP:

1. PHP is an actual programming language. For developers comfortable using languages like Javascript, Python, Java, etc – picking up PHP is typically quite easy.What does this mean for you? Easy – more programmers can be readily found to develop PHP. Your PHP-driven website has a better chance of being supported by other developers (if need be) – especially over languages such as Coldfusion and JSP, as these languages are typically more specialized. Laymen Terms: Cheaper to support
   
2. PHP is Efficient. The C library that runs PHP requires far less overhead than running TomCat (JSP engine built by Java) or the Coldfusion Engine (Build by Adobe). ASP runs by default on Microsoft’s IIS server (however, do we really want to discuss the viability or security if IIS?).
   What does this mean for you? Speedier websites and delivery of pages. Since our server doesn’t have all of this bulky 3rd party software consuming processor usage and memory – they can deliver pages faster and more efficiently than others.

   Laymen Terms: It’s more efficient, our servers can run faster than others.

3. PHP is more popular? I know that’s a bold statement – but don’t believe me?
   I encourage you to review TIOBE Programming Community Index. You’ll find PHP is the 3rd most commonly used programming language worldwide. Languages such as Coldfusion, ASP, Ajax, Ruby on Rails and more were excluded – because, according to the website, they’re not considered full blown languages. This may come as a shock to all of the Microsoft proponents of the world – especially my colleagues at CVTC – but sorry. (Is this where I get to point out Apache web servers outnumber Microsoft ones by over 4-1!  No really… See Here.

   In case you’d like more supporting documentation, the following site (HERE) displays statistics on the top used frameworks. Here’s the scoop:

   PHP – 29.58%
   ASP – 23.98% (Sorry guys)
   J2EE (JSP) – 7.66%
   Coldfusion – 1.92% (eek)
   
   Laymen Terms: Go with what’s supported the most, especially with technology that changes as often with the web. Again, cheaper to support.

4. Cost To Developer. PHP is Free. Did you know a Coldfusion license can cost as much as $7,500? Ouch. And what about their upgrades – from year-to-year? PHP, ASP, and JSP are continuously supported and upgraded for free. Throw in the industry-standard MySQL database that powers our “back-end” data storage needs and we can write applications that other developers would need to spend $10,000 on just to get started.

Laymen Terms: We don’t have to charge you as much.

Well, that concludes my summary of why JB Systems (and ~ 30% of other developers in the world) choose PHP as the de-facto technology of choice to power our websites. Hopefully you’ve found this article helpful. Thanks for reading!