There are workarounds. Clunky at best and mostly proprietary, they’re seldom used by the third party agencies who audit the traffic claims of major sites (and thereby influence the rates those sites can charge advertisers). In other words, they don’t rate with the moneymen.

There have been efforts to emphasize other metrics, such as the amount of time a user spends on a site, but they haven’t amounted to much yet. At least not enough to free us from traffic woes when playing anywhere remotely near the bleeding edge.

It’s quite plain this state of affairs is holding these technologies, and the Web, back. Enough so that Adobe has apparently decided to take matters into its own hands, at great expense, by plunking down a king’s ransom to acquire Omniture, a major player in the business of counting site traffic.

With this purchase, Adobe clearly intends to construct a bully pulpit from which it can influence this state of affairs for its benefit, serving their deeply vested interest in Flash. Good for them.

So this begs a question.

Is anybody working on a solution for AJAX?

It would seem like the work currently underway on HTML5, a specification fittingly dubbed “Web Applications 1.0″ at one point, provides a choice opportunity to establish some clear guidance on trackable AJAX events in Web apps for everyone involved, and help steer the ship forward.

I’ve been scanning the spec-in-progress, but haven’t yet seen anything that seems to fit the bill. It’s a big spec. I could easily be missing something. Maybe we can use the ping attribute? Perhaps it’s in how resource fetching is defined? I don’t know. But I’m sure minds more knowledgeable than mine have some ideas. Ideas that wouldn’t constitute a proprietary hack.

The major sites won’t budge until the auditors move. The auditors won’t move until the corporate coalitions make some decisions. The corporate coalitions are comprised of the owners of said major sites. Lather, rinse, repeat.

What’s needed now is a standards body to break this stalemate. Otherwise we remain locked into a stagnant scenario where no one wants to be the first mover, and the proprietary solutions pass us all by.

Dear Adobe:

Knock it off.

It’s no picnic writing software updaters for an ever sprawling empire of code. Sure. Mistakes are made. Granted. But hijacking an automatic update to install a plugin I never asked for, don’t want, and have no way of opting out of (and throwing me off my browser session to boot)? That’s software update rape.

Until I tell you otherwise, what happens in my browser is my business, not yours. Get thy plugin from out my browser, and take thy form from off my desktop.

Extradition Proceedings

If you’ve updated Acrobat and find your copy of Safari likewise commandeered, you can slap a muzzle on the interloper by chasing down the following maze: Acrobat menu > Preferences… > Internet > Web Browser Options.

Uncheck “Display PDF in browser using”. (Oh, and while we’re at it Adobe, don’t use a dropdown box when you’re only giving the user one option.)

For good measure, uncheck “Check browser settings when starting Acrobat” to keep it from nagging you to turn the plugin back on again (until Adobe sneaks in and does it themselves during the next software update, that is.)

This will get you back using the much, much faster Preview app for viewing PDFs in Safari. Unfortunately it doesn’t mean it’s going to stay that way the next time an Adobe updater comes bouncing your way. For shame.

These programs like to waste my time—or at least that’s what it feels like.

I’ve been using the new Adobe CS3 applications full-time for a little over a week now, at home and the office. The change to fast, stable Universal Binaries is a welcome one, as are several of the more subtle tool refinements. But there’s one new addition that punches me in the eye every time I see it.

That damn fade.

Cue Transition

For those of you already using a CS3 app, you know what I’m talking about. When you make one of the new applications active the entire program UI fades into view over the course of a quarter of a second or so.

Someone thought this was slick. Someone thought this was pretty. Someone was fairly misguided.

Pause for Effect(s): Photoshop makes its dramatic entrance.

Ill-considered UI fluff like this makes me want to run for my copy of The Humane Interface and wave it about wildly. It’s not a question of aesthetics. It’s a question of perceived performance.

All this fade does is increase the time I have to wait for the application to become active, and therefore usable. Sure it only takes a quarter of a second, but users in heavy production environments (arguably Adobe’s core) switch back and forth between these apps hundreds, maybe thousands, of times a day. What starts out as an annoying stutter compounds to steal minutes out of every day. It doesn’t matter if the applications are screaming speed demons chockablock with fastidiously optimized code—they built a speed bump right outside the front door.

The subconscious is being trained to fold its arms and tap its foot every time you click, tab or otherwise stumble your way into Adobeland. Somewhere a neuron is saying, “Damn it, I was in the middle of a flow there.”

Initial impressions? It’s a much more engaging experience than using Bridge/Camera Raw alone. The app has a more fully-formed toolset and polished UI, and will probably keep a lot of photographers from popping in and out of Photoshop. In fact, it seems like the intention might be to serve up an alternative for pro photographers who might be a little skittish about digging into Photoshop and managing all their shots using the Adobe Bridge/Camera Raw/Photoshop combination that prevails today (read: basically managing everything by hand).

Any way you slice it the pro photography market can only benefit from what’s shaping up to be a healthy competition between Adobe and Apple.

While this isn’t the first time Apple has used Flash on their site (see the Final Cut Studio pages, and the image galleries for the iPod nano that neatly mimic the side-to-side browsing of the iTunes Music Store), it’s certainly the most prominent. A far cry from the days of tinkering with sprites in QuickTime tracks. (How many old copies of LiveStage Pro are out there just hanging around collecting dust?)