It’s been a long time coming, but Adobe’s finally given Flash on mobile the axe. Much like many things designed for desktop computing, Flash was never really architectured to perform well with slower, power conscious hardware.

Call it another byproduct of the mobilization of computing, but one of the interesting trends to come out of it has been designing things with these long forgotten constraints in mind. It’s a harkening back to the old days where we had a lot less hardware to work with. When CPUs weren’t pushing 4 Ghz clock rates with astronomically long execution pipelines, and didn’t need 400 watt power supplies.

But it’s more than that. To me it’s almost like the green movement applied to computing. Do more, with less. Use every part, rather than take for granted how much we already have. Flash was never built with that philosophy in mind, and with such a large code base I’m sure such a task was unattainable without starting from scratch with a different philosophy from the beginning. As we fast forward several years after Adobe tried to fit that square peg into a round hole it never was intended to, they’re finally pulling the plug seeing that it won’t fit.

This excites me as a citizen of the web a lot. This sort of decision, while not over night, is going to make the web a better place. It won’t stop at mobile because no one wants to have two separate codebases between their increasingly more important mobile site and their maintenance mode desktop site if they don’t have to. It’s taken a lot of things to get us to this point though. HTML5, amazing new additions to CSS3, and fast JavaScript engines like V8 and SquirrelFish have long been missing pieces to complete the puzzle.

Hopefully Adobe keeps putting out great tools to help us build flash-like sites with these new advancements and get us to a plugin-less future even faster.

I feel like I’ve graduated to a new level recently. I figured out a couple of the major scales on my own! It’s great how when you’re learning something new you go from feeling like a bewildered fawn in the forest to having a bit of confidence that you’re things are actually starting to make sense.

I’ve been getting pretty proficient at a lot of my majors, so every few days I pester Sara to teach me something new to practice. She’s been busy designing up a storm for her portfolio lately, so I don’t try to interrupt her too much while she’s in The Zone™. One of the nice, approachable things about learning the piano is that the keys are pretty logical. They go in a rather unsurprisingly alphabetic order C-D-E-F-G-A-B, C-D-E-F… so it’s easy to find which key I have to start on to begin a scale.

While waiting for her to teach me one of the keys I didn’t yet know, I said screw it let me try to figure it out. I started cautiously, but carefully, playing notes with the known starting key one by one. Nope, that didn’t sound right. Scratch that. Start again. Repeat. Eventually I’d stumble on a continuous set that sounded more appropriate. It wasn’t long before I had both B and E figured out without any help other than a confirming nod from Sara.

Next up, figure out how to do all these two handed. See you in a couple weeks!

As of late, I’ve finally started pursuing a hobby I’ve been meaning to start for quite some time — learning the piano. My girlfriend Sara and I have a rather interesting exchange of hobbies. She’s been wanting to go from just designing and writing websites to building some more interactive things with JavaScript and I’ve long been wanting to learn a musical instrument so we decided to exchange talents.

The piano’s always particularly stuck out to me, likely due to my fascination with keyboards of the qwerty variety. She’s been teaching me on her Roland HP 137. It’s a gorgeous, wooden studio piano her parents gave her when she was 16.

Thus far I’ve been learning a few majors in scales — C, D, F, and G. I’ve gotten somewhat decent at two handed C, but not quite good enough to do it over and over without fail. I’m not quite sure what path she’s going to take me down next but I know for now I want to start getting proficient at playing each of these scales two handed, and then on to the rest of the majors and minors I haven’t yet learned.

I’ll be posting updates from time to time on my progress, and just thoughts on learning music in the first place. Should be the start of a great skill in life I’ve always wanted! I can’t wait until the day I can sit down and just play a song as easy as riding a bike.