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SILICON SILIC CHIP www.siliconchip.com.au Publisher/Editor Nicholas Vinen Technical Editor John Clarke, B.E.(Elec.) Technical Staff Jim Rowe, B.A., B.Sc. Bao Smith, B.Sc. Tim Blythman, B.E., B.Sc. Nicolas Hannekum, Dip. Elec. Tech. Technical Contributor Duraid Madina, B.Sc, M.Sc, PhD Art Director & Production Manager Ross Tester Reader Services Ann Morris Advertising Enquiries Glyn Smith Phone (02) 9939 3295 Mobile 0431 792 293 glyn<at>siliconchip.com.au Regular Contributors Dave Thompson David Maddison B.App.Sc. (Hons 1), PhD, Grad.Dip.Entr.Innov. Geoff Graham Associate Professor Graham Parslow Ian Batty Cartoonist Brendan Akhurst Founding Editor (retired) Leo Simpson, B.Bus., FAICD Silicon Chip is published 12 times a year by Silicon Chip Publications Pty Ltd. ACN 626 922 870. ABN 20 880 526 923. All material is copyright ©. No part of this publication may be reproduced without the written consent of the publisher. Subscription rates (12 issues): $105.00 per year, post paid, in Australia. For overseas rates, see our website or email silicon<at>siliconchip.com.au Recommended & maximum price only. Editorial office: Unit 1 (up ramp), 234 Harbord Rd, Brookvale, NSW 2100. Postal address: PO Box 139, Collaroy Beach, NSW 2097. Phone (02) 9939 3295. E-mail: silicon<at>siliconchip.com.au ISSN 1030-2662 Printing and Distribution: Editorial Viewpoint Saying goodbye to Adobe Flash We have been using Flash to deliver our online magazines since 2012. Back then, there weren’t many alternatives. Flash has been moving towards obsolete status since 2017, probably because Adobe got sick of patching security bugs in it. Flash has to be in the running for the buggiest software ever written! Adobe’s official line has been that the features of HTML5 (especially the newly introduced Canvas) could replace Flash’s functions, so it was no longer needed. While that’s probably true, it’s an oversimplification of the situation. If you have access to their (expensive) Flash software, you can load simple Flash animations and then export them to HTML, as long as you don’t mind the file size growing significantly. But that would never work with our online magazines. They’re too large; even if the conversion worked, the resulting HTML files would be over 100MB, which is not practical. Part of the reason that we used Flash in the first place is that, at the time, Adobe made it easy for us. InDesign could export a layout directly to a Flash file. We then just had to upload that straight to our website to get an exact on-screen representation with minimal fuss (and nice page-turning animations). It worked well – as long as you had the Flash plugin installed on your system. With the end of Flash looming, I investigated many other options. I went through at least a dozen possibilities, but found none of them to be satisfactory. Virtually all of them resulted in some pages of the magazines looking wrong (in some cases, many pages!). Early on we tried to use EPUB but found it lacking. Firstly, not all fonts would display correctly, and the page layouts just wouldn’t display correctly exported as fixed or reflowable layouts. We decided in the end to stick to a HTML5-based viewer. The main problem is that while the HTML5 Canvas element works exceptionally well for certain things, it can’t handle some of the effects that we use in the magazine, resulting in some pages loading incorrectly. To solve this, I had to go through every page of every magazine back to about 1995 (around 30,000 pages!) and identify the problematic ones. We then had to experiment with various approaches until we came up with several different ways to alter the content so that it looked the same, but would display correctly on the HTML5 Canvas. We are still ‘mopping up’ a few very minor problems, but overall our online magazines (approaching 400 in number) look very good. Our new HTML5-based online viewer has been deployed and is now the default. So you no longer need any plugins to view magazines on our website, as long as you have a modern web browser. The good news about the new viewer is that the HTML5 rendering has excellent (almost unbelievable) clarity. I am blown away with how good text and diagrams look on a 4K monitor. It’s usable on lower resolution monitors (eg, 1080p) but a 2560x1440 resolution is much better. As 4K displays are now becoming more mainstream, I expect more of our readers will be using them in future, with ideal results. The slightly bad news is that specific pages of the magazine can take a bit longer to load, especially on older computers with slower CPUs. But I think that is a worthwhile trade-off for the improved clarity. You can also download the PDF and view it on most desktop viewers. So please bear with us while we clean up any small remaining problems with the new system, and tweak it to improve usability on smaller devices like smartphones. It should be pretty well sorted by early next year. And if you haven’t looked at our online edition in a while, now might be a good time to revisit it. Nicholas Vinen 24-26 Lilian Fowler Pl, Marrickville 2204 2 Silicon Chip Australia’s electronics magazine siliconchip.com.au