blog

Crackle Cat Software

Mon, 25 Jul 2011 23:06:13 -0400

We finally have a website! I can't believe we found time to work on the site amidst our work on our upcoming web app Wishing Wagon. We can't take all the credit though as the wonderful SilverStripe CMS made our lives so much easier.

Speaking of Wishing Wagon... our latest product is nearing completion and should be launched in November of this year.

Visit http://www.wishingwagon.com and submit a request to be notified upon launch.

Storing Canadian Data on US Cloud Servers

Mon, 25 Jul 2011 23:02:04 -0400

Before I get into this subject, I want to state that at Crackle Cat we greatly value and respect your privacy surrounding the information you entrust to us. Rest assured, we make every effort to safeguard and protect your data. See our privacy poicy for more information. This article is more about the issue involving the physical location of the servers where your data is located.

I was sent a rather interesting article last week about Data Residency and Legal Questions About the Cloud. It made me chuckle. It also raised some questions. If storing Canadian personal data on non-Canadian servers is illegal, why is Facebook allowed to store our data? Do they have servers in Canada to store our personal data? Should the Canadian government block our access to Facebook? What about Google?

I did some more searching on this subject and came across these two excellent articles.

Don't use the Patriot Act as an excuse

and

Is your Canadian Data Safe in the US?

Basically these articles blame the scariness of hosting your data on US servers on the US Patriot Act. Which means the US governent has the right to access your data if it deems your data is related to national security.

I think Chris Day summarizes the situation quite nicely:

"This risk simply does not exist for most legitimate Canadian businesses. For most of our clients in Vancouver and Edmonton looking at leveraging a cost-effective backup and disaster recovery solution, cloud-based e-mail or collaboration solution (e.g. SharePoint), or inexpensive hosting solution - the cost of hosting the solution in Canada far outweighs the risks of the US government attacking their data. There are significant other benefits to working with a Canadian company for hosting/cloud services, this just isn't one of them as far as I'm concerned."

Do we even have a remotely decent Cloud provider in Canada?

What about US data? Should US companies be allowed to store Canadian users' data on US servers? Should Canadian companies be allowed to store US data on Canadian servers? What about other countries?

Is our data really that important? The only types of data our Crackle Cat products store are billing information (EXCLUDING any payment information of course) and encrypted passwords. I'm sure my personal Canadian information is on literally hundreds of servers in the US from services I have signed up for. I can't say I'm super happy about that, but I am definitely not worried about the US government getting access to it.

Until we see the Canadian government cutting off our access to Facebook and Google for storing our personal information, I am not reallly sure we have anything to fear from our government for storing personal data in the scary US of A. Crackle Cat will continue to use Amazon and Rackspace Cloud services, and as always, ensure our users' data is stored securely in our databases.

3 Reasons Why We Don't Do Flash

Mon, 25 Jul 2011 23:00:24 -0400

Apple haters and Flash Developers will probably disagree with the following but these are some of the reasons why we don't do Flash any more.

1. It is not supported on iOS

So it doesn't work on Apple's devices...who cares? Well according to Apple¹, their 160 million iOS users might care. That's a lot of devices that will not be able to use your web site properly because of Flash. Of course, Google and RIM claim Flash will/does work on their devices but why would anyone want to neglect 160 million potential users? Disclaimer: We here at Crackle Cat have converted to Appleism.

2. Flash is slow

From my own personal experience I'll never forget working with a Flash object that had a simple hover effect. I happened to have my CPU monitor open at the same time and everytime I hovered over the object my CPU utilization maxed out. This was just a simple hover; a change image on rollover effect. The same could easily have been done with CSS with a lot less processing power required.

3. SEO

While you can have effective SEO with a Flash site, it requires a lot of extra effort to create the nesscesary dual content. Why not just use HTML and add the desired visual effects with jQuery?

Flash's Future

I'll be the first to admit Flash was cool and nescessary back in the early days of the web. But Flash's days are numbered as more and more sites begin the transition to HTML5.

I believe Adobe's Flash development tools do have a future as Adobe has started to enable HTML5 output instead of Flash, but the demise of the Flash plugin is imminent.

1. http://www.macobserver.com/tmo/article/apple_160_million_ios_devices_sold_so_far/