Google announced its Flash embrace Tuesday on its Chromium blog, but the company has been agitating for months on a related project to improve the security of browser plug-ins. Google wants the Web to be the foundation for applications, but it doesn't want the security and crash problems plug-ins can bring.

Specifically, Google said it will distribute Flash with Chrome, update it automatically, and eventually put Flash in Chrome's sandbox where its risks can be contained better.

Please, pretty please, let this be the start of an open source Flash runtime. I can't imagine Google just tossing Flash into Chrome when the very essence of Chrome is built around speed.

According to Google, it's already party of the dev build. Guess I might as well try it out instead of crying about it.

I'm a full-time Flash developer and I'd love to get paid to make Flash sites for the iPad. I want that to make sense — but it doesn't. Flash on the iPad will not (and should not) happen — and the main reason, as I see it, is one that never gets talked about: current Flash sites could never be made to work well on any touchscreen device, and this cannot be solved by Apple, Adobe, or magical new hardware. That's not because of slow mobile performance, battery drain or crashes. It's because of the hover or mouseover problem. ... All that Apple and Adobe could ever do is make current Flash content visible. It would be seen, but very often would not work.

Having recently had the opportunity to actually play with Flash on and Android phone, I couldn't agree more. But it's not hover and mouse-over that's really the problem. That same problem exists with HTML and JavaScript too. The real problem is that Flash is a plug-in that needs to capture input to work properly. That means there's an extra 'tap' that has to happen just to let the browser know that you want to interact with the Flash embed and not the browser. So while double tapping might normally zoom in and out, now it just tells the browser to capture the touch input and then release it. How do you tell the device that you want your tap or pinch to interact with the browser window and not the Flash window, and vice versa?

The only way to bring the Flash plug-in to mobile devices is by creating an on-screen UI specifically for interacting with Flash embeds. And once you do that the user experience is so poor that it's just not worth the trouble.

I've said it before and I'll say it again, if Adobe actually wants to get Flash on the iPhone (or cares at all about the user experience on Android) it needs to open source the runtime and push towards getting Flash integrated directly with WebKit itself.

How do you make a heatmap? This came from kerimcan in the FlowingData forums, and krees followed up with a couple of good links on how to do them in R. It really is super easy. Here's how to make a heatmap with just a few lines of code, but first, a short description of what a heatmap is.

Great article by Nathan Yau of FlowingData on how to use R to create a heatmap. I'm not sure how it is that I'm just finding out about R today. It's like the open source SPSS/SAS alternative, and it's pretty well documented to boot. I wish I knew about this a year ago. It's a really great application, and definitely something I'm going to spend more time with in the future.