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November 30, 2005
Fave free SWF audio?
Fave free SWF audio? Niall Kennedy is seeking a Flash-based audio player as a podcast adjunct, and I haven't compared the currently available players... if you've got suggestions, he'd appreciate them, thanks. "I plan to include a Flash-based audio player directly on each podcast post. If you have a favorite single track progressive download Flash-based player -- requiring Flash 7 or 8 is OK by me -- please let me know."
Posted by John Dowdell at 2:51 PM
Firefox SVG resources
Firefox SVG resources: Yesterday's Firefox 1.5 release was the first version to have some type of SVG rendering enabled by default. Because "AJaX" got popular only after XmlHttpRequest appeared in the preferred Firefox browser, I'd expect an uptick in SVG experiments with this new renderer. The above link shows which parts of the SVG 1.1 spec are implemented and not implemented in Firefox (compare the W3C implementation matrix, from 2001). Jonathan Watt also offers SVG authoring guidelines to make pages more renderer-independent. More info is in the Mozilla SVG mailing list. [via Jonathan Watt]
Posted by John Dowdell at 2:32 PM
Intel Viiv
Intel Viiv: I didn't know about this, just happened upon it... early next year Intel will have a home-entertainment environment named "Viiv" (rhymes with "five")... partners include TV companies like TiVo, software companies like Adobe Systems. I don't know anything else on this yet.
Posted by John Dowdell at 1:58 PM
Pocket video roundup
Pocket video roundup: This USA Today article focuses mostly on Apple's video iPod and subsequent third-party content businesses: repositories of both copyright and public-domain material, celebrity video-blogging, more. We haven't discovered the usage patterns of casual video yet... seems like each device form factor would have a little different effect on when & where the device is used, and the ways to navigate and access new videos affects habits too... I also suspect that there will be a lot more viewing of casually-produced video than there was in professional broadcast TV, or the cable age. But there's finally the real ability to carry around rich video players (and recorders) during daily life, so the ride's going to get more interesting from this point.... ;-)
Posted by John Dowdell at 7:34 AM
MacTel pushed up?
MacTel pushed up? Another rumor running the blogs this week is that Intel-based Apple computers will arrive in early January. Like the Microsoft story, I have no inside info on this, I just watch how people talk, the evidence they present. But whenever it arrives, it will take awhile for the new hardware to become a regular daily working environment. Adobe has given guidance via Bruce Chizen and this Intel/Mac FAQ for plugin developers and system integrators. I've been an early purchaser of new hardware myself, and I know it can get very frustrating, that waiting for a new generation of software before fully using the new machine. Bottom line: Even if a powerful new Macintosh were available this week, it would still take awhile for all the software to catch up. But I bet that by late spring this will be a regular topic on the mailing lists... I empathize with the frustration of buying a new system and waiting, that tradeoff for getting first access to the hardware.... :(
Posted by John Dowdell at 6:57 AM
Longhorn delayed?
Longhorn delayed? That's the story floating around the blogs and newspapers today, but I'm not sure it's legit. Yesterday Microsoft announced that Windows Vista Beta 2 will arrive sometime next year, and that the "Community Tech Preview" will change from its previous monthly schedule. Some were expecting Vista Beta 2 in December, but I haven't been able to find any actual Microsoft statement about such a date -- closest I found was one newspaper which predicted Vista Beta 2 in November being denounced by another newspaper which predicted December, and then another reporter with a "sources say" kind of story which said Microsoft's internal date was Dec7. (See The Inquirer, Mary Jo Foley, Paul Thurrott, Digg.com etc to see the chains of belief.) Joe Wilcox has the best summary I've found, and Wikipedia has a build history of the new OS. My takeaway: We're all vulnerable these days to false stories being spread on the net -- it's not enough to say someone is trustworthy, we need to continually check how they know what they say they know.
Posted by John Dowdell at 6:40 AM
Hi-res PDF to webby SWF
Hi-res PDF to webby SWF: "Digital Edition" offers online conversion and optimization for print publishers to offer browser-based viewing. I don't know yet what Adobe/Macromedia might be doing in this area, but look at how they tailor the service to their particular audience: they include a navigation UI tailored to online "print" reading, include web advertising and tracking options, handle table-of-contents, more. (It isn't just the technology, but how the technology is tailored to an audience's needs.) Found it via a press release.
Posted by John Dowdell at 5:56 AM
November 29, 2005
Clientside aggregator vulnerability
Clientside aggregator vulnerability: Makes sense: ""The easy way of taking advantage of the popularity [of RSS] is to hijack the existing configured feed clients to automatically download new copies of worms and other threats to the infected computers. This is accomplished by pointing the already-configured client to different and malicious Web content. The way this would work is checking if the system has any automatic feed download configured. If it does, it would just add or change an existing one to point to the malicious Web site." No exploits yet -- the tipping point might be the RSS features of IE7. (Unwanted updates might be accomplished in other ways, but clientside RSS readers seem an easy way to hitchhike a ride.)
Posted by John Dowdell at 10:52 PM
FAMES on Ubuntu
FAMES on Ubuntu: Step-by-step guide to getting the open-source, SWF-producing FAMES suite running in Ubuntu GNU/Linux. Written Nov11 by "dave" at headlondon.com, but I don't see it mentioned in mailing list, aggregator, or general web yet, so I'm bumping it up. If this helps even just one Slashdot writer, then that would be a beautiful thing.... ;-)
Posted by John Dowdell at 9:31 PM
FF/Mac+Flash wow
FF/Mac+Flash wow: I had heard of this Bugzilla entry, but had never managed to find it. After reading it all I can say is "wow". Contains info on how the Macintosh version of Firefox had allowed plugins to function. The good news is that this is addressed in today's 1.5 release of Firefox. [via Emmy Huang]
Posted by John Dowdell at 9:13 PM
Email deletion patterns
Email deletion patterns: Techdirt runs a poll "How Much Time Do You Waste With Confusing Emails?" Surprisingly, the most popular choice is just deleting messages which make no apparent sense, rather than trying to find out what the writer was trying to say.
Posted by John Dowdell at 5:15 PM
New AdBlock?
New AdBlock? It looks like this Firefox extension has been updated, but I'm unable to find decent release notes. AdBlock blocks ads on websites, a two-edged sword if you rely on ads to pay for the labor you put into your site. There was some problem with it during Flash Player 8 beta -- the Macromedia site had some mention of it but today all I find is a mirrored quote at Ray Camden's blog. I researched this today because a blogsearch showed a live post of problems, with advice to go back to Flash Player 7 -- the latter recommendation is definitely not recommended for security reasons, but that's what people are telling each other online. Google has more citations of current conversation. The AdBlock comments at MozDev imply that the extension was abandoned but now has a new version... I'd feel more confident if I could find strong source info for all the above, instead of trying to read between the lines of various incomplete statements. Anyway, if you want to use AdBlock, then there's a new version that apparently doesn't balk at the new Player like the old one did. If you've got links to better source info then I'd appreciate it in comments here, thanks.
Posted by John Dowdell at 4:08 PM
Snakes, Rubies, Annette
Snakes, Rubies, Annette: A bit off-topic, but better addressed here than in the link... the Chicago Area Ruby Group and the Chicago Python Users Group will be presenting a framework face-off between Adrian Holovaty (Django for Python) and David Heinemeier Hansson (Ruby on Rails), and they're soliciting questions on the web in advance. The above link goes to a question "What do you guys think of ColdFusion? Flex?" from "Annette", with a given address of "www.macromedia.com". I just did an employee check and cannot find any staffer named "Annette" here. No big thing, but it just goes to show that things on the web cannot be taken at face value.
Posted by John Dowdell at 11:19 AM
Nokia N90 blog
Nokia N90 blog: I saw Bill Perry use this new model for video capture during Hong Kong MAX... it's a larger phone, but seems comfortable, capable, and made lots of wheels turn in my head. Justin-Everett Church picked one up on the spot, and has posted a detailed review, particularly in context of his Flash development. Nokia has a weblog for this one model... it's described as: "Nokia Nseries N90 Blogger Relations Blog site", apparently more about bloggers than consumers. (I'm intrigued by the N90, but don't know enough about it yet... Bill was documenting his Hong Kong experience in a way more accessible than text... right now it's executive-sized more than consumer-sized, but the way it captures and transmits audio, image and video experience -- with programmable interactivity via Flash -- has the potential to change things.)
Posted by John Dowdell at 4:19 AM
November 28, 2005
10 Rules for Web Startups
10 Rules for Web Startups: Evan Williams (Pyra, Google, Odeo) has a good synopsis here of how business dynamics have changed in the new tech market, particularly when a small group wants to achieve something new. There have been similar lists elsewhere, but this one seems more concise, more relevant.
Posted by John Dowdell at 3:09 PM
Bloggers beaten, whipped
Bloggers beaten, whipped: A bit off-topic, but it's one thing to create technology, another to be able to use it safely: "Over the last year, however, Iranian authorities have arrested and beaten dozens of bloggers, charged with crimes such as espionage and insulting leaders of the Islamic Republic. Among them is Omid Sheikhan, who last month was sentenced to one year in prison and 124 lashes of the whip for writing a blog that featured satirical cartoons of Iranian politicians." Those of us who can write freely have a responsibility to those of us who can't.... [via Memeorandum]
Posted by John Dowdell at 2:59 PM
Bendable 640x480
Bendable 640x480: Samsung announces a prototype display screen, made of thin bendable plastic, offering full-color support at 640x480 pixels, 7-inch diagonal. (Their previous prototypes had a 5-inch diagonal, half the screen area of the current model.) No production schedule yet, although analysts estimate it would take 18-24 months for such a thing to hit the street. It may take awhile, but fullsized displays are moving to the pocket, too.
Posted by John Dowdell at 2:39 PM
Flash Lite devices DB
Flash Lite devices DB: This chart shows how various current devices support Flash Lite capabilities. (The test is run from here.) The list has a lot more entries than the last time I saw it, and some patterns emerge. The most startling is how there are so many green checkmarks -- there's great homogeneity across devices on these capabilities tests. Some devices do diverge in reporting their current connectivity or memory status, however... there's a Symbian which also doesn't report its current power level correctly, another unit which doesn't offer timezone info... overall, though, there's a great uniformity on how the various devices report their status to the Flash Lite rendering engine. (More info on the Flash Lite mailing list.)
Posted by John Dowdell at 2:17 PM
Ongoing alpha improvements
Ongoing alpha improvements: There's a startling tidbit about Player 8.5 performance in Mark Anders' blog here. Right now there's an alpha 8.5 Player up on Labs, but some isolated benchmarks on internal builds show continued improvement beyond that. One task went from 3.52 seconds in the 7.0 Player to 0.95 seconds in the public alpha 8.5, and is now at 0.59 seconds in internal builds... another long data-rendering task took 15.90 seconds in Flash Player 7, 3.06 seconds in the public alpha 8.5, and is currently 1.25 seconds in internal builds. It's hard to generalize from any single benchmark to overall performance, and things can still change before any final public release, but this seems a good indicator for how fast the new logic will really be.
Posted by John Dowdell at 1:55 PM
MM.com nav feedback
MM.com nav feedback: This already got bumped up by Sean Corfield, and I'll do my bit too... Neil Straghalis of the Macromedia web team is seeking your current pain points on finding desired information on the Macromedia site. All horror stories appreciated, thanks in advance.... ;-)
Posted by John Dowdell at 1:27 PM
Jabber in Breeze
Jabber in Breeze: I haven't seen this press release hit the aggregators yet, so am logging it here: "Macromedia today announced a partnership with Jabber, a leading provider of real-time, standards-based presence and messaging solutions. The companies plan to integrate Macromedia Breeze Meeting and the Jabber Extensible Communications Platform (Jabber XCP)... [to allow] the US Department of Defense and other federal agencies to rapidly deploy a web conferencing, instant messaging, chat, presence, and awareness solution that meets the rigorous standards requirements of the federal government. The first deliverable of the partnership is expected to be available in early 2006 and will enable users to easily launch Breeze Meetings directly from Jabber XCP." I don't have further info, but please let me know in comments here if there are questions I should try to pursue further internally, thanks.
Posted by John Dowdell at 12:58 PM
CANVAS in SWF
CANVAS in SWF: I was just reading of a CANVAS example via Manish Jethani, and from doing some web searches found that Paul Colton has recently added a CANVAS example to his JavaScript-controlled generic-SWF AFLAX library. (AFLAX is a way for JavaScript to specify drawing and logic instructions for a SWF, using the externalInterface API of Macromedia Flash Player 8 -- if you develop in SWF you wouldn't need the extra layer, but it's a helpful advance for those more familiar with JavaScript, and can help make the CANVAS tag more browser-independent.) That's cool enough, but then I saw that he also ported Mario Klingemann's Kaleidoscope from ActionScript to JavaScript -- see JavaScript source -- there's a definite performance drop when the browser passes its interactivity into the SWF, but it's very impressive to see that even such an example is possible. This "write in JavaScript to control a SWF" approach is still bending my brain a little, but I think it's a rich area for future work, melding the web technologies together even tighter than before -- check it out!
Posted by John Dowdell at 12:08 PM
Hackery costs
Hackery costs: Tantek Celic discusses the long-term effects of getting overly tricksy with CSS. The article is long, starts with detail and bounces back between viewponts, but I think the main point is "stay in the mainstream when rendering on a range of Other Peoples Engines". Steven Wood has a similar summary at Molly Holzschlag's blog. When reading this I think of the original principles of HTML as a way that anyone could create hypertext documents, and of the pressure now for increased amounts of arcane knowledge as a higher barrier-to-entry. (Things are more straightforward when designing for a single engine than for multiple engines, naturally... there's also the issue of whether you write a spec and hope everybody else implements it "correctly", or whether you provide a capability and then hope others adopt it.)
Posted by John Dowdell at 4:34 AM
November 27, 2005
More links
More links: News items and blog posts which caught my attention, collected into one entry to avoid overwhelming the aggregators....
Samsung is now the #2 handphone manufacturer in Europe, overtaking Motorola, according to this article in The Korea Times.
"75% of cyber attacks are launched upon web applications", according to this press release for a security company. They guard against unsafe URL parameters, script injections into form fields, data discovery via search engines, more. (I'm not sure whether the remaining 25% is considered to be attacks against browsers, databases, or something else.)
Cisco acquires Scientific Atlanta... "Scientific-Atlanta, based in Lawrenceville, Ga., is the second-largest seller of set-top boxes, after Motorola." This caught my eye because of recent Cisco/Macromedia news on Breeze and gaming, but I have no idea of whether there are connections between these individual items.
Standalone solar streetlights are adding wireless networking abilities... big implications, more at IFTF.
Oliver Steele of Laszlo has put together a cut'n'paste Flash Troll Generator. Reload for more fun & frivolity.
Dow Jones has an article titled "Adobe Plans To Move Fast After Macromedia Deal Closes", quoting Bruce Chizen on the expected pace after the Adobe/Macromedia deal is approved by all governments. "The company also plans to move quickly on marketing bundles of software that combine products from Adobe and Macromedia. 'What we can do quickly is anything that doesn't involve engineering,' said Chizen... 'Probably, the biggest challenge we face right now is prioritizing the many great opportunities in front of us,' said Chizen, listing digital video and photography, Web collaboration, and Internet-enabled mobile devices among the market trends that benefit Adobe."
The "Web Content Accessibility Guidlines 2.0" spec has reached Working Draft stage... here's a more accessible gloss of the spec. The emphasis still seems to be on linear text... I like how Guideline 3.1 says to "Make text content readable and understandable," but I'm not sure I could accurately rephrase the followup text.
DVD form-factor will receive a 60-fold improvement in storage next year, from 5 gigabytes to 300... about 26 hours of broadcast-quality high-definition video signal.
Posted by John Dowdell at 5:04 PM
November 26, 2005
Other device notes
Other device notes: Two other trends which struck me, over the past two weeks in Korea and Hong Kong. One was that I saw more people using full-time electronic prosthetics, usually a phone earpiece perpetually attached, instead of used intermittently as I see in San Francisco. People in clubs always had their earpiece on, and were taking & making calls continually. I didn't see large numbers of people walking around talking to themselves, but did see a shift from using a phone to being a phone. One other pattern struck me by its absence: I still didn't come across much use of the pocket phone to interact with environmental computers, whether placing orders in a restaurant or interacting with a point-of-purchase display or entering the subway. DoCoMo in Japan has been doing a lot with electronic wallets, but we still don't have these pocket computers interacting with other nearby devices yet.
Posted by John Dowdell at 8:23 AM
Mobile surpasses PC
Mobile surpasses PC: Another shock was when I realized what I wasn't seeing in the retail electronics stores -- mobile phones had larger displays than computers, of course, but even pocket media players (like iRiver and Archos) and personal media players (7" screens for DVD/VCD readers, etc) had as many offerings as did notebook computers, and it was only the larger stores which had full desktop computers. The pattern didn't hit me in Seoul or Hong Kong, but I saw it in the smaller shops in Macau and realized it held across the previous regions too. (Macau's an interesting case -- few internet cafes or hotel connectivity, but 55% of its visitors come from mainland China for Macau's casinos -- computers are barely on the radar, but phones offer the full range you'd find elsewhere.) Fullsized computers offer things that pocket computers can't, but the action is clearly in affordable and portable devices now... the revolution has already arrived. The rate of change will be greatest in mobile.
Posted by John Dowdell at 8:23 AM
Native device interfaces
Native device interfaces: One of the strongest shocks I received at MAX Korea was when examining a table of a half-dozen devices which used SWF for the device's native interface -- there were pocket media players like the iRiver U10 and the Viliv P1, standalone learning tools which reminded me of Leapfrog, other items with SWF UIs similar to the Samsung phones, the Kodak cameras, the Jaguar automobiles. (No, they didn't have a car at the expo, but I didn't list the devices and these are all in the same vein. ;-) Why did this table full of Flash-native devices shock me? Because the interfaces were so much more persuasive and enjoyable than the old VisualBasic-style of "let's change all the text when they click" kind of interface. Motion, inertia, graphic integration, a visual design sense for active data, audio reinforcement, retention of context after a user decision -- I knew intellectually that a richer interface is more engaging, but it wasn't until actually toying around with a half-dozen different device-native rich interfaces that I really understood how revolutionary such a difference will be. Don't take my word for it, but please put it on your radar -- please test some native Flash UIs when they come around to your region, I think there's something really big brewing here.
Posted by John Dowdell at 8:22 AM
November 15, 2005
Light blogging
Light blogging: Today's the last day of MAX 2005 Korea, and I'll be flying to MAX 2005 Greater China in Kowloon, Hong Kong tonight. Both cities are bisected by water, with large areas of natural beauty nearby... this is the first time I've visited Seoul and I really wish I could stay longer. (The food is intelligent as well as delicious, mostly vegetables with a good amount of pickles, low-fat meat, moderate carbohydrates, fruit for desserts (persimmons in season! trees are gorgeous!) and there's no social stigma to the healthful capsicum/allium habit. ;-) The one thing I regret is that I was not able to learn more from the unexpectedly large number of people attending this event... I wanted to learn who they were, how they worked, what they hoped to do in this field, why they found it worth their while to invest two days and the money at this conference... I wanted to learn what they've learned about this entire rich-interactivity field we're working in globally, how they see the upcoming decade of change playing out. I guess I better improve my language skills for my next visit. ;-) (See the comment from Kim, Jae-Chul in Justin Everett-Church's blog for the sense I also get of the people here.) Korea has the best broadband penetration in the world, but my time online has been mostly scanning mailing lists and weblogs -- didn't really get a chance to do internet video, or explore how this unprecedented capability affects usage. I did see people in subways using their mobiles as entertainment devices as well as communication devices, but it's still difficult for me to get a quick sense of the social aspects of mobile usage just by walking around town. I'm not sure of my connectivity in Kowloon -- if you come across any hot issues then dropping a link in comments here would help orient me, thanks. I'll be taking a few days' holiday in Hong Kong after the conference, and flying back to San Francisco just before the American Thanksgiving Day airplane rush -- it will probably be another two weeks before I'm back to normal routine here. See ya!
Posted by John Dowdell at 3:41 PM
Server security updates
Server security updates: Three updates went live today, for Breeze, FlashComm, and Contribute servers. (You can sign up for email alerts on these if you wish.) In a related item, that buffer-overflow Player issue is still percolating around the media -- once found the exploit was immediately addressed in the 8.0 Player, which was then in final stages of release -- last week Players for older operating systems (Mac Classic etc) were updated, and that's when the exploit was publicized in the press -- Microsoft also recommends these updates because Macromedia Flash Player is the only non-Microsoft software included within recent versions of Windows. Some of the press played this latter angle up, saying "Suppose MS unbundles Flash!?", but these reporters don't seem to realize that Flash has a much faster adoption rate than Windows -- I don't have firm numbers yet, but it seems like Macromedia Flash Player 8 audience size will exceed that of Windows XP Service Pack 2 very soon, in just a few months of website-only distribution.
Posted by John Dowdell at 3:38 PM
Lynch, live, Spark
Lynch, live, Spark: This hit the aggregators yesterday, but I'm repeating it because not everyone can read every item there anymore, and because some read this blog who don't read the Macromedia-oriented aggregators. Kevin Lynch, Chief Software Architect at Macromedia (and upcoming parallel role at Adobe) will be doing the keynote at Spark conference in Amsterdam Thursday evening (see time conversions), and the keynote will apparently have some time of live video at spark.fabchannel.com (currently redirects to front page). I don't have first-hand info, but received some copy from PR: "Fabchannel.com is one of the biggest online concert archives in the world. During this event they'll be launching their new website using Flash 8 and Flash Media Server 2." I don't think Kevin will be in a position to speak much of the future... well, there's a chance the deal could finally close by then, I guess... still, this is one of the best ways to pick up the flavor of future directions, and I'd recommend the live session if you're near a good connection at that time.
Posted by John Dowdell at 3:28 PM
November 14, 2005
MS headhunters
MS headhunters: Damon Cooper of Macromedia has a blog note here, making a request that recruiters keep things on the up-and-up rather than coldcall around the shop. Damon doesn't have comments open, and I'm a bit too jet-lagged to even think of the diplomatic use of private email, but hey Damon, why don't we just have team members continue to set up appointments and break them? or make counter-offers to the headhunters, set up appointments to discuss how they can make triple the commissions, and then break those? or isn't there an online pizza service where... nah, I better stop now, but there's something always a little bit clinical about treating people as objects like that, I share the frustration.... :(
Posted by John Dowdell at 9:55 PM
November 9, 2005
Tailranking MXNA?
Tailranking MXNA? Kevin Burton today launched Tailrank: "A personalized recommendation engine where you and your contacts control the ranking!" I've just had time today to play with it a bit, read the FAQ, but I won't be able to sign up for membership for awhile to see how the recommendation system works. But... I wonder if there's some way that we can use this engine to find the most common recent recommendations made among the 600 bloggers aggregated at MXNA... maybe feeding it the various outbound blended & categorized RSS from MXNA, or setting up a special "social" or "local" group where we can find the out-of-MXNA news which gets the most in-MXNA recommendations, something like that.... Does this area interest you? Do you have time to do some experimenting with Tailrank, to see if we in the MXNA universe can find something new of value with it...? (In a similar vein, Mike Davidson announced his news-collecting project today.)
Posted by John Dowdell at 8:54 PM
Off to Seoul
Off to Seoul: I'll be travelling the next two weeks, part business part pleasure, first to Seoul for MAX Korea, then MAX Hong Kong. I'm not sure of my connectivity or surfing schedule, but will be popping in as opportunity (and footsoreness!) permit. See you!
Posted by John Dowdell at 5:38 PM
Audible Ajax on MM
Audible Ajax on MM: Good listening... Dion Almaer and Ben Galbraith of Ajaxian.com got the chance to sit down with Christian Cantrell, check out some SWF tech, and came away with a very good feeling about what the universal runtime can offer them as JavaScript-oriented developers. If you've been beaten down by one too many "this will crush that" assertions, then give a listen to this MP3 file for a stronger, more useful perspective. We're all just geeks, just trying to get useful stuff done.
Posted by John Dowdell at 5:25 PM
Flashblock usability
Flashblock usability: Chris Radcliff has a good comment here, in Parand Tony Darugar's mention of Justin's "Pirate Map" example, and of us his use of the Flashblock Firefox extension: "I'm less concerned with the maps on the Yahoo! sites themselves, and more concerned with folks who would include them on their own sites, a la Google Maps. It's in those cases that I'll have a hard time determining the difference between a functional component and an advertisement." Should that extension filter on the standard advertising sizes? or should users know when they visit a page why they're there? or should page-design indicate in text its richer content? or...? Whatever, it's a good point -- if you hide stuff, how would you know when you want to see it?
Posted by John Dowdell at 3:42 PM
Browser tabs usability
Browser tabs usability: Ben Goodger, Mozilla developer who is now supported by Google, writes of testing how people actually use tabbed browsing. The focus here is putting a close-window button on each tab. I've used this in Safari and it's handy for closing background tabs without re-rendering them, although it cuts down on the number of pixels available for the title. I'd really like to consolidate two windows worth of tabs too... right now I CTRL-C, click, CTRL-T, CTRL-V to consolidate two windows with three remaining tabs each. Would be good to be able to name windows too....
Posted by John Dowdell at 3:33 PM
Hotpads.com
HotPads.com Mapper I caught this link in a GeekNews opinionfest... the site combines mapping and real estate data, so that you can find a given dwelling in a given range in a given area.
Posted by John Dowdell at 3:29 PM
MS browser dependence
MS browser dependencies: This post from "Scott", whom I think is a Microsoft staffer (I could search, but he could list his name too), talks about some of the browser dependencies that prevent their DHTML/AJaX sites from working outside of IE/Win and Firefox. (The live.com site today adds Firefox, but still fails without feedback to Safari or other browsers... John Welch captured how I feel about the need for usefully guiding visitors about their experience.) More from surnameless Scott here.
Posted by John Dowdell at 3:23 PM
Winer on MS leak
Winer on MS leak: I pulled this link through Memeorandum, and one line particularly caught me: "It's always frustrating to read these memos through the filters of mainstream reporters. I wanted to read the memo myself, but more important, I wanted my fellow bloggers to have a chance to read Gates' and Ozzie's words directly, without interpretation, and decide for themselves what they were saying, trying to figure out what they're thinking and form their own opinions on whether it makes sense." So that's what you wanted. What about what the creators of those words wanted? They didn't send those words to you, or to the New York Times -- the creator of that media sent it to their desired audience. Trafficking in purloined media of uncertain authenticity -- not good karma, that "might makes right" kind of approach. :( (I'm keeping alive the hypothesis that it's all a ploy, a stealth campaign by MS, and that Dave received the text from Ray Ozzie personally, but I think that's an unlikely scenario.)
Posted by John Dowdell at 8:44 AM
November 8, 2005
Pocket content
Pocket content: Eye-opening article at The Hollywood Reporter about centralized media's need for interactive design on pocket devices: "While it looks as though Microsoft could provide the operating systems for many devices and platforms, and that Yahoo! and Google could provide management and search, it is unclear as to who or what will provide the next generation of content and services designed for interactive consumers... Although branded content will have a strong draw, interactive consumers are more sophisticated and demanding. They will pay for content and services that enrich and enhance their lives and reflect their personal interests and needs. It's as much about data as it is about video... The proliferation of devices and networks for securing content, information and services make it competitively critical to do more than just recycle existing films, television shows, recorded music, video games, sports and news... What's required is a call for a genuine creative awakening not only in Hollywood and New York but everywhere in between where artists, writers, producers, animators and performers reside." I'm not sure whether 90% of the business will be done through 5 storefronts or 5000 storefronts, but it's great to see such consensus emerging on personalized rich-media interactivity, with the need for a sustainable business model. [via Memeorandum]
Posted by John Dowdell at 10:11 PM
MySpace & EMBEDs?
MySpace & EMBEDs? Anyone have more info on this? I was running some searches on current discussions, and see that myspace.com has temporarily blocked EMBED tags in the content they host, which has had an effect on many people who use SWF for audio or video players, cyberpets, more. I'm not sure about the "filtering EMBEDs" claim... seems like they'd have to temporarily block OBJECT tags too, for any practical effect. But I haven't been able to search up source info. Anybody got more context? Thanks!
Posted by John Dowdell at 5:19 PM
Yahoo Maps links
Yahoo Maps links: Justin Everett-Church showed today how mapping data can be even further separated from its presentation, by incorporating live Yahoo Maps data into a "magic pirate" interface, and an "x-files radar screen" interface... Sho Kuwamoto notes the difference, and Ryan Guill opened it up on digg.com. The Yahoo Maps Application Gallery has a whole bunch of recent additions towards the bottom (with both Flash and JavaScript UIs), and there's also a mailing list on the subject. Merhl Interactive is using it for office display -- reminds me an example I saw last week of Macromedia User Group locations (I can't find link now -- if you know it, please hit comments, thanks!). Michael van Leest has already tweaked some of the source to his liking. Charlene Li found it more useful than prior maps. James Fee and Jibbering weighed in on the "nay" side. NextMUNI uses transponders in San Francisco buses and seems like a good candidate... they've got Java and Google JavaScript interfaces but I'm not sure whether they provide an open data service. If you've got more links that you think people should know about, please drop them in the comments to this entry, thanks!
Posted by John Dowdell at 4:02 PM
Etsy marketplace
Etsy marketplace: Billed as "your place to buy and sell all things handmade", the database has a number of pretty SWF interfaces from Jared Tarbell... you can browse items from when they were submitted, to where they were submitted from, to colors and more. Marc Hedlund picked up on this in September, but I didn't pick up on it until today from Michael Arrington.
Posted by John Dowdell at 2:58 PM
Perlin textures
Perlin textures: Great work from Joel May here... this example is for generating marble-like bitmaps in Macromedia Flash Player 8, and he also has an example of wood shaders too. If you're interested in this area, check out the RenderMan Repository, which contains links to many procedural shaders and tips. The RenderMan stuff calculates pixel values in 3D space, where in Flash we work with a 2D surface, but the octave-like randomizations in Perlin calculations are a vital part of the toolkit in both. Compute-intensive, but pretty!
Posted by John Dowdell at 2:38 PM
"Looks best in"
"Looks best in": Another great example of the need for browser-centric apps to offer good support pages -- I again took a recommendation from Scoble, and spent time before discovering (through his commenters!) that it's an "only in IE" kind of website. Put that info up front -- make an interface that doesn't uselessly eat the time of viewers -- at least put a link on the front page to something like this browser matrix if there are strong clientside dependencies.
Posted by John Dowdell at 12:56 PM
Player update story
Player update story: From what I understand, on June 27 security researchers found that Macromedia Flash Player 6.x and 7.x did not validate the formatting of animation frame headers, leading to a possible buffer overflow -- my thanks to these researchers for alerting Macromedia Security. Changes to prevent this buffer overflow were rolled into the Macromedia Flash Player 8, in beta release on July 12, and subsequent final consumer release. Last week the Players for older platforms which only run the 7.x generation were also updated, as well as many of the alternate platforms. Some articles portray it as a "finally" situation, but looking at the wider picture shows the actual staged release. Upshot? If your clients or contacts hear a press account and are concerned, then that's all the more reason to use the current version, and if they're on a very old operating system then there are updated 7.x Players too.
Posted by John Dowdell at 12:11 PM
Windows Update today
Windows Update today: New changes available today -- installation requires visiting the above URL in Internet Explorer, then an autoscan/download/install/restart sequence. More info at Washington Post and Microsoft. There's also a phishing exploit reported today, where an HTML email spoofs an MS address and provides a false link to install something -- it may be good to remind colleagues that it's safer to type addresses into a browser than to click on links from strangers.
Posted by John Dowdell at 11:46 AM
Sudden Popularity Syndrome
Sudden Popularity Syndrome: "Tech Recipes" writes of what happens when your website is recommended on the front page of digg.com, and how this compares with the Slashdot effect. Meanwhile there's a parallel discussion of gaming Memeorandum -- or, more specifically, gaming tech.memeorandum.com, which appears to have a very different social dynamic than the original version about general current events. The weblog system can have real effects on writers, and writers can have real effects on the system, and I'm not sure how much of it all we can take at face value anymore....
Posted by John Dowdell at 8:10 AM
November 7, 2005
Won't fit under tree
Won't fit under tree: ... and it's not a pocket gadget either, but if you're looking for a seven-foot-tall gift for the geek of your life, then this fully-controllable Robby the Robot from Hammacher-Schlemmer will fit the bill. A steal at only $49,999.95, a fraction of the original!
Posted by John Dowdell at 3:53 PM
JSifying SWF
JSifying SWF: You may be comfortable using SWF-producing tools, but not everyone is. That's why I think Paul Colton's AFLAX routine is cool. If I'm understanding it correctly, he offers a generic SWF file (aflax.swf), and a matching generic JavaScript file (aflax.js) to talk to this SWF. Then in a second JavaScript file you can write instructions for the desired effects. See this barchart.js file -- it's like a JavaScript developer is writing to a richer rendering engine than what they normally write to, giving a result like this. Advantages? More approachable for those already using a JS-centric workflow. Disadvantages? Calling more files, more parsing than with a precompiled SWF. It took me a little while to figure out what was going on, and I may still be offbase, but offering Flash-y effects to any JavaScript developer to play in any browser sounds like a good goal to me.
Posted by John Dowdell at 3:20 PM
November 6, 2005
Mobile gardens
Mobile gardens: Something that always confused me about what you could get on a particular phone: "T-Mobile and Cingular allow their subscribers to access features that are, in the obscure parlance of the wireless world, 'off deck.' That means if users know where to look on the Web, they can sign up for content that is not discernibly featured on the phone. For example, Cingular and T-Mobile subscribers can shop on the Web's numerous ringtone stores, even though their carriers don't explicitly feature those services. Verizon and Sprint, on the other hand, currently limit access to such off-deck content." There's also discussion of Sprint's "mobile virtual network operators", where Disney or ESPN sell a Sprint phone branded in both hardware and in default services. North American orientation to this Newsweek article, but useful.
Posted by John Dowdell at 10:52 AM
CANVAS via SWF?
CANVAS via SWF? Do you know of anyone working on rendering Safari's CANVAS tag in a SWF file, to increase the range of CANVAS-supporting browsers? Right now it's recent MacOS Safari versions, and the beta Firefox 1.5. But it seems possible for an in-page SWF to request the CANVAS instructions, parse them and draw them, and for a standard JavaScript sniffer to show SWF or not depending on which browser runs it. (I got here from a link by Simon Willison to Jesse Andres -- bar charts, animated rectangles, and also a live-data line graph.) Do you know of any work on rendering CANVAS in SWF...?
Posted by John Dowdell at 10:31 AM
More links
More links: Lots of interesting news and perspectives which isn't on-topic enough to put as individual items in the aggregators, but which has too much value to just close out of unacknowledged... lots of different material, in the extended entry here....
Re: the ICANN/ITU "Who Should Rule Internet?" debate, Kofi Annan op/eds in WaPo that The U.N. Isn't a Threat to the Net: "One mistaken notion is that the United Nations wants to 'take over,' police or otherwise control the Internet. Nothing could be farther from the truth." But history shows that promises may need deeper backing. Foreign Affairs has context from the other side of the debate, about what's called the Monroe Doctrine for minimal interference with civilians' Internet use.
Dion Hinchcliffe writes of 10 Issues Facing Web 2.0, noting these as excessive hype, lack of functional definition, need for new showcase sites, need to support occasional connectivity, over-reliance on browser scripting, focusing on production details rather than usage details, co-optation of the marketing label, bad talk/walk ratio, more in the essay and the comments.
Gecko 1.0 Roadmap, in early draft... they hope that this work includes improved graphics and layout capabilities, better JavaScript that seems to be a subset of ECMA-262 specs (hard for me to tell, but sounds like it will continue to share structure with ActionScript 3, although maybe not all the same constructs), better cookies (with discussion of possibly using Flash's shared objects), attempt to handle occasional connectivity, making the browser itself a plugin for other apps, more work done in security, plugin cooperation, debugging. (All this is tentative and early on their part, and subject to reading errors on my part.)
Meanwhile, Simon Willison links to some demos from Jesse Andres of the CANVAS tag, introduced in recent Apple Safari versions and adopted by the beta Firefox 1.5. I can't easily view these at the moment, but I'm intrigued by the idea -- seems like it would be possible to make any browser a CANVAS-supporting browser, through use of ActionScript parsing & drawing routines and a JavaScript dynamic-pagewriting routine, right...?
Dale Rankine writes of how internet telephony is being parasitized by spammers now. (I think architectures work best when the system itself is open to all, but when any individual can block out who they wish, so we don't risk riling the intolerant with unwanted signal. But anti-spam measures need to be handled at the beginning, not after something gets popular enough to be a target.)
Virtual Microsoft in a Firefox tab... wild, but makes sense. (Emulation can help speed testing, but I connections and processors still vary across devices.)
Yahoo Maps spurred some anti-Flash whinging, but what's remarkable is the lack of followup when pressed... leaves the impression that it's a social stance rather than a legit request for improvement -- here, here and here.
Spark Blog has news of the Flash-centric conference in Amsterdam this week.
Ken @ Gizzar "Photoshop is not for web design, but Macromedia Fireworks is": "The Bad Designer Trick is to still use Dreamweaver/Photoshop to do your web designs."
Rich Ziade writes of beyond-the-browser work. Part of the rationale is similar to my data & interface rant, but he also focuses on reduced consumer costs and faster adoption being the real engine behind technical developments.
Bill Gates hits those similar themes of needing better remote services and better interfaces across a better range of devices. (After the audience is assured we can start lowering production costs: compiler comparisons, code-hinting, whatever.)
International Herald Tribune writes of how the rural/urban economic gap is narrowing in India, even as it is increasing in China, and even as the differences widen within rural India itself as its economic ecologies become more complex.
Peter Ent describes the new Flash/Flex interaction at Sys-Con/France.
Tom Foremski writes of anti-syndication, how some engines impose more costs on creators than they return in value.
WikiNotes seems like a single-machine, multi-page text editor, using Wiki editing conventions. I replaced my old home iBook with a PowerBook last month and will probably try this out... at first I was apprehensive of loading executable code from an unknown site, but the source code has been released for modification by others... such transparency helps in trust issues too.
The US Federal Communications Commission is investigating whether local political power is being used to block rival media services. (At one point the digging of cable lines provided a rationale for local political permission...)
Shanghai Daily reports on need for state ID before playing certain networked games... part of the rationale is about "killer" games (related to virtual economies?)... game services are required to set the score of a heavy player to zero after they play a certain number of hours.
Jack Herrington writes of Java at O'Reilly, and digs deep into how dysfunctional beliefs can get in the way of finding the best-fitting tools for a task. "A good engineer has a variety of tools in their toolkit and is always looking for new tools that can speed development." Related: "I direct this to the vocal programming community at large: Why does it take people so damn long to figure out these huge mistakes? I think there is this hubris or pride in the programmer community. If you aren’t doing something really complicated like that other guy, then you aren’t smart... Change the word 'complicated' to 'productive' and see if you don’t get on the right track."
Mohandas Gandhi writes "First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win." Not new, maybe, but it just seemed apropos recently.
A Californian is arrested for his 400,000 unit botnet.
A Yahoo Maps piece from Jeremy Zawodny draws this comment about expecting that Yahoo should tie together data from its various services... Jeremy responds that you should be careful what you wish for. Robert Oschler also describes his appreciation of the Maps API there.
Phil Wainewright writes "How many times over should you pay for software?" in regards to pricing models, but seems to have an undercurrent that one size fits all, and doesn't remark that a contract is strongest when it's between two consenting parties. (You may want a service at a one-time price rather than an annual price, and if the other party does not agree, then that opens a space for a new service.)
Ryan Stewart writes of objections to Microsoft, in context of Flex. "When you hire a Macromedia developer who is in touch with the community you get the resources of all the bloggers, newsgroups and Macromedia team members who help out new developers and contribute to the community." Also: "The bread and butter of Flash is that basically everyone has it, and more importantly, everyone upgrades quickly to the newest version." Lengthy reply from Scott Barnes too.
Rick Segal put out a "Macromedia: Corporate-speak is alive" piece, yet didn't come back to pick up comments, even after getting linked late by Scoble. (Rick's a solid guy, I assume this is an oversight, but geez....)
Posted by John Dowdell at 8:00 AM
November 5, 2005
Bloggers bundle Firefox Toolbar
Bloggers bundle Firefox Toolbar: Sort of amusing, but I might be misunderstanding it... the popular weblog revenue source Google AdSense is offering to pay $1 for each blog visitor who installs the Firefox browser with Google Toolbar from an ad on the weblog page. Discussion is all over the map at Slashdot.
Posted by John Dowdell at 9:46 AM
Casual video
Casual video: Red Herring surveys recent trends in videoblogs, and includes a great quote on how the medium changes the message: "'I think the big mistake people are making now is they're thinking how do I get television onto the Internet -- downloading episodes of Lost, putting an old format into a new place,' said Mr. Dedman, who also lives in New York City. He advocates more creativity. 'Because it's so easy to make this stuff, it's really anyone's ballgame.'" More: "'Desperate Housewives' is not going to go away... But it doesn't matter if my production is screwy or if I don't look pretty. It's about using this neat medium to show how you can build robots."
Posted by John Dowdell at 9:04 AM
November 4, 2005
Custom context menus
Custom context menus: Ethan Malasky revived his blog to put up these samples of the new Player context menu customization available in Macromedia Flash Player 8. I know people are interested in this area, and he isn't back in the aggregator yet, so I'm linking here right now. (I'm sitting in the 2nd floor lobby, watching people walk by, and Ethan said "Hey, how can I get this blog item noticed?" I said "Well, go home and write an anonymous flame about lack of context menu control, and somebody will find you through Google" and we both laughed... not that we've ever done anything like that, mind you, it's just that that's the way the net works.) Anyway... interested in better context menus for SWFs in browsers? Check Ethan. ;-)
Posted by John Dowdell at 5:14 PM
Open sensor formats
Open sensor formats: Jeffrey Veen points out how device data (in this case, a sports heart-rate monitor) is still often tied to a particular software application, rather than being in a more neutral format like XML where it can be manipulated in ways unimagined by the device creators. Lots of comment, too. (I'm not into telling a device manufacturer what they "should" do, but am thinking more of the expanded business opportunities if their device's data can be used in unexpected ways.)
Posted by John Dowdell at 4:20 PM
US PVRs 11%
US PVRs 11%: The stat looks good -- that 11% of Americans polled now use a harddrive-based television for some of their viewing -- but I can't substantiate it on the source site. More thoughts via Memeorandum.
Posted by John Dowdell at 3:36 PM
MIT iSPOTS
MIT iSPOTS: Massachusetts Institute of Technology collects data on local network activity, displays them in a series of SWFs. I'm not sure of their data collection/integration scheme -- not sure if this is an optimized public presentation. Background on the need for wireless usage analysis is here. [via Paul Heersink?]
Posted by John Dowdell at 2:20 PM
Who turns off JS?
Who turns off JS? Tom Dell'Aringa starts a great discussion on Evolt about the possibly-mythical non-interactive browser. Responses include "mobile", "accessibility" (ok for rollovers, tough with data), and (my favorite) "c'mon, who really uses Lynx anymore!?" Chris from Globet and Volkan Ozcelik write of why a web designer might want to turn it off, while Eike Pierstorff and Hal Smith point out that not all individuals have full control over their own computers.
Posted by John Dowdell at 1:20 PM
Approaching Flex
Approaching Flex: I'm highlighting a post from Matt Chotin here... there's lots of excitement around Flex 2.0, even though it's in early public alpha and resource sites are few. Knowing the Macromedia Flash MX visual authoring tool helps in understanding the SWF format and clientside Player, but its authoring metaphors don't really help in approaching the XML-written interfaces of Flex. The principles in "Developing Rich Clients" apply across Flex versions.
Posted by John Dowdell at 12:33 PM
The VC Squeeze
The VC Squeeze: Paul Graham has one of the best essays I've seen on recent changes in the tech economy. It's easier to start a business now -- costs are much lower, investment money is easier to find -- but harder to take it public due to increased regulation. So now the goal is to start a business and sell it (see The Flip 2K5" by Anil Dash). Venture capitalists have found themselves in a new business. Paul has many other essays -- I liked what I saw in quick readings of What Business Can Learn from Open Source" and Inequality and Risk".
Posted by John Dowdell at 12:24 PM
Michelle's Raycaster
Michelle's Raycaster: I just passed by the cube of Scott Fegette and saw that he had a really fast 3D navigation open on his desktop, and I stopped in my tracks to stare. Andre Michelle has updated some old ActionScript raycasting code for the Macromedia Flash Player 8.5 Alpha, and... uh... it was a beautiful thing. If you've got a second machine, or some type of virtual machine or plugin-switcher, then this is worth looking at!
Posted by John Dowdell at 12:09 PM
New Player for old OS
New Player for old OS: Macromedia Flash Player 7 ran on WinNT, Win95, Mac Classic... Macromedia Flash Player 8 requires newer systems, and so bids Mac Classic a fond adieu. But FP7/Win95 etc have been updated with some security and stability fixes, and this newer Player is recommended for older machines. (If you've got a fairly current OS, then the regular Macromedia Flash Player 8 is advised.)
Posted by John Dowdell at 12:02 PM
Inside Leapfrog
Inside Leapfrog: Josh McHugh, at WIRED, profiles "the fastest-growing toy company in history". Lots of Macromedia staffers and technology have worked at Leapfrog, but now they're bypassing a visual interface in going for tactile input and audio output: the $99 "Fly Pen", which uses special microgridded paper to determine its position and the shapes drawn, and whose processor then speaks to the user. Stirring stuff.
Posted by John Dowdell at 8:17 AM
Labs CSS
Labs CSS: Neil Straghalis, of Macromedia's web team, discusses the Cascading Style Sheets strategy of Macromedia Labs. Labs "inherits" the modular styling structure of the main mm.com site, but overrides certain instructions within a single Labs stylesheet. All the different microsites within the Macromedia domain can be updated with one edit, even though a single class may be described in multiple stylesheets, and even though each microsite may still have its own personality.
Posted by John Dowdell at 7:38 AM
November 3, 2005
Linux recommendation
Linux recommendation: One trend I'm seeing among the "Yahoo Maps slow" posts has been unhappiness on Linux. Tinic Uro has already documented the difficulties of advanced media capabilities on that variegated platform (and yes, we're still hiring), but at the above links is one person's comparison of various Linux distributions across multiple systems, and the recommendation is for the SuSE 10, which includes standard web material like SWF and PDF rendering.
Posted by John Dowdell at 5:43 PM
Yahoo ups Flex
Yahoo ups Flex: I'm doing a Technorati trawl and coming across a good number of posts where the Yahoo Maps example was the writer's first notice of Flex 2.0... Barry LaChapelle above has a "new best friend" feeling... Simon Willison hadn't examined Flex before but found the syntax compelling... WeBreakStuff had been hearing about Flex, but the example entices... DAT also has Flex on the radar... Bill Rawlinson is aware of the difference between Flash and Flex... Hannes Moser doesn't mention Yahoo Maps but had his first sit-down session with Flex 2.0 alpha today. We're in an interesting place right now, where those who are familiar with the ZMZ announcements are very excited, but where it's off-the-radar of most of the webtech world... it's fascinating to see awareness start to seep into the general discussion.
Posted by John Dowdell at 5:38 PM
Slow maps?
Slow maps? I'm struck by the great diversity in opinions on the performance of Yahoo Maps -- lots of people say it's very fast, but there's a significant number saying they see some undefined slowness. I'm trying to get a better handle on this difference. I'm a little skeptical this can be done through a weblog post to a crowd, but I want to give it a shot. If you've "got slow", then (a) browser brand/version? (b) OS? (c) browser window size? (d) how many browser tabs/windows open, or does performance change when this is done solo? (e) what, specifically, is slow (loading map data usually, but some seem "other"; this detail may be hardest to nail in a public forum) (f) can you render videos normally? If there's something addressable behind this "it's fast! no it's slow!" argument then I'd like to discover it, thanks.
Posted by John Dowdell at 4:53 PM
Amazon's Mechanical Turk
Amazon's Mechanical Turk: Kinky, but makes sense... Amazon introduces a programming API where you can request that a human make a judgment on a decision ("is this an objectionable photo?" eg). Lets your program utilize human judgment, while paying the judger for their time. (The name "Mechanical Turk" will likely be a hot-button these days, but the historical precedent is real: a supposed machine that was actually a human. Not related to Laffing Sal, who actually has a closer connection to the Doggie Diner heads, via Vito Lawtoni, but I digress.... ;-) Anyway, this seems like a great way to make computers smarter by trading with people in low-income areas, I hope it works out. [via Jason Fried]
Posted by John Dowdell at 4:06 PM
Ads, choice, rights
Ads, choice, rights: Heather Armstrong of dooce.com takes in advertising to support her weblog (and her writing thereof), then takes in complaints from readers who don't like the ads. Meanwhile Kim Cavanaugh links to both this and a Miami Herald op/ed by Edward Wasserman about how costs are a vital feedback measure on the usefulness of a piece of work. Me? I'm gonna charge the next person who writes "flash is just ads!" $20 for each sentence they put in front of my eyeballs, gotta get that feedback back to them, do my piece for the ecology.... ;-)
Posted by John Dowdell at 3:46 PM
Yahoo Maps notes
Yahoo Maps notes: This was the big news on tech.memeorandum.com today, although I don't think most writers yet realize that this was created through XML and Flex rather than the visual authoring tool. (They will, though. ;-) In the extended entry here are notes from my morning reading of what people are saying. If you've got time for only one link, I'd strongly recommend the range of examples, delivered as SWF or HTML/JS, at Yahoo's Application Gallery -- it's really astonishing, the range of interfaces people have already created for this service.
Michael Bazeley and Solution Watch describe the advantages of the Yahoo interface from a user's point of view... a good intro for those who wonder why they'd want to use the app, rather than how it was made.
In comments at 37 Signals: "the only thing that i didn’t like about it was that after browsing around on the map, i had a bunch of yahoo entries in my history, so i had to hit the back button about 50 times to get back to where i thought i should have gone with a single back-click." (I think it's cool that Yahoo Maps shows it's possible to get application states into the browser's navigation stack, but I always found that "back button doesn't work right" objection to be strange anyway -- the browser navigates documents, and I suspect that an Undo function would be better in the app-on-the-page than in the page-switching mechanism.)
At Metafilter, after a bunch of content-free "eww flash!" comments, someone tickles my snarkybone by writing: "Did Flash steal your girlfriend once or something?" (The Metafilter comments also mention Paul Neave's work, which I appreciate.)
Top negatives have been "Where's Europe?" and "slow for me". Working out legal agreements for mapping data for all countries takes more time than for one country, please don't feel slighted. The "slow for me" posts usually alternate with "wow it's fast!" posts, which should provide a clue... I'm guessing most of those with slower action are in Firefox/Mac, and if so, then try Safari for faster performance on the same machine. (For escalation, try detailing what precisely is slow, whether it's loading new map data, or scrolling with already-local map data, or a particular operation... I hit it in FF/Mac on dialup early this morning and app performance was great, but loading new map data remained the sticking point.)
I saw a couple of comments from people who said they couldn't see it in Firefox with FlashBlocker, but that combo works normally for me... I can't yet repro their reports, don't know yet what the missing ingredient is to see the problem.
Rich Ziade likes it, and gets two "but my 64-bit linux!" comments in reply. Then he writes something which somehow sounds much more persuasive from him than from me: "Let's be realistic folks. Flash is arguably the most widely deployed platform in the world. Anyone who's suffered thru browser compliance efforts across Safari, Opera, IE, Mozilla knows the pain avoided." I guess this means I owe Rich a beer.... ;-)
Mike Chambers notes that MXNA now has a Yahoo-specific view into 600 weblogs via the Yahoo Maps Smart Category. (What makes it "smart"? It combines categorization with some text analysis to find releveant posts automatically.)
If you use HTML or other markup, then take a look at Jesse Warden's example on Flexcoders. Yes, this markup produces an interactive SWF file! You do not need to look at a timeline or asset library if you don't wish -- you can mark up text which is then compiled to SWF if you wish. More info on Flex 2 is at Macromedia Labs.
Nat Torkington at O'Reilly has one of the better early write-ups on advantages of the Yahoo services API over others... Simon Willison also focuses on the services, rather than just a particular interface.
Jeremy Zawodny has a whole bunch of selected links to posts from others on this set of applications... in comments people particularly appreciate the geocoding API, which finds where you are in a very HarryPotter-ish way.
One of the longest negatives is at netweb blog, but the text itself has some usability problems... I'm guessing he's waiting for map data for a new region to be transferred to his machine.
Robert Scoble had a multi-screenful hunkatext on the subject, which after three readings I think just boils down to "Google has better ads".
By now there's probably been a second round of writing... if you saw something which would be good to get into this edited list of links, then please feel free to add it in comments, many thanks! :)
Posted by John Dowdell at 12:09 PM
November 2, 2005
Google UI
Google UI: A viewpoint I hadn't seen before, at least not this way... you can search to find Google Suggest, but the navigation guidance is tricky, for instance. "Don't you find it disturbing the very company that is supposed to open up the web doesn't open its web site, doesn't provide a straightforward interface and doesn't apply their wonderful scripting capabilities to their site?" Then again, it can be hard to find things on the Macromedia site too, things need to improve all around....
Posted by John Dowdell at 5:27 PM
MiniPC, Linux
MiniPC, Linux: "A Taiwanese systems integrator is readying a tiny Linux-powered PC likely to make even Mac Mini owners envious. The AOpen MiniPC measures 6.5 x 6.5 x 2 inches, is powered by an Intel Pentium M or Celeron M processor, and runs Linspire Linux... The A-Open MiniPC will ship this month in the US through TigerDirect, with prices starting at $399, including the Linspire operating system. A $499 version running Windows XP will also be available."
Posted by John Dowdell at 5:17 PM
SGI delisted
SGI delisted: A nod to computer history here... Silicon Graphics has been removed from the New York Stock Exchange. [via OS News]
Posted by John Dowdell at 5:07 PM
March to 220 Mill
March to 220 Mill: One more Microsoft-spurred stat before I shut up.... ;-) Last month I marveled at all the media attention Firefox got for seeing a hundred million downloads in a year (including updaters), while Macromedia Flash Player 8 transformed a hundred million consumer machines within a short month. Here, Niall Kennedy has another stat from the Microsoft press event: there have been 220 million online installs of Windows XP Service Pack 2 since it was released in Aug 2004. Because SP2 is a must-have update for security reasons, it seems reasonable to put the number of up-to-date Windows systems at 220 million (keeping in mind that Win2K is still more popular than WinXP). Shooting from the hip, it looks likely the up-to-date Flash audience will exceed the up-to-date Windows audience by the end of this year, doesn't it...?
Posted by John Dowdell at 3:58 PM
You oughter be in pitchers
You oughter be in pitchers: The Macromedia Showcase galleries are currently seeking early adopters of Studio 8 for case studies, profiles, EDGE interviews, more. The choice of projects can be hard to predict, because it depends on lots of different criteria -- not just the technology itself, but also client profile (Fortune 500 *do* have an edge), field of work, previous showpieces etc. But if you've used Studio 8 on a finished site already, then you've got an advantage over other contenders right now -- give it a shot, you might get a profile!
Posted by John Dowdell at 3:33 PM
Staffing levels
Staffing levels: One other thing I've been thinking about lately has been what a "big company" is. When I started at Macromedia there were just over a hundred employees, and the Hoover link above shows this grew to 1213 people by the end of 2004. That's a big company, alright. Hoover lists Adobe at 3,142 staffers in 2004... 2.5 times as big, and I'm not sure what the post-acquisition staffing level will be. But Microsoft has 50 staffers for every Macromedian... 57,000 employees total! Macromedia has grown by an order of magnitude while I've been here, and with Adobe it will be a larger company still, but even so it will be more than an order of magnitude smaller than other companies with which it is compared. Proves nothing, just provides some context....
Posted by John Dowdell at 3:18 PM
Microsoft validation
Microsoft validation: I woke up in the middle of the night, reading a lot of the commentary about Microsoft's press event yesterday, and it all still reads ambiguously to me. But one trend which emerged was the increasing validation (by Microsoft as well as others) of themes we've all been discussing here the last few years. AJaX validated the separation of data and presentation introduced by RIAs... the Sparkle talk validated vectors and richer media and clientside processing... Tim O'Reilly had a key line on yesterday's speeches: "There's an emphasis on rich client experiences. The trend that Macromedia started a few years back, that AJAX has fueled, is front and center here". (Tim also mentioned the non-PC trajectory being validated too.) In the Robert Scoble piece linked above, this line caught my eye: "Yesterday I talked with Jenny Lam. You might not know her. But she’s one of Microsoft’s new leaders. To me, she’s the face of where Microsoft MUST GO. She’s an experience designer." Or, more succinctly, "Experience Matters". ;-) I think it's great that we're all coming to agree on the core principles here -- the increasing consensus shows that the last five years of work has been in the right direction.
Posted by John Dowdell at 2:52 PM
Universal Video
Universal Video: I'm not sure of the details of this, but the press release sounds good... Guba.com offers search of the videos posted to Usenet binaries newsgroups over the past two decades, and converts it to SWF for "universal playback capabilities". I don't see corresponding details in their FAQ or site yet, though. (I'm also not sure of the business model, because from what I've seen many Usenet videos were uploaded by readers, not creators, of that material.)
Posted by John Dowdell at 2:21 PM
Vanderhuge Video Blog
Vanderhuge Video Blog: Frank Galligan has been bringing together tips and techniques for casual video playback in weblogs... picked this up in the high-traffic Yahoo Videoblogging list.
Posted by John Dowdell at 12:15 PM
November 1, 2005
Microsoft Live
Microsoft Live: I've been reading about this press conference all day, particularly as it go such heavy play among the pool of tech.memeorandum.com bloggers. Mary Jo Foley has the most understandable pair of sentences I've seen: "Office Live is not a hosted version of Office. We're not entirely sure what it is, given that it isn't set to go to beta until early 2006." She then tries to figure out the core of the day's presentations.
Posted by John Dowdell at 4:51 PM
Eolas news
Eolas news: Not news, really... came out last week, but you might get questions from clients or colleagues now that the article is in such wide syndication. From what I read, this month's ruling was mostly about an appeal on a prior ruling where Microsoft had to pay Eolas $500 million, rather than about what browsers can legally do in the future and how. (For the latter, the Active Content Developer Center has had its content mothballed to avoid confusing anyone who stumbled upon it, but to my knowledge those technical methods are still available, should they be needed.) Anyway, no news here from us, from what I can read into it....
Posted by John Dowdell at 4:35 PM
The "accelerating adoption" stat
The "accelerating adoption" stat: I was searching for something else, and came across a comment from Mike Davidson at Todd Dominey's blog, back in July 2002... this is the earliest citation I know of (offhand!) for that "each Flash Player version reaches significant consumer viewership quicker than the previous version" observation. Anyone know of a prior citation, or do I owe Mike & Todd a beer here...? ;-)
Posted by John Dowdell at 3:05 PM
Vista adoption rate
Vista adoption rate: eWeek attempts to peer into the future, and determine how rapidly the new operating system will spread into the world. Some people upgrade older systems (which happen to meet the new minimum specs), but many tie OS purchases to new system purchases, and that curve will be on the downslide by autumn 2006, when the OS will be finished and bundled by hardware manufacturers. There's a lot of dueling numbers here -- some predict slow adoption through 2008/9, others predict the fastest MS adoption ever -- there's still confusion, though, about which shipping machines will be able to support which OS versions. Too much for me to figure out, but this is a good link if anyone pretends to you that they know what will happen when.... ;-)
Posted by John Dowdell at 3:01 PM
Skip intro
Skip intro: LifeHacker has a short bit here on the same principle applied to another medium: "One of the biggest mistakes amateur photographers make - especially ones who share their photos online in albums or on Flickr - is including too many. Choose to share your absolute best, sharpest, most well-composed shots and simply leave out the rest." (Related: Strunk & White on text, Dizzy Gillespie on music.)
Posted by John Dowdell at 1:49 PM
Squashed computer
Squashed computer: Gag photo for geeks... "Here are the specs: A genuine Cucurbita pepo PTX 1.0 case, with a Dell Latitude D410 laptop board. It has a 1.6 GHz Intel Pentium M processor with Intel wireless card, a 60GB hard drive, 512MB of DDR2, and a DVDR/RW drive. Note that the 'eyes' are fans." [via PCWorld]
Posted by John Dowdell at 1:07 PM