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December 31, 2005
Trends 2006
Trends 2006: Lots of weblog posts make specific predictions, but here are some general trends we can already see. For the 2006 Adobe Systems, execs have consistently said that the deal is "all about growth", so I'd expect a lot of news this year about high-growth areas like ubiquitous computing (mobiles, consumer devices, signage etc). The last two years have been particularly ripe for collaborative development, whether for code or content, so I'd expect interactivity to increase here too. The Apollo project was mentioned in a MAX presentation in 2005, so in 2006 there will be a lot more shaping of how SWF, PDF, and HTML/JS can work together, outside of the HTTP-refresh paradigm. Another strong trend for 2006 is the increasing globalization of development and use -- raises issues such as how local or global each project should be, the diversity of English skills in the project's audience and whether text should be minimized, improved cross-region collaboration, lots more. The trend of advanced pocket devices seems finally ready to break out of Japan and Korea and into EU and NA, and home televisions increasingly have memory and interactive displays, and stores and public places are increasingly wired too -- privacy & security have a lot more growing to do, and we need to nail the synching of data for occasional connectivity. The Adobe DNA has always been about techies using computers to create experiences for the public, whether delivered by paper or CD or HTTP or whatever -- with the explosion of growth in connected devices, and remote services, and global audiences, there's some important work ahead in figuring how to engage each audience with the type of experience they really want to have. Big changes ahead. :)
Posted by John Dowdell at 8:57 AM
EU GPS
EU GPS: The first of 30 satellites was successfully launched yesterday. "When the Galileo constellation is complete in 2010 it will be accurate to within a metre and its stronger radio signals will enable receivers to work in high-rise cities and even indoors... Coverage in Europe will be virtually total. In most locations six to eight satellites will always be visible, allowing positions to be determined to within a few centimetres." GPS sensors are shrinking, too... Galileo will increase demand, speed device growth further. The device in your pocket always knows exactly where you are, and it can get fresh information from the network at any time, and its displays are evolving rapidly too. How would someone want to engage the world in that way? what types of interactions will they want on their devices? what types of risks will we have to avoid? (Also in The Times, one of the best Wikipedia interviews I've seen... Jimmy Wales notes how the architectural incentives shape the social processes.)
Posted by John Dowdell at 8:44 AM
December 26, 2005
Mobile summons
Mobile summons: In South Korea, legal notices from the government start shifting from postal service to mobile communications. Seems historic to me, this acknowledgment of how communication channels have changed....
Posted by John Dowdell at 8:37 PM
December 23, 2005
Stripping metadata
Stripping metadata: Joris Evers writes at CNET of a tricky problem: how can we be sure that users know what data is embedded in the documents they send? The article is about metadata uses in the upcoming Microsoft operating system, but the same problem has shown up in .DOC files, .PDF, and other files which can include revisions, redactions or other data not visible when reading the file.
Posted by John Dowdell at 2:25 PM
JD buys Opera
JD buys Opera: I don't actually need a browser company myself, but someone has to do something about these pesky "anonymous sources say" blogosphere infections, they make us all look so credulous and goofy, wouldn't you say...? ;-)
Posted by John Dowdell at 7:45 AM
December 22, 2005
Adobe 4Q05 transcript
Adobe 4Q05 transcript: Here's a full transcript of the prepared statements and question session of the Adobe Dec05 earnings call. This is the best resource I know of right now for future directions, even though many questions haven't yet received fully-detailed answers (questions like "when CS3?" are still too early) -- this document is a good way to check what level of detail execs have provided in mid-December. I suspect we'll all know a lot more by the end of January. For a shorter summary/report, see Alexandru Costin's notes or Judith Dinowitz's report.
Posted by John Dowdell at 2:50 PM
Jobs at Adobe
Jobs at Adobe: The old mm.com/jobs board now redirects into a web database at Adobe. No registration is needed to search through this list of current jobs -- just look for the "Search" button at the bottom. I'm not certain whether this database is in final form yet -- it doesn't seem to list some of the jobs I've seen discussed in individual weblogs. Another way to search, for related non-Adobe positions, is via an MXNA search on terms like hiring or job.
Posted by John Dowdell at 2:03 PM
Flash Lite 2.0 note
Flash Lite 2.0 note: As Bill Perry notes here, the Macromedia Store currently has an order entry already for the Flash Lite 2.0 engine, even though it won't be announced or fully documented until the actual launch in very early January. But if you don't absolutely need it immediately then I'd recommend waiting -- the current download there has an installation glitch with certain mobile models, and I'm told (via internal email) that there will be a new package there at the actual Flash Lite 2.0 launch. Better, during this final week of the year, would be to check into Bill Perry's presentation of how the new engine has evolved, the improved workflow, more. (For what it's worth I don't have solid info on that download beyond what's already published -- the full launch in early January is when we'll get the best documentation.) Do me a favor too, please? If you see a bare link elsewhere to the unadvertised Flash Lite 2.0 link in the Macromedia store, on a page which doesn't link to Bill's contextual info in his weblog, then could you drop a note here so I can check their pre-launch experience with it? Thanks!
Posted by John Dowdell at 11:36 AM
December 21, 2005
Using Express Install?
Using Express Install? I'm bumping this up, even though it's already in the MXNA news stream... Flash Player Product Manager Emmy Huang is seeking feedback on how Express Install is doing for you, whether you're already using it... this is a good time/place for any feedback you've got on the new consumer upgrade process, thanks.
Posted by John Dowdell at 6:30 PM
Cantrell on occasional connectivity
Cantrell on occasional connectivity: Christian Cantrell has a great user-oriented essay about the classic web-app situation of requiring a network connection in order to work. He lists some examples of where a pure server-based approach has hurt users, and the essay is even more timely due to additional problems at Typepad and Salesforce.com. We'll have to have our data stored remotely, not only for backup but also for multi-device synch, but I think we'll also have to be able to work offline with local static data too, synching up with the server as it becomes available. Whether you can get your work done or not shouldn't depend on what someone else is doing with a server that day....
Posted by John Dowdell at 2:40 PM
December 20, 2005
Tomorrow's computers
Tomorrow's computers: Marco Cassario has a pointer here to a DoCoMo/PlasticLogic deal. But check out that animated GIF on the left -- it's of a handheld device screen which scrolls as you tilt it, a little looking-glass into a virtual desktop beyond -- very natural. Then check out these images on the Plastic Logic site -- those are live computer displays, not paper. The whole Desktop Publishing user experience has met interactivity -- circle has come 'round. Assuming that production costs drop down (and spraying plastic sounds much more economical than assembling LCDs), then these are the ways people will use computers soon... portable displays that they use throughout the day, not just something they sit down at to work at. These hardware improvements will influence what we do.
Posted by John Dowdell at 8:34 PM
Needs easy data viz
Needs easy data viz: Jon Udell tries to show how time has influenced his blogging tags, and spends a lot of effort in production only to find the graphic didn't show what he had hoped. He calls for easier ways to plugin available data into graphics engines: "We need an environment that's open to users and developers, that fully embraces web standards and XML, that is dynamically scriptable, that deals with text, images, and vector graphics in the same domain, and that is tuned for rapid creation and wide propagation of memes." (He thinks it may be Firefox, but there's no sign that the audience will ever exceed a minority.) The world wants the ability to easily tweak and publish visualizations of arbitrary datasets... looks like an opportunity here for someone...?
Posted by John Dowdell at 3:27 PM
Google Blogger Comments
Google Blogger Comments: Google releases a Firefox extension which lets you see, when visiting any site, an overlay with recent comments about that site made from Blogger-hosted blogs. Considering the number of spamblogs Blogger has hosted, and the hot reaction to previous site-comment overlays, I'm not sure what response this intro might draw..... [via Evan Williams]
Posted by John Dowdell at 2:53 PM
More Top Changes in 2005
More Top Changes in 2005: Building atop the prior items, here are some more significant changes of the past year, all in my own opinion. 2005 saw the widespread acceptance of the need for both clientside and serverside interactivity -- the acceptance of the Rich Internet Application approach. This was formalized by the widespread press buzz around "AJaX" -- the ability to refresh text independently of presentation isn't a new thing for HTML browsers, so the attention paid to AJaX actually signified general acceptance of the RIA model itself, although we're all still working on aspects such as offline synch. Another trend was the emphasis on casual content -- professional video, text and music will all remain important, but decentralized production and publishing -- and efficient navigation systems! -- really blossomed in 2005, and enfranchised many more people on the internet. A third trend was the realworld acceptance of web services, whether from the whole "mashup" school or from simple XML formattings of text as RSS or the APIs being released by varied services -- the idea of decoupling data from presentation is now accepted, seen as the norm. Lots of other things happened this year, but these are the most significant trends I saw fulfilled: consumer computers were invisibly and very rapidly upgraded via Flash Player 8... RIAs and web services are now mainstream ideas... more people can create richer content than ever before.
Posted by John Dowdell at 2:16 PM
Top Change of 2005
Top Change of 2005: After reading how others summarized 2005, here are my top choices... yes, I might be biased by how I spend my day and get the rent paid, but that doesn't automatically mean my points aren't right! ;-) The most important change this past year was the explosive adoption of Flash Player 8 -- reporters would naturally miss this, because the consumer audits haven't hit their quarterly publishing point yet and the company hasn't made a big deal of confirmed installs, but the traffic flow has exceeded even the most optimistic projections inside the shop. Millions of consumer machines have already received predictable, advanced visualization engines -- it has blown past Firefox and even Windows XP, all in stealth mode. In 2006 I think the world will start to recognize the important upgrade to clientside abilities that started here in late 2005....
Posted by John Dowdell at 1:57 PM
Wrapups, predictions
Wrapups, predictions: Lots of people are now summing the top trends of 2005, and the trends they expect in 2006. After reading these I've got my own short list of most-important developments in 2005, but I'd like to list these out first. Richard MacManus lists "Top Ten Web 2.0 Moments of 2005", and these seem to be mostly business deals which received high coverage among the Memeorandum pool of bloggers. Alex Barnett responds with his own longer list of significant deals and interesting trivia in 2005. Thomas Baekdal offers predictions for 2006, including the deflation of some smaller hype cycles but the fulfillment of deeper underlying trends (I like this list). Stephen Bryant sums up the year's changes in "home pages", or personality portals (where your choice of data is served by Google, Yahoo or whomever) -- more a survey than a summary or set of predictions, here. Luigi Canali De Rossi is bullish on trends like information-filtering, web video, and collaborative creation -- his eleventh point is about using Flash for grassroots media editing. Jon Udell predicts '06, with emphasis on Flash Video, screencasting, TV integration, more.
Posted by John Dowdell at 1:23 PM
Lots of links
Lots of links: I've kept a lot of tabbed windows open in my browser the past week, but didn't have sufficient original commentary to justify sending each to the aggregator... here's a bunch of recent postings, some of which you may find of interest too....
Scott Adams writes of common internet debating techniques and tricks. The comments pull up tons more rhetorical devices.
An article at JavaLobby titled "Rich Internet Applications and AJAX - Selecting the best product" confused me, because "AJaX" literally means refreshing text without refreshing the page via XmlHttpRequest, and doesn't add any richer media or interactions to the browser itself -- it's hard to see any Ajax-branded approach as being a literal Rich Internet Application. I have to hit the scroll button in my browser 20 times to see the whole article so it's easy to take away the wrong key points... at one point the author does acknowledge that browser renderers aren't that rich... at another point he categorizes work with Flash Platform as "Fancy Animations" for some reason. I think the article may boil down to "What do you need to do, and what can your audience support?"
Joe Chung notes that shoppers often research online but buy offline, and suggests that it's because the online purchasing experience is still unpredictable and varying enough to not be worth the hassle.
The W3C has a new committee to make a new meta-markup language for interactions: "This deliverable should be based on an existing application/UI format, such as Mozilla's XUL, Microsoft's XAML, Macromedia's MXML or Laszlo Systems' LZX, provided the owners of the format are willing to contribute." I'm not sure of the assumptions -- it seems like it would be easier to translate from one XML format to another, dropping features as necessary, than to map all into some type of common markup and then back again, but I'm not as close to this project as others are and likely don't see it clearly yet.
Microsoft Live Local staff respond to concerns about their "Locate Me" functions -- when you visit the Microsoft Live site and click "Locate Me" the server uses wireless and IP connections to identify where you likely are. Boing Boing and O'Reilly Radar had carried worries on the privacy of this feature. But while the response says "your name etc is not sent to the server", it doesn't discuss whether there is any session data or cookie-like persistence associated with the request... where the response says that other websites won't receive any info it doesn't mention the structure of the Microsoft database and what fields it stores. Even when there's an explicit followup question about persistence, the response is about "no personally identifiable data" sent with the requests, and it doesn't tie the *request* with other personal data held on their servers... it answers a slightly different question. (To be fair, most search engines and personality portals don't divulge the nature of their stored data either.)
Rex Hammock had a funny response to the latest debates over the label "Web 2.0"... he spoofs the season with "Yes, Virginia, There Is A Web 2.0".
Joshua Jeffryes offers an essay "We Must Start Fresh as Designers", bouncing on themes of pure-server application failure, offshore design work, the leapfrogging of communication networks in Africa and other less-developed regions, and has a list at the bottom of how eight major beliefs in web work are changing.
AllAboutSymbian.com has an extensive writeup of the Nokia N80 phone... quotes: "... looks set to become one of the most desirable phones of 2006... three years of development have resulted in a phone several generations more advanced... the first smartphone that can be truly described as a modern world phone... will work almost anywhere in the world... will almost certainly be making an appearance in the USA (on Cingular)... Flash Lite also looks set to become a standard part of S60 and the N80 will be one of the first handsets with Flash Lite (1.1) supported out of the box. Flash Lite is becoming an increasingly popular solution for creating small micro-apps. These range from small games to front ends for displaying data retrieved from the Internet, such as weather or traffic information, dictionary look ups and news headlines. Flash Lite 1.1 brings several improvements include support for SVG-Tiny playback and additional audio and ActionScript support." Lots more here too.
ComputerWorld discusses virtualization of the client, where a predictable set of clientside services floats above different hardware and operating systems. The article focuses on Microsoft, and their announcement of (full? partial?) Avalon portability some time in the future, but also discusses other platform-neutral runtimes like Macromedia Flash Player.
Chris Anderson discusses the discomfort with ambiguity that lies behind some of the current debates about Wikipedia integrity... many people want concrete, clear, firm answers and get anxious without certitude. I'm not sure I agree with his assertion "Our brains aren't wired to think in terms of statistics and probability. We want to know whether an encyclopedia entry is right or wrong"... I think we're wired for both belief and agnosticism, with the blends varying for different people, in different situations, at different times in their lives.
The "Google buying Opera?" discussion started with a single person in France saying "according to usually reliable sources" that there's a deal. The speaker had once been an exec at Yahoo/Europe, but so much talk over such an unverifiable third-hand assertion still seems bizarre to me. At least when knitting you'd have something concrete to show after all that finger activity.... ;-)
Clickz reports that standalone ads in RSS feeds draw more clicks than do ads embedded in RSS feeds. I guess this means that some of the Slashdot crowd will be avoiding RSS now.... ;-)
Posted by John Dowdell at 1:14 PM
Adobe call notes
Adobe call notes: Alexandru Costin of InterAKT took text notes of the Dec 15 earnings call for Adobe Systems. (Thanks! :) There's not much there on the technology yet -- the talk is more about the business end -- but it shows the types of things that analysts were asking. If there's a section you're particularly interested in, then the source audio will be online for 45 days, through late January.
Posted by John Dowdell at 9:08 AM
Net future, global
Net future, global: [Link now corrected] Jakob Nielsen sums up internet demographic trends... in 2005 we had one billion people connected, 36% Asia, 24% Europe, 23% North America... in 2015 we'll likely reach two billion connected people, largely from China and India, with NA dropping to 15% of users yet 33% of value. He brings up the topic of international usability... it's possible to localize sites but the range of human languages is vast... I believe that accessible English, richer media, and more responsive interactions will all be tools we'll need to reach this accelerating diversity of audiences.
Posted by John Dowdell at 8:45 AM
Reuters Video
Reuters Video: The news service offers websites and blogs free updated news video. The format is Flash. The financial model is currently ad-supported, but may change after this pilot program. Brightcove is handling the mechanics, CNET has the story.
Posted by John Dowdell at 8:33 AM
December 19, 2005
Evading prohibitions
Evading prohibitions: Two articles from the weekend's general news seemed to me to have structural similarities... the above link goes to an ArsTechnica article about political efforts in the US to prohibit hardware which does not respect an anti-capture flag in a digital stream... here's a Washington Post article about political efforts in China to prohibit certain speech. In China people are discussing under-reported current events through allusion and code -- in the US any such prohibition will strengthen the blackmarket networks in banned hardware (just one such machine can disrespect the copying flag enough to make a new stream without the flag). These prohibition movements don't seem to synch up to reality well, 'cause they never seem to expect the inevitable counter-movements, and what actually happens as other parties react....
Posted by John Dowdell at 3:37 PM
Search & user mutation
Search & user mutation: USA Today has a good piece here on how humans are changing as a result of enhanced searching abilities... we don't memorize facts so much as memorize how to find facts, now. The overall emphasis is on the Google brand, but mention is made of the competitive sport of teasing hard-to-search info out of the engines. (For awhile I've been using the acronym SECML in personal conversation, for "Search Engines Changed My Life"... being able to find, confirm, point to resources has gotten much more important over the past decade.)
Posted by John Dowdell at 2:49 PM
SWF 2005 critiques
SWF 2005 critiques: Jon Meyer looks at at a whole passle of current SWF for a competition, and sees some pattern in the entries he was asked to judge. He liked the richer presentations -- eye candy is aptly named, it makes for an attractive message -- but an over-fussy text layout frequently created problems when the viewer's situation was different (monitor set to high pixels-per-inch, etc). Another area which differed among candidates was the hand-work in using a mouse... it's hard work to make an interface easy, but that work pays off for each person who then uses the application. Quick read, worthwhile. [via FlashForward blog]
Posted by John Dowdell at 2:15 PM
Casual video flow
Casual video flow: The content of this video doesn't matter to me as much as how it was produced, how it was distributed, and the final effect for the audience -- a Nokia N90 mobile phone doubles as the video capture tool, and it is emailed to the beta VPod.tv service, which then transcodes the device video into universal Flash video for insertion into a weblog. There's definitely still a lot of room for professionally-produced video, but this type of decentralized casual video will likely grow much more rapidly over the next decade, I'd bet. [via robert a/k/a r on the Videoblogging mailing list]
Posted by John Dowdell at 1:54 PM
Current status
Current status: I've been posting less lately, and will probably remain light for a few weeks yet... it's not as bad as the situation in the link; that was just an apt coincidence. ;-) I had been doublethinking most posts during the Adobe acquisition, and now that we're starting to get early internal guidance on the new company I'm triplethinking everything, and fewer items make the cut. I'm extremely sensitive now to how so many people are seeking clues about where Adobe will be going, and it's really easy for me to write something which could be seen as implying a particular future... I'll feel a lot freer once the company's roadmaps are out for public inspection. Right now there's also a lot more internal meetings, new processes to handle, and that cuts out a chunk of reading/posting time too. Anyway, my apologies in advance for my relative silence here these days... I'm still alive and kicking, but am writing on the light side, that's true.
Posted by John Dowdell at 1:06 PM
December 16, 2005
Security updates
Security updates: These four patches -- for a possible denial-of-service with Flash Media Server, cumulative security updaters for ColdFusion 7 and JRun 4, and a special fix for a CFMail vulnerability in ColdFusion 6 -- all entered the news today, but I wanted to add a few more links. The notification service gets the news directly to your mailbox, or your colleague's mailbox... the updates page (accessible from the main MM navbar) always lists the latest version of any tool... Adobe has its own security center with different resources, and these two sites will eventually be merged. Yesterday's story on a monthly patch schedule mainly benefits larger installations where planning for mass-updates is required... it should be implemented during the first half of 2006, but a lot of details still need to be finalized first. (If you've got any thoughts or concerns on scheduled updates then please let me know in the comments, thanks.) And finally, using the Alert Adobe page for warning about any possible vulnerability is greatly appreciated -- things like How can a local SWF access the net? are better addressed in technotes and other support materials, but if you see a way any Macromedia/Adobe tool can be hacked for evil then we really need to know ASAP, thanks!
Posted by John Dowdell at 1:48 PM
Keyboards & health
Keyboards & health: A new report from Harvard Medical School challenges previous accepted wisdom: "Research indicates that those susceptible to carpal tunnel do not increase their chances of the disorder by heavy computer use of up to seven hours per day. The Harvard Medical School report also warned that problems due to improper computer use or workplace habits could contribute to injuries of the neck and shoulders, as well as other parts of the body."
Posted by John Dowdell at 12:56 PM
December 15, 2005
Adobe conference call
Adobe conference call: Execs discuss financial results and take questions from analysts -- starts in just a few minutes, and I believe will be archived on the site for awhile after that. I'll jot notes in the comments here. (And yes, it'll eventually be in Breeze.... ;-)
Posted by John Dowdell at 1:54 PM
December 14, 2005
Kryptonite blogifact
Kryptonite blogifact: Lots of bloggers went off on the Kryptonite bike lock company awhile ago, accusing them of having their heads in the sand and being unresponsive. (A general web search term "kryptonite technorati" happens to pull up many of these bloggers.) Here, there's detail about what actually happened... the blogging reality did not seem to match the realworld reality...? (My ulterior motive in all this? I've tried to clean up similar stories in the past... not fun, and not usually effective, either... the more that the reading public validates its inputs, the better off we'll all be, I reckon.)
Posted by John Dowdell at 4:44 PM
Kernel kicks Avalon?
Kernel kicks Avalon? Odd article... I'm sure neither of its veracity nor its implications, but it sounds significant: "Vista's graphics subsystem, codenamed Avalon and formally known as the Windows Presentation Foundation, will be pulled out the kernel because many lock-ups are the result of the GUI freezing, Microsoft infrastructure architect Giovanni Marchetti told us exclusively yesterday." I picked it up from a content-light link at FlexBeta, but see no significant matches at Google News or Technorati. If Vista is getting solid soon, then this seems like a major change, at a late date...? (Speaking of which, this morning I got a kick out of how MXNA burped some blog postings, and timscollick's item from a year ago hasn't lost any of its currency.)
Posted by John Dowdell at 4:03 PM
MS post-Eolas UE
MS post-Eolas UE: A. Russell Jones of DevX describes the user experience a future version of Internet Explorer would bring. I haven't confirmed his description against the Microsoft docs, but his description seems simple enough -- if you use OBJECT/EMBED or APPLET then the content will display as it does now, without extraneous dialog boxes, but interactivity requires a mouseclick into the extended content. This is pretty much the same user experience we have today: to click buttons in a SWF you have to click the SWF; to use keystrokes to control a SWF you first have to transfer browser focus into the SWF via a mouseclick; etc. It's less onerous than the Flashblock user experience, because you still see the content, even if it uses scripting or remote calls. Another path is to dynamically write the tags into the HTML, which many people already do to make the W3C validators happy. At the end he writes how he believes Microsoft should have paid the Eolas licensing fees instead of having existing webpages change, but I don't think that's a good opinion -- MS would just have been the first to cough up, and those resources could not have been used elsewhere, and it's very hard to measure the economic initiatives which would not have been undertaken in such a litigation-oriented society. Kneeling to bad laws is not the best long-term solution, I think, because this tends to lead to even worse laws in the future.
Update: [Additional blogsearch terms: eolas, patent, activex, Active Content]
Posted by John Dowdell at 8:51 AM
Container-dependent content, II
Container-dependent content, II: Steve Johnson of The Chicago Tribune dissects how some commercial television style fared when played on the web. (Spoiler: The camera and editing choices which work for the big, sitback screen don't fare so well when plugged into the small-screen interactive environment.) This is similar to Jakob Nielsen's recent work on eyetracking patterns when viewing web video. There are many video professionals, with hard-won skills, but their earlier skills may get in the way when delivering into a new distribution channel like interactive web video. Does a message actually work, and how do you know...?
Posted by John Dowdell at 12:01 AM
December 13, 2005
Robots, rockets
Robots, rockets: Honda's new generation of Asimo robot runs a 16 minute mile, and acts more naturally, too... I just saw a video on San Francisco's channel 26, NHK News, very impressive. Meanwhile, Virgin Galactic has sold out its first flights from a spaceport in New Mexico for commercial spaceflight, with the first seats priced at $200K per roundtrip ticket. More on Asimo and Virgin Galactic via Google News.
Posted by John Dowdell at 11:51 PM
Cahill on Apollo
Cahill on Apollo: Over the last two weeks there has been a lot more commentary on what the Apollo project may turn out to be. Kevin Lynch had the initial presentation in this MAX video, day one, one hour sixteen minutes in, at the "Platform:Future" chapter. In the above essay Matthew Cahill writes about how he sees the possibilities. I don't have additional info yet myself, but I think it's worthwhile to read these various blog essays, to get a sense of how people currently see the needs, how they consider these needs might be satisfied. The only original observation I've got at this point is that some people seem to equate "HTML" with "new web browser", which seems a stretch to me. I know real info is still scanty here in mid-December, but if you've got particular concerns, desires or wishes then please feel free to advise in comments here, thanks.
Posted by John Dowdell at 4:14 PM
My prediction
My prediction: I predict that, by December 2006, lots of people will be glad they didn't bet money on the predictions they made in December 2005.... ;-)
Posted by John Dowdell at 3:43 PM
Adobe investors, Thurs.
Adobe investors, Thurs: Reminder here that Adobe Systems will be discussing its quarterly financial results with analysts in a public webcast, Thu Dec 15, about 48 hours from now. I don't expect much dramatic news here -- still too early for any types of general or specific roadmaps -- but if you've invested either capital or your time in these technologies then the webcast would be a good resource for any new guidance. (And yes, the webcast will be done through older webcasting technology... Breeze integration will take awhile yet too.)
Posted by John Dowdell at 2:05 PM
What I'm doing
What I'm doing: Like Christian Cantrell, I'm spending a good amount of the day (and likely the week) in internal tasks... resubbing mailing lists so I can post from adobe.com, trying to unsub from lists under the old address when I can no longer confirm with macromedia.com email, stuff like that. Complicating this is the latency of various mail-list interfaces... I'm still getting mail forwarded to the old address hours after I think I've unsubscribed, so it's hard to tell what has actually worked and what hasn't. More meetings than usual this week too. Anyway, I'll probably have a light posting schedule on both lists and blogs this week... doesn't mean anything, I'm just working through the necessaries here.... ;-)
Posted by John Dowdell at 1:38 PM
December 12, 2005
"microsoft to buy macromedia"
"microsoft to buy macromedia": No, not a new news item... after reading a lot of the speculation last week I compared it with all the commentary the last few Decembers about Microsoft acquiring Macromedia. There's not a real futures market on opinions, so those whose speculation is off tend not to really bet on their words. Those older news flurries sure got a lot of attention, though.... ;-)
Posted by John Dowdell at 1:40 PM
FlashLite seminar
FlashLite seminar: There are still some spaces available for an web-seminar this week on FlashLite, both usage of v1.1 and a preview of v2.0. There are two sessions, spaced twelve hours apart for attendees around the globe. Bill Perry has more info.
Posted by John Dowdell at 12:55 PM
Transition status
Transition status: Email has been moving over from the Macromedia servers to Adobe servers this weekend, but you may see some aftereffects -- over the weekend some mail addresses were temporarily unavailable, and other people may see their names change during the transition -- please give it a little time for the dust to settle, thanks. Generally the xyz@macromedia.com addresses will just funnel over into the new adobe.com addresses. I think I may have to unsubscribe from all mailing lists and resubscribe under the new address, because I don't have posting privileges on many lists under the new adobe.com address... still under research. I anticipate a light posting schedule this week due to the increased internal meetings. If you see any hot issues then please drop a note in the comments here, thanks!
Posted by John Dowdell at 12:46 PM
December 11, 2005
Clearing my browser
Clearing my browser: I haven't been writing much lately... more talking with friends at the shop, thinking, taking some decompression time... in the extended entry are a whole bunch of links I found of interest but for which I didn't have enough original content to justify in their own weblog entries.
Back in November Russell Beattie had an essay "How far ahead is Japanese Mobility?" The comments were particularly valuable, because the group pulled together some of the social, technical, and business differences across regions. I hope some day to abstract out the main ideas into bullet points, but....
Jonathan Boutelle discusses how to introduce a wiki to a group working on a project, so that people would actually use the new communication medium.
Ryan Stewart discusses "Why Adobe is Going to Make the Web Great". I've been too modest to talk up the people I work with like this, but Ryan's thinking parallels what I've seen myself, and shows why I'm personally excited by the possibilities. Two additional ex-Macromedia execs leading the new Business Units are Tom Hale (Acrobat + Breeze) and Al Ramadan (mobile).
Kathy Sierra starts with a somewhat cynical deconstruction of buzzword currency, but then gets into the important point towards the end: "Why not rewrite these buzzwords in terms of what they mean for users? For example, we know that 'harnessing collective intelligence' is good... but why? I don't necessarily want you "harnessing" my anything, unless... unless it means I benefit from the result. And of course, that's the point-- that end-users can benefit from all that group wisdom, like Amazon reviews or delicious/popular tags, to help reduce the flood of data. So why not say it like that?"
Bill Perry notes the new iRiver U10 Development Center on the Macromedia site, and seeks requests for particularly useful additional content.
Kirk Mower notes that the new ArcWEB Explorer will be Flash-based, and discusses some of the other new mapping efforts now available. Related: Orbit FlashMap is announced, but I haven't had a session to sit down and examine it yet.
I haven't fully read Richard Rutter's A Practical Guide To Web Typography yet myself, but I was heartened that the front page used a SWF.
Darrel Plant notes that the first version of Shockwave, for richer web experiences, left beta ten years ago this month. (I celebrated last June, when Shockwave and the Macromedia website were announced, alongside the announcement of Netscape 2.0 and its plugin architecture.)
Jon Udell writes a Firefox Greasemonkey script to display specific segments of a SWF-based Google Video file. (Hmm, shouldn't we be able to do this within the video's controller skin itself, and so avoid the browser dependencies?) He also points out, towards the end, the need to make it easier to translate any video format into FLV for delivery.
I've scanned the Adobe LiveCycle Workflow SDK but haven't fully absorbed it yet. The bottom section contains links to related resources.
Adobean Bill McCoy writes: "Anything that gives users an increased comfort level in reading digitally should not be taken lightly. When we were competing with Macromedia these solutions - including Macromedia's own FlashPaper technology - gave us heartburn. Now, they are simply additional arrows in our quiver." (uh, "Adobean" is a word, right, and I'm not mucking with trademarks to use it, I hope? ;-)
Graeme Bull links to an interesting experiment of making a game controller out of a toy gun or whatever you want to point at the screen, via the magic of webcam image analysis.
BBM.net makes royalty-free music for Flash projects. (I know there are other sites like this on the net, but I always have difficulty searching for them when needed.)
Mary Meeker of Morgan Stanley has a big 'ol PDF of a presentation she gave on net trends... lots of numbers here... things which caught my eye are the confirmation of the evolution to both broadband and mobile, the increasing globalization of web content, the increasing ratio of litigation costs to research costs... slide 26 shows mobile/computer ratios in various countries... the expanding use of mobile devices as environmental controllers... growth of richer media (audio and video compared to text)... more. Killer quote: "We believe the first ten years of commercial Internet (1995-2005) were just a warm up act for what is about to happen."
SeoMoz.org offers a beginners' guide to search engine optimization. One part asserts that text in a SWF cannot be found (my new favorite counter-example, via a Slashdot commenter, is "contrary evidence filetype:swf"), but overall this guide seems like a useful, practical resource.
David Mendels discusses ColdFusion and Adobe with Simon Horwith: "ColdFusion fits squarely in the new Enterprise and Developer Solutions Business Unit. Here we will focus on leveraging the combined LiveCycle, Flex and ColdFusion technologies to provide a rich set of technologies for building and deploying both Web and document-based solutions."
Techdirt deconstructs the recent "france bans opensource" blogifact.
Wow, cool... a Macromedia tombstone. ;-)
Safari SVG: "This page describes the current status of the SVG implementation in WebKit." Shape primitives are implemented, text is not, other areas are a mix of implemented, partially implemented, and not implemented.
Techdirt links together different articles on politically-controlled technical standards.
New Scientist magazine discusses embedding sensors and light-emitting diodes into clothes to practical result: a scarf which blends with its environment.
Dion Hinchcliffe pulls together a great categorized listing under the title of "The Best Web 2.0 Software of 2005".
Posted by John Dowdell at 11:34 AM
December 10, 2005
Reuters' big board
Reuters' big board: Robert Scoble describes the display in the lobby of Reuters' main office: "It's a huge screen right behind the reception area when you walk in. Something like 30 or 40 feet wide... It's a Flash app running on a Windows XP box.. The app, every few minutes, checks with one of Reuters' news servers around the world. It's like a big RSS Aggregator. While we were standing there it checked with the server in Russia, pulled down several photos and news headlines and displayed those. It had a cool animation that showed which city it was displaying, then you saw current news headlines flying across the screen... A second screen displays news and market prices from around the world to the public square outside of Reuters' headquarters."
Posted by John Dowdell at 12:31 PM
December 8, 2005
Technorati live
Technorati live: Interesting blogsearch feature... the "mini" button at Technorati opens a small window which auto-refreshes itself, so you can keep a live search window open on your desktop. It displays the five most recent entries on your keyword, and flags items which have appeared since the last refresh. I'm currently testing two windows with keywords "macromedia" and "flash", but am not sure of how useful it will be... I generally see only one or two relevant entries on each full page of results anyway... could be a good way to get alerts within the web browser window, though.
Posted by John Dowdell at 2:47 PM
Varying Garmins
Varying Garmins: Jason Fried of 37 Signals had a Garmin GPS unit, but replaced it with a newer one, and finds it a totally different experience. Both tell you where you are, but he found that a smaller size, larger display, clearer and less chrome-ridden display, fewer buttons, good taste in speech synthesis, fast startup and responsiveness, ability to customize... all these improvements make it a different type of device than the previous Garmin unit. Many of the comments get into pricing issues, but the essay itself is a good example of how it's the user experience which determines whether a project successfully attracts its audience or not.
Posted by John Dowdell at 2:28 PM
ScottEVest jacket review
ScottEVest jacket review: Leather jacket with 41 pockets and internal network is reviewed at GearLive. The article contains links to other reviews of their gear-holding gear.
Posted by John Dowdell at 2:20 PM
December 7, 2005
FF1.5, crash, History
FF1.5, crash, History: I haven't confirmed this reported exploit yet, but apparently a malevolent site can fill up the Firefox History stack, causing subsequent crash-on-start problems. This report says that deleting your history.dat file removes the problem. I'm posting it without confirmation because it's likely that some testers have put this up on webpages already... if you suddenly get persistent crash-on-start in Firefox, then one path may be to manually delete its history.dat file. Take with a grain of salt, but....
Posted by John Dowdell at 4:55 PM
Contrary evidence on Slashdot
Contrary evidence on Slashdot: Poster "brassmoknets" has one of the funniest "swf don't search" ripostes I've seen.... ;-)
Posted by John Dowdell at 4:41 PM
New names, II
New names, II: I've updated my blog header again... after receiving and signing an acceptance offer, it now reads "I'm employed by Adobe Systems but views are my own." (whew... that's one small phrase for a mouth, but one giant mouthful for my brain.) I'm still not sure about the title of this blog, though, because "MX" doesn't describe the work ahead... may be a couple of weeks until I get this squared away. With my friends here at the shop, I'm seeing that lots of people are getting what they wanted, whether to stay with the company or step off at this juncture, and that's good, although it's still hard to see folks leave regardless, and I'm sure that not all stories are as happy... that's just the overall trend I see. Most of the departures seem to be from parts of Macromedia that blog readers do not see, the folks who make the business work day in and day out, while the parts you do see, for technologies and public-facing staff, these seem largely intact -- I'm not sure how much of a change you'll notice out there, should be a pretty smooth transition. Right now I'm eating a big slice of double-chocolate cake with vanilla ice cream atop, which I guess gives you the overall mood of the situation right there.... ;-) Summary: Blog title is still "JD on [TBD]", although I've accepted an offer at Adobe Systems, and will be continuing in similar role.
Posted by John Dowdell at 1:35 PM
Contextual blogspam
Contextual blogspam: Steve Webster noted smarter blogspam earlier this week, and I'm suffering from a few new campaigns each day here. (How's it smarter? It directly addresses a previous comment, or adds capitalized text from the blog body, but the URL always points to a commercial site... so far the lowlifes usually seem to be hitting a couple of recent blog articles, rather than arriving at random places in the archives via blogsearch.) I think we've got NOFOLLOW in comment URLs on this server, I'll need to check. But I'm also deleting lots more blog comments these days too -- my apologies in advance if I mistake a legit one! :( Update: One tip for all weblog commentary over the coming months may be to avoid unrelated commercial URLs in postings, so you're not mistaken for a contextual spammer.
Posted by John Dowdell at 12:18 PM
On2 on Adobe
On2 on Adobe: Bullish sentiment on Flash video from this codec provider: "CNET made a similar observation about three months ago. There is not enough room for four or five multimedia formats. Period. Who wins?", followed by observations on various deliverable container formats. Many more relevant entries are in their main weblog.
Posted by John Dowdell at 11:34 AM
Virtual persons in SWF
Virtual persons in SWF: Codebaby adds SWF delivery to their prior "download for IE/Win" approach to virtual agents, interactive characters with recorded speech. I'm not sure of their authoring process... their Studio info describes a post-processing step to SWF. The press release mentions that they hope for eventual migration to non-PC devices.
Posted by John Dowdell at 10:50 AM
Ferraiolo on SVG
Ferraiolo on SVG: Jon Ferraiolo, longtime contributor to Adobe's SVG work, offers guidance on the SVG mailing list, particularly in light of the current info about technology on the merger FAQ and subsequent discussions. "Adobe has no plans to do anything which would disrupt any ASV3 installations or dependencies on ASV3 downloads. If we come out with new viewing technology which includes SVG support, we will be highly sensitive towards the needs of SVG applications that are installed in the field today." (Related: Andrew Wooldridge, one of the first people to get into Dreamweaver extensibility, notes a new Yahoo list for those tracking experiments in in-browser drawing via the CANVAS tag in Safari and Firefox.)
Posted by John Dowdell at 10:08 AM
December 6, 2005
EU Publishers, Google
EU Publishers, Google: Odd article... if you find links to source info I'd appreciate the tip, thanks. Associated Press leads: "European publishers warned Tuesday that they cannot keep allowing Internet search engines such as Google Inc. to make money from their content." I didn't see exactly what they wanted. On their website, the most likely items in their recent press releases don't show much to scanning, but there's a lot of them... the internal search (Powered by Google, heh ;-) doesn't seem to turn up the actual unedited comments. Hmm... Slashdot picked it up, but searching each page with terms like "transcript" or "speech" turns up nothing. More at Memeorandum. The stuff as quoted seems sort of strange (Google News doesn't offer either fulltext or ads, much less both), but the AP story has only the initial two quotes from the speaker, then the rest of the text is context from the reporter... they might actually have been talking about books, not news articles, I can't tell from the story. Does anyone know a way to find the actual speech from which these comments were extracted? Thanks! (Meanwhile, let me find the AP wishlist for them to include links to source info in all their articles, 'cause it's getting on to 2006 here.... ;-)
Posted by John Dowdell at 9:47 PM
Flex alpha review
Flex alpha review: Tim Anderson at The Register gives the Flex 2 alpha a spin... it feels funny to see alpha software discussed in magazines, but I guess I'll have to learn to live with it. ;-) The first section lays out a SWF-based context for those who usually deliver to Java, JavaScript, or Microsoft clients. Thanks to Mike Schleifstein for the link.
Posted by John Dowdell at 4:15 PM
"Controlling the net" debate
"Controlling the net" debate: The International Telecommunication Union, a sub-bureau of the United Nations, is proposing Internet Governance under its administration. Here's a debate which seems to concisely capture most of the arguments and stances: "Who should have control of the internet, or is control even desirable or possible? Is it to be viewed as a human construct, owned by its many creators, or is it more like a global public utility, or a natural resource? Here to debate the question of whether or not the internet should or can be controlled, and if so, who should do the controlling, are Michael Barone of US News & World Report, Perry De Havilland of Samzdata, Franklin Cudjoe of Imani Ghana and Peng Hwa Ang of the UN’s Working Group on Internet Governance." There's also a followup debate, although the second one doesn't seem as meaty and concise as the first. (The second debate does introduce the term UNternet, though, for a network for those governments which require higher levels of governance of their citizens.)
Posted by John Dowdell at 3:51 PM
10 reasons for Web Standards
10 reasons for Web Standards: Roger Johannson puts forth a list at 456 Berea St, and draws many replies. I'm linking to it for your own evaluation, I've got no overall opinion... like other commenters there, I'm not sure what "web standards" really means when this site (for instance) chooses patent-complicated JPG and GIF instead of the W3C-recommended PNG. It's good to make an easily-maintainable project which others can view, sure, and no one can argue against "make it look better, make it look more professional, make it faster to load and more responsive"... I'm not sure how the points hook together, though. Maybe it's more an effort at moral suasion, to have other people create markup in the preferred style...?
Posted by John Dowdell at 2:05 PM
Prediction season
Prediction season: Just a heads-up that we may be seeing alarming posts over the next few weeks, as everyone with a vested interest in the software tries to imagine the future. Here, Timothy Gray writes of a future that looks plausible to him, while David Mendels writes of direct action he and the company are already taking to bring about other, better futures. No blame -- lots of us have lots at stake in this whole area, inside and outside the company -- I'd expect more such threads over the next few weeks, entirely understandable. But keeping aware of source information (FAQs, PRs, blogs etc) and checking how people know what they say they know, those are two habits that will lessen the confusion and worry online for everyone.
Posted by John Dowdell at 8:14 AM
December 5, 2005
Container-dependent content
Container-dependent content: Jakob Nielsen tracks eyescan patterns on webpages with video, and finds that content which works well on the big screen may not play quite as well on the small screen. His early recommendations? Keep it short, make sure the richness of video is required for the message, eliminate distracting UI chrome. (Earlier today I realized that one additional reason Flash Video has taken off is because it doesn't impose a UI on the final presentation... it's hard for one interface approach to meet all needs.)
Posted by John Dowdell at 9:19 PM
Shea's gang on Adobe
Shea's gang on Adobe: I'm highlighting this more for other staffers than for techblog readers... Dave Shea's blog has a web-oriented audience that's different from that reflected in MXNA, so their comments offer a good overview from a different perspective. It's nice to see that "ajax & swf are different" in Dave's opening remarks too. (There are comments on Digg, too, but I didn't get as much out of them as the ones at Shea's.)
Posted by John Dowdell at 5:06 PM
Player FAQ change
Player FAQ change: New text now: (Q) What are Adobe's plans for Flash Player and Adobe Reader? (A) Our long-term plan is to develop a 'universal client' by combining PDF, Flash and HTML in a single, integrated runtime. Of course, we will continue delivering the Flash Player as a small, efficient runtime for content and applications on the web, and Adobe Reader for viewing and interacting with PDF documents and forms. The integration of these technologies into a unified framework creates a ubiquitous platform that runs on virtually every device, and dramatically expands the opportunities to create compelling solutions." Readings of the prior text have been discussed by Colin Moock, Aral Balkan, John Gruber, and Todd Dominey have already entered public discourse... fortunately these folks did link to source material, so people following their links will catch the less-ambiguous new version.
Posted by John Dowdell at 3:42 PM
Firefox testimonials
Firefox testimonials: In SWF... capture from your own webcam, win prizes. Related: "Can others use my webcam to spy on me?"
Posted by John Dowdell at 3:04 PM
HTML experts & Japan mobile
HTML experts & Japan mobile: Andreas Bovens offers a long paper here, about the history of the "spec-first" approach (VRML, HTML, SVG etc) and how it's faring in the vibrant mobile development scene in Japan. The essay is written in expository style... many pages detailing history before getting to the essay's main theme... there's some interesting stuff in there, though, on how the little mobile browsers handled all the features added to their big desktop cousins. There's no first-paragraph summary, so I may have pulled out the wrong emphasis, but these lines jumped out at me: "Hence, I will propose an alternative approach—a new direction Japanese web development should take... I argue that Japanese web developers should make the leap to web standards." Lots of use of the word "should" throughout the piece. (I lean towards simpler, stabler requirements... I like how the original HTML could be learned in an afternoon.) [via WebGraphics]
Posted by John Dowdell at 2:25 PM
"The last presses"
"The last presses": Jeff Jarvis has a long essay here, literally about how newspapers and other print-focused work are changing, but the descriptions seem to parallel the software-development world as well. "It’s not about saving anything. Instead, this is about seizing the opportunity of the internet and whatever that brings... I don’t want to fall back into that trap again: the trap of thinking that our task is to save something from the past, to look back when we should be looking forward. Our task is to stop seeing old failings everywhere and start seeing all the new opportunities before us, to exploit the future and expand news — to exhibit a passion about the possibilities."
Posted by John Dowdell at 1:58 PM
FF/NASA rumor
FF/ NASA rumor: A website says "little birdie told me today that NASA has given up entirely on Internet Explorer." Check out the trackbacks, how people accept and embellish the story. Then other commenters check the story, and some from inside NASA disprove it. uh... make that "some *apparently* inside NASA", I don't want to believe everything I read on the web either. ;-) My takeaway: The network is great for eventually finding truth, longterm, but it's also great for rapidly spreading mistruth, shortterm -- choices aren't just "true or false" but "true, false, or currently indeterminate" -- we've got to nail those "little birdie" and "authoritative sources" stories down before quoting them. :(
Posted by John Dowdell at 1:01 PM
Chizen on the new work
Chizen on the new work: Adobe CEO Bruce Chizen does a Breeze presentation on the completion of the acquisition, and what might happen in the future. Check out that "Engaging with Information" section... audience requirements have changed dramatically, particularly over the past five years... the new company will have a much wider scope than before... we need to make the connected digital experience (on whichever device) efficient, effective, engaging. The presentation is a high-level, general orientation -- few details -- but I'd recommend it to get a sense of the big picture. How will you get your client's ideas across most effectively in 2006, 2007, 2008 and beyond...?
Posted by John Dowdell at 11:57 AM
Day one website work
Day one website work: David Hatch is a longtime Macromedian, on the web team, who has just started a new blog that's not yet linked-up. Here he has a lengthy article on the goals and actions for the initial joining of corporate websites. More from Neil Straghalis.
Posted by John Dowdell at 11:45 AM
Player future
Player future: Aral Balkan expresses concern with a line in the FAQ about "combining" Flash and Acrobat clientside software in some way. David Mendels noted that the FAQ could bear another edit, and added: "We plan to keep the Flash Player small and focused. We *also* plan on a new client code named Apollo that will work out of the browser and bring together the best of HTML, Flash, and PDF." (I don't have additional info on the Apollo project yet... best I can offer is current search results on what's in the public record.)
Posted by John Dowdell at 11:04 AM
Adobe on developers
Adobe on developers: I'm highlighting part of the new FAQ here, after Ed Sullivan of Macromedia User Groups pointed it out. The question is "Does Adobe plan to increase its focus on developers as a result of the acquisition?" and here's the reply: "Yes. Adobe now has a large community of more than one million developers as well as an extended ecosystem of user groups, book publishers, certification programs, conferences, and trainers. Adobe will offer numerous resources, tools, and programs — including continuing all websites, tutorials, forums, and other resources formerly run separately by Macromedia and Adobe — to support and build up this community. Additionally, moving forward, developers will play a key part in the proliferation of Adobe's engagement platform for the creation and deployment of compelling, actionable applications and content to any desktop or device. Developers will be able to count on a universal client that is cross-browser, cross-platform, and cross-device, as well as tools and technologies that support the entire development workflow." That "engagement platform, universal client" is one theme that I've heard repeatedly from inside-the-cleanroom speakers. ("cleanroom" means that some staff did consult cross-company for planning, but few know all the pieces yet -- we'll be having a lot of meetings the next few weeks.)
Posted by John Dowdell at 9:01 AM
New names
New names: The company name changed today... the above link goes to a revised FAQ with new info. I've also temporarily changed the blog name to "JD on [TBD]"... "JD on MX" worked when we were trying to unite clientside and serverside processing in RIAs, but it has been a little dated for awhile now. Not sure what to rename it yet... ideas? I also put a "TBD" in the "employed by" field in the blog description, because technically Macromedia is no more, and Adobe offer letters will be arriving over the next week... there's a lot of internal discussion the next two weeks, so please don't be surprised if there's not a lot of staff comment for awhile. The new company also announced new bundles today, for general design, web, and video. I understand that there are new factsheets and company profiles up on the website too, but I'm not sure of HTML versions yet.
Posted by John Dowdell at 8:49 AM
December 3, 2005
Clearing my browser
Clearing my browser: I've got a lot of tabbed windows open, with interesting material for which I lack significant personal additions, but can write a short summary for each... you may find something of interest in the following webpages this week....
[NB: I try to quote a writer by name whenever possible, but don't have time for WHOIS searches on uncredited blogs any more.]
Daniel Solove of Concurring Opinions writes of "Google's Empire, Privacy, and Government Access to Personal Data". He notes that centralized data services (search engines, online stores, serverside aggregators, social networks, credit cards, etc) know a lot more about individuals than fifty years ago, but then falls flat by looking only at potential abuse by governments (specifically, the US government). Get real -- any criminal network has sufficient incentive to infiltrate staff to withdraw or insert data -- the risks lie in the rapid centralization itself, not just the advantage one particular faction might take of such centralization.
Pete Freitag has a quick intro to the universal UNIX text editor, vi.
I get a lot of weird comments in old items here -- most of these are from search engine visitors who need a place to spew, rather than from people actually interested in these rich networked technologies. An old weblog item about the webapp UI for the Entertainment Tonight website has attracted angry comments from people who saw TV shows they didn't like. Free Clue, folks: If you don't know where you're writing, then what you're writing may not be very useful... give my love to MSNSearch 'kay...? ;-)
M.Sippey offers a Web 2.0 Checklist, a smart fashion list of what the well-dressed Press Release will be wearing this season....
Fontographer was ported to Mac OS X and contains changes to match newer application, but no dramatic change to its drawing tools for typefaces. (Fontographer was actually the first PostScript drawing tool -- created for fonts, people used the Bezier Pen to draw vector artwork within a single character, then sized it up for printing. It was developed by Jim Von Ehr, Kevin Crowder and the initial group from Altsys in Texas -- marketed by Aldus in Seattle -- wrested free from Aldus when it merged with Adobe, with Altsys then fully joining Macromedia -- was spun off from Macromedia to Fontlab last year.) (And no, I haven't heard anything about FreeHand or other older applications yet... the company issues a fiscal outlook Dec15, and strategic outlook Jan31.)
Alex Bosworth writes "10 Places You Must Use Ajax", but I suspect this might have been more accurately titled "6 Places You Must Use Ajax (Or Better), And 6 Places to Choose HTML" -- some web tasks benefit from partial-data refreshes more than full-page refreshes, others are better handled simply. Good discussion of evaluating the user experience of various web tasks, recommended.
Jonathan Aquino synchs up three mapping UIs within a single web page: Google/JavaScript, Yahoo/JavaScript, Yahoo/Flash.
Dion Almaer lists some of the recent SVG and CANVAS examples possible within the Firefox 1.5 rendering engine. (More here.)
A data-fed mix of Avian Flu outbreak locations with Google's mapping imagery and JavaScript controls.
Odeo introduces a new interface for casual audio on websites.
Deployment of hand prosthetics with haptic feedback is expected by European researchers within two years.
Metrics of television viewers are about to add stats on whether a viewing has been time-shifted, and will then move to whether viewing has been shifted to other devices (computers, pocket video, etc).
"Interactive posters" are described as an ambient electronic display which can respond to passers-by: "When the user of a Windows Mobile phone or PDA in the vicinity of an interactive poster activates the Bluetooth or IrDA port of their device, a small electronic tag attached to the poster transmits some content to the mobile device. Examples include coupons or other promotional material, custom-branded games or ringtones, or even custom mobile phone applications, according to Remote Media."
Ben Forta shows how it's difficult to directly compare ColdFusion and .NET because they're at different logical levels, like comparing a supercharged fuel injected V-8 S10 engine to the Jaguar XK 2007 automobile.
Christian Cantrell forgets a necessary first implementation step, in a photo from the memorably incredible establishments at Yung Shue Wan. (More from Fegette, Cantrell, Church, others? Also of interest: This, but not this. ;-)
Another person gets hurt by specification validators -- people work hard to accommodate the specs, without stopping to check how hard the specs had tried to accommodate the world's existing browsers. (Summary, more.) Andrew Kirkpatrick has one of the best comparisons of various circuitous paths around OBJECT/EMBED, with a special set of tests of what happens to screenreaders when the browser's normal tag is shunned.
Posted by John Dowdell at 7:17 PM
Post-merger websites
Post-merger websites: Earlier this morning, a short outage on MXNA triggered Eric Dolecki to suspect the worst. Generally, I think the various Macromedia websites will change gradually, like the Allaire websites (front page, forums, downloads etc) did when they joined Macromedia five years ago. Sometimes late this weekend the Macromedia front page will likely have an Adobe logo replacing the Macromedia logo, and the top name will be "Adobe (formerly Macromedia)". Layout, menus, resources, addresses, even body text, all should be exactly the same, but the branding will likely change. Product literature will likely change faster than technote body, docs may change brandnames only by replacement, etc. At some point in the future the sites will actually merge into one, but even at that point older addresses will still be getting tons of links, so the work has to be done at a gradual rate of change. Some of the 15 regional websites may change at different times, whether it's handled by a central or regional web team. Branding is a Day One thing, and you should expect the sites to function same as before, over the many months during which they'll fully merge. (If you see any Day One glitches, then dropping a comment to this item, or over at Neil's place, would likely avoid the other issues that come into the general site feedback form, thanks.)
Posted by John Dowdell at 11:41 AM
December 2, 2005
Digg's Farewell
Digg's Farewell: Complementing today's Slashdot discussion, the folks at digg.com discuss how Friday was the final day of Macromedia, Inc. There's a range of viewpoints, and I'm a little too tipsy at the moment to address them all (I'm typing in between parties here at 601T ;-) -- the biggest idea I'd try to get across is to please look at the software architectures which need to be created for the next ten years, not just the software architectures which have been produced for the past ten, twenty years. There's a lot of work yet to be done here, and I think the new company will be in a prime position to lay out and distribute this groundwork, which others can then build upon. It's not about DTP, or CD-ROM, or WWW, or web apps anymore -- not even about RIAs anymore -- our goal's beyond. There's much more stuff yet to do.
Posted by John Dowdell at 5:26 PM
MACR wrap
MACR wrap: heh, I hadn't thought of that... no more MACR trades, they're history: "NEW YORK, Dec. 2 /PRNewswire/ -- Quicksilver Resources Inc. will be added to the S&P MidCap 400 after the close of trading on Monday, December 5. Quicksilver will take the place of Macromedia Inc., which was removed from the Index after the close of trading today, in anticipation of Macromedia's pending acquisition of S&P 500 constituent Adobe Systems Inc. closing before Monday's open of trading."
Posted by John Dowdell at 4:49 PM
Eolas re-re-re-re-redux
Eolas re-re-re-re-redux: In response to recent court rulings, Microsoft announced this afternoon that they'll go back to avoiding possible infringement of the Eolas plugin-invocation patent. This Microsoft page on "Changes to Internet Explorer" is back in effect, and I suspect Macromedia/Adobe will be reviving their plugin patent page pretty soon as well. No rush on this... from what I currently understand Microsoft doesn't plan to ship its first altered browsers until mid-spring next year. Sorry to spring this on you on a Friday afternoon, but.... :(
Update: [Additional blogsearch terms: eolas, patent, activex, Active Content]
Posted by John Dowdell at 4:23 PM
Macromedia contacts
Macromedia contacts: Here's a LinkedIn group for "Macromedia Alumni"... I haven't explored this service, but many find it useful. If you're in San Francisco, then I, uh, expect that Mars Bar and Annie's will be pretty busy this week. ;-) I'd also sort of expect that the next few weeks won't be the most productive ones at either Macromedia or Adobe... lots of meetings, lots of changes, please cut us some slack if we're not as on-top of things as usual. With the end-of-year holidays there probably won't be much solid news until January... on Dec15 there will be a webcast for the financial community, but the formal strategic outlook presentation won't be until Jan31. Fewer tenterhooks today, true, but there's still a lot of business to take care of before the great leap forward.... ;-)
Posted by John Dowdell at 1:50 PM
Forbes, Adobe COO
Forbes, Adobe COO: Danit Lidor of Forbes interviews Shantanu Narayen, president and chief operating officer of Adobe Systems. "What should customers expect from the newly merged company?" "Look at our four major customer segments... [creative tools, knowledge workers, enterprise, mobile]" There's a video too, linked but not yet live.
Posted by John Dowdell at 1:28 PM
Read Dutch?
Read Dutch? If so, could you check my understanding of this privacy concern in a Dutch weblog? I'm working off the Babelfish translation and it sounds like the root issue is that someone is shocked to see their Flash Player privacy settings displayed within a web browser, and they're assuming that their chosen settings are stored on the Macromedia site. If so, then their settings are actually stored on their own computer (via a cookie-like mechanism in the Player) and are never transmitted to the Macromedia site -- people are used to seeing dynamic data come from a server, but in this case the dynamic data is fed from the local machine. Here's the part which concerned me most (in machine translation): "If you adapt your settings now [in a local shared objects file] then on the macro media site are adapted this aware bestandje. Irrespective of firewall, spyware blocker.. everything become simply get round. If this no spyware or rootkit material are weet I it also no longer." If you can read the original, then could you check my understanding of it, please?
Posted by John Dowdell at 7:45 AM
ePaper hits market
ePaper hits market: Last spring Seiko demonstrated a wristwatch using flexible electronic paper for its display, and this January they're shipping, a limited-edition 500 units worldwide. Check how the display in the above photo is so much more stylish than that in the prototype -- style is extremely important in personal electronics, programmer art won't cut it. More on the technology, its manufacture, market, its current acceleration. eInk itself is looking to add internet connectivity to such displays. This is ambient computing, where you just speak to control the wall of whatever building you're in, because your mobile's earpiece communicates with the wall's pixels. What happens when architecture and decorating can use interactive video as a media type? That's still a ways away, but this ePaper watch does look attractive... betcha Christian Cantrell has his order in already.... ;-) [via MobileWhack]
Posted by John Dowdell at 5:36 AM
December 1, 2005
Adobe update
Adobe update: "SAN JOSE, Calif. — December 1, 2005 — Adobe Systems Incorporated (Nasdaq: ADBE) and Macromedia, Inc. (Nasdaq: MACR) today announced they have either received or been notified they will receive all regulatory clearances necessary to complete Adobe's pending acquisition of Macromedia. The companies expect to close the transaction on December 3, 2005."
Posted by John Dowdell at 5:43 PM
Mobile AJaX?
Mobile AJaX? I picked up this "flash-vs-ajax slugfest" article via Rich Ziade (whose perspective parallels mine), and while scanning, stopped at this question: "So what about AJAX on mobile devices? What’s the future? what’s the adoption level? no accurate measures available yet. Agree with me? please oppose me if not, comment please." I think such things will eventually happen, if we define "Ajax" as "document-centric interactivity" and "mobile devices" as any mobile device, not just the current range of phones. That's because technologies eventually do converge on new abilities... it took about five years for browsers to converge on the HTML 2.0 spec (still working on the subsequent specs)... it took about seven years for data-refreshes via XmlHttpRequest to be implemented in multiple browsers and prompt the "AJaX" marketing festival... other "spec-first" approaches like CSS have already converged on their base-level functionality in current browsers. Some specs founder before adoption (like VRML)... some specs muddle along until becoming reliably available (like PNG)... but generally, HTML, JavaScript, and other core specifications do gradually improve and converge in realworld implementations. On the "devices" end of things, it seems that most will have a need to work with live text, and so some type of markup language for layout and styling will be necessary in devices, as well as some type of text-refresh mechanism (which is the literal, non-marketing definition for "AJaX"). For the unasked question "How will most of the memorable experiences on 2010's pocket devices be engineered?" then I suspect they'd be by some type of general capability (like Flash) rather than by varying implementations of a general specification (like most AJaX debates). The WWW browsers will eventually converge on new abilities, but it won't be as fast as a single engine will get there, that's what I suspect.
Posted by John Dowdell at 4:56 PM
Santangelo on nearterm tech
Santangelo on nearterm tech: Josh Santangelo is interviewed in Futile blog and looks forward at application development via Flex, via JavaScript... paraphrases is that app development in the classic Flash authoring environment was hard, and that much current interactivity can be handled by JavaScript... there are different trajectories for tool development... he's bullish on Flex 2, but it's hard to wait for this and Player 8.5 to get out the door.
Posted by John Dowdell at 4:19 PM
FF SVG, CANVAS in SWF
FF SVG, CANVAS in SWF: I'm pulling together a list of resources into this entry; please add more in comments if you know of them, thanks. Firefox 1.5 adds native rendering support for a subset of SVG-full 1.1 and the CANVAS drawing tag. Today Manish Jethani describes an approach to render CANVAS instructions in SWF. Paul Colton has also been working with JavaScript control over SWF, with drawing descriptions passed by a CANVAS tag. Claus Wahlers has been rendering SVG files in the Macromedia Flash Player via his DENG library. David Flanagan has also been exploring JavaScript drawing into SWF, although I think his use of term "canvas" may be coincidental. Christopher Anderson has also been doing work in this area. Why does this matter? Lots of web-influentials prefer Firefox, and I suspect that over the next eight months we'll see their experiments with CANVAS and the SVG subset... co-rendering with SWF means (a) their audiences won't have to switch environments (good for them); (b) we won't have to listen to newbie "firefox vs flash" debates (good for us). Seems to me that Firefox drawing which can gracefully degrade to SWF helps everyone. More: Antoine Quint looks at rendering SVG via CANVAS tags... Brad Neuberg looks at emulating SVG and CANVAS in Internet Explorer... Dion Almaer offers some CANVAS examples... Vladimir Vukicevic lists some current CANVAS examples and wonders whether richer-than-text media is worth it... the Mozilla site has various debates between CANVAS and SVG advocates. Do you have more links in this area, so that someone interested in such solutions can get the best info, quickest...?
Posted by John Dowdell at 3:20 PM
i.get.it, Flex
i.get.it, Flex: I came across this press release in the morning news search... CADPO introduces a new behind-the-firewall engineering training/assessment system, using Macromedia Flex for delivering the user interface to web browsers. The system requires a log-in to use, but the demonstration videos show the types of interactions. Points which struck me: (a) Much of the Flex 1.0 work has been for intranet rather than for internet, particularly because of the tight server integration... I suspect we'll see a change in the mix of realworld examples once the next-generation Flex splits into both standalone authoring and enhanced enterprise versions. (b) It's not just "what can the browser do?" but more "how can my serving computer work with the audience's viewing computers?", and serverside integration is still non-standardized for pure JavaScript UIs ("Ajax" as marketing term, eg). (c) SWF UIs can handle data-driven text quite easily, but also handle more media types, more predictably and economically, than relying on the varying current markup-oriented ways to do so.
Posted by John Dowdell at 12:33 PM