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January 31, 2006

Historic day

Historic day: Adobe execs lay out the business plan to the financial community. I believe the presentations will remain on the site for two weeks. This isn't so much about the details of each technology as to how the Adobe technologies work together across business opportunities. (ie, no Apollo implementation details or product announcements, but lots on why "Knowledge Workers" is so hot, the evolution and expansion of developers/enterprise, and a great overview of current mobile.) Meanwhile, Flash Player 8 was tested at nearly 50% consumer viewability by NPD last month, at only fifteen weeks after public release -- amazing, significant milestone. The capabilities of the world's wide web have been measurably enhanced in record time; and there are large areas of user experience in which the new Adobe is already innovating. Exciting stuff, historic day, check it out!

Posted by John Dowdell at 10:56 AM

January 27, 2006

Flash Media Server licensing

Flash Media Server licensing: Steve Wolkoff, Adobe Product Manager for Flash Media Server, opened up a new blog -- I don't think he's in the aggregators yet, but he's got info here on the new licensing models for different types of serverside control over video and communications. It seems like you'll be able to change your licensing configuration on the fly, depending on the audience size and throughput you see yourself needing for different projects. Update: Sorry, I had meant to credit Stefan Richter for first highlighting this conversation with occurred on the FlashComm mailing list! (I don't yet know about the bitmap issue, but am working on finding out more.)

Posted by John Dowdell at 4:29 PM

Blogger junkets

Blogger junkets: Steve Rubel writes of companies offering services to bloggers, presumably in hopes of good coverage. I'm torn on this, got no conclusion. You have thoughts, stuff that you'd like others to know about your feelings on the subject...?

Posted by John Dowdell at 3:47 PM

I'm with Bill

I'm with Bill: I put fnords in bold: "Bill Gates, the billionaire founder of Microsoft, took the rare step of standing up for arch-rival Google today as he argued that state censorship was no reason for technology companies not to do business in China. The richest man in the world told delegates at the World Economic Forum in Davos that he thought the internet 'is contributing to Chinese political engagement' as 'access to the outside world is preventing more censorship'." I also think that a greater range of technical options for individuals tends to be a good thing overall, and I'm also aware that there are signficant business interests in play were Google to be pressured out of that arena. If a "human rights group" wanted to expand blogging or search options in a top-down society then I'd be willing to back that effort (assuming suitable financial transparency), but I'm not sure about working to remove less-than-perfect implementations that others may attempt. One other Gates quote from this reporter: "Software piracy is a problem that will likely be solved over time, because as Chinese-made technology evolves, the country's respect for intellectual property rights will improve, he added. 'We are always upset that they aren't paying us for our products, but we're not going to pick up and go home,' Mr Gates said." Even typewriter registration didn't hold back inevitable change....

Posted by John Dowdell at 3:39 PM

XHTML 2.0 vs HTML 5

XHTML 2.0 vs HTML 5: Edd Dumbill writes of the debates over which way browsers should behave next year. I don't have a succinct overview myself. Changes like putting ALT text into a full IMG tag sound like they'd have some effects on the world: "<p><img src="http://example.com/water.png">H₂O</img></p>" Key quote: "In these two articles, I've presented the salient points of both WHATWG's HTML 5 and the W3C's XHTML 2.0. The two initiatives are quite different: The grassroots-organised WHATWG aims for a gently incremental enhancement of HTML 4 and XHTML 1.0, whereas the consortium-sponsored XHTML 2.0 is a comprehensive refactoring of the HTML language. While different, the two approaches are not incompatible." (Related: Sometimes I like to go read the 1993 papers on HTML, the types of jobs for which it was envisioned, and how it was refactored down as a simpler, more learnable, and more uniformly implementable format than SGML....)

Posted by John Dowdell at 3:16 PM

Streaming video quality

Streaming video quality: Network Computing blind-tests streaming video servers from Microsoft, Apple, Real, and Adobe -- participants rated Flash's video quality to be the best. (This was with the On2 codec.) The article confused me a little -- I think they ding'd Flash because its chromeless playback means that you have to specify a video shell -- it doesn't have "the big box" of Windows Media Player or Real Player. I think the tests were focused on image quality, rather than realworld capability for realworld audiences... the Sorenson codec in Flash Player 7 is the undisputed winner for consumer viewability, and it will take a few more months for the On2 codec in Flash Player 8 to reach that level. I'm glad they preferred how Flash Video looks, though. :)

Posted by John Dowdell at 2:46 PM

Mochibot not "spyware"

Mochibot not "spyware": Mochibot is a good technique/service for making sure your SWFs aren't swiped. You add a call to the Mochibot servers in the script in your SWF, and then check hosting servers periodically. I've written about Mochibot before, but am highlighting it today because of an objection on a GNU list, and it seems like a Slashdottable claim. A subsequent comment confusingly avers this is something built into Macromedia Flash Player, rather than optionally placed into any SWF by any one who doesn't want their creative work repurposed without their knowledge or consent. (You don't want to invisibly call materials from local servers, because clientside stuff can execute *behind* a firewall -- tons more actual info in the 50 page Player Security whitepaper.) Thanks to Claus Wahlers for adding context to that conversation!

Posted by John Dowdell at 12:57 PM

Ads go 8

Ads go 8: Web-ad company PointRoll licenses On2's Flix tools, for compression to the tighter video format in Flash Player 8. The significance? Ad-serving companies (DoubleClick, Google, more) do a lot of capabilities testing on many of the world's browsers, and their measurements have convinced them that SWF8 is now a viable format to offer to the general public. The specific percentage of Flash8-enabled audience will vary with the testing method (some ads use browser-script to query extensions, some use Player getVersion() tests, NPD uses consumer audits, etc), but their trends will usually be internally consistent across time. The advertisers are pragmatic, measuring their clicks... they're starting to switch over to Flash 8.

Posted by John Dowdell at 7:49 AM

January 26, 2006

Google Rich Ads

Google Rich Ads: Google is reportedly ready to start beta-testing rich-media ads in AdSense -- different from their AdWords rich-media, somehow. Anyway, if you make up a nice SWF that promotes Falun Gong, I'll sponsor its AdSense placement on People's Daily, let's see what kind of ruckus we can cause.... ;-)

Posted by John Dowdell at 5:24 PM

Google SVG use

Google SVG use: Earlier this week Google released a study of how many web pages were constructed, and displayed the results in SVG. There was discussion at Slashdot and other places, but on Evolt's mailing list, Dejan Kozina described viewing tests in a variety of SVG-supporting environments. (Summary: SVG ain't "SVG", you've got to specify the implementation.) Max Schwanekamp had more info on how the decision was made. For me, this is the key issue behind most of the Microsoft Expression discussions this week -- where does the stuff actually work, what costs do your audience have to pay to view it? Focusing on the file formats is nice, but what's the actual engine which renders your work in each of the various viewing environments?

Posted by John Dowdell at 5:17 PM

More links

More links: Abandoned robotic dogs, Pixar history, massively multiplayer dancing, and more... lots of links I found this week while searching technology-related discussions, that are just too interesting to close out of my browser windows....

Sony discontinues Aibo, the robotic dog.

Chris Seibold at AppleMatters has a great history of how the elements of Pixar were put together over the years, and how business needs affected creative output.

A Korean game called "Audition" is a different way for people to get together online.

Lots of people really like the iRiver U10 device.

Debate over whether we should carry multiple small devices, or one larger uberdevice.

Chris Pirillo has a way with words when he's talking them, more than just writing them.

Online learning may have increased realworld absenteeism.

"You can write, people like your style and enjoy your work. But you can't make enough money from advertising to pay your bills. What can you do? Have you considered blogging for hire?"

Google analyzes the markup of a subset of the web. The requirement for a particular browser version to view charts sparks debate. (More at Slashdot.)

An interview with Sean Stewart about producing website games which reach out into the real world. Mike Masnick pulls out this quote: "What people do on the web is they look for things and they gossip. We found a way of storytelling that has a lot to do with looking for things and gossiping about them."

Tactics for dealing with requests for your (US) Social Security Number.

Brad Fuller: "Why don't we have an aural web? Can web-sounds be a new paradigm for professional sound designers? Will new web technologies enable the web to make it past the silent-era?"

Jeffrey Zeldman dissects some of the bluster behind the loudest talkers in "Web 2.0"... Dion Hinchcliffe responds, with followup conversation here.

Jeff Jarvis dissects the sections of a modern newspaper, to figure how to sanely re-create them in today's world.

Luar has a bunch of photos of the "Thank you, Macromedia" essay in Japan's Web Designing magazine.

Jered from Razorfish has a different view of Microsoft's Sparkle than what we read in the newspapers: "Do I think that Interactive Designer is the Flash killer? No. Do I think that it is a direct competitor? Only somewhat. Unlike Flash, WPF is a true platform. Interactive Designer is built on and made to build content for that platform. Flash can actually be one of many pieces of content that is served on the WPF platform. There are similarities in what they do as far as vectors and animation but Interactive Designer is built to serve a very complex, robust and highly integrated platform of which UX is only one element."

"Bill Gates Runs Like a Girl", while politically incorrect, made me laugh out loud more than a few times.

Back in September, Mark Niemann-Ross summarized the public record on ports of Adobe software to the new Macintosh/Intel platform.

The FreeBSD advocacy list has a new petition for Flash Player port, but I didn't see that they've yet linked to Tinic's backgrounder on the subject.

Jason Kottke analyzed the maintainence costs of open comments at a high-volume weblog.

Microsoft spends $328,767 a day to be perceived as a small company.

"Java Champion" Yakov Fain looks around for matching client-side interactivity, and starts to look into Flash Platform technology.

Sergey Brin of Google has a great op/ed about growing up in the USSR, and finding a way to stay engaged with China.

Business 2.0 lists out 2005's "101 Dumbest Business Moves", and this page focuses on tech companies.

In Paris, Sunny Ripert lists out "Flash isn't a browser" objections and closes, "I beg you, please stop asking me to make sites in Flash!" (Sounds like he's got more work than he can handle, if you're local and can help him out.... ;-)

The markup used on the IEEE "Social Implications of Technology" website does not please a member, who unfortunately doesn't quite specify the elements to which she objects.

Posted by John Dowdell at 4:38 PM

Out of the ghetto

Out of the ghetto: Yesterday I asked your help in assisting people, who haven't yet used Flash Platform technology, to get up to speed on the Public Beta of Flex 2.0, expected Very Soon Now. Last night I realized more of what drove my concern. ColdFusion users know what I'm talking about -- the Allaire group did something truly innovative in the mid-90s, but later seemed to get pushed off to the side in the press, off in their own little ghetto, by subsequent talk about latecomers like ASP and PHP. (ColdFusion adoption *is* real high, particularly for realworld non-hobbyist use, but that "Not Invented Here" blindness has been frustrating.) Flash folk also know what I'm talking about -- we've been doing live-text refreshes in Player for a decade, and with the Allaire merger solidified client/server integration as "RIAs", but it wasn't until 2005 after the marketing term "Ajax" appeared that we saw people gushing about separating data updates from presentation updates. I don't want to see the same invisibility happen to Flex -- I think the technology is too important, too empowering, to be shunted off into our own little ghetto somewhere. I've suffered more than enough "You must use Internet Explorer" web apps in my life -- I've watched more than enough committees dither over complex specifications that never get implemented identically among different engines. I want to see a lightweight, universally accessible, and consistent way to create browser-based interfaces. I want that as a geek; I want that as a consumer. If Flex gets competition later, that's one thing, but I don't want to see it ignored by the influential until followup approaches appear. So, if you can tip off someone outside our little circle about the Flex 2.0 Public Beta, in an honest way that focuses on how they might benefit, then that would be a great help to me, thanks. I don't want to see great technology marginalized by lack of awareness again...!

Posted by John Dowdell at 12:45 PM

January 25, 2006

Blog sensationalism

Blog sensationalism: Russell Beattie has a great illustration here, worth the click alone... for text, he covers a similar theme to Caterina Fake the other day, about how the echo-chamberiness of popular weblogs is getting very noticeably strange. (Check out the current headlines on "Google/China for an example.) I got a laugh from the astringency of Brian Duffy in the comments, too.... ;-)

Posted by John Dowdell at 4:25 PM

svgtest.org

svgtest.org: New opensource project, designed to make a test suite for comparing the various SVG renderers. The mailing list is discussing some of the issues involved.

Posted by John Dowdell at 4:08 PM

Web design vs "web standards"

Web design vs "web standards": The author of ActionScript Jabberwocky runs a rant on browser variability, and pulls good commentary in reply. He contrasts the Flash approach of defining how the world's computers will act (by getting a lightweight rendering engine onto all those machines), and the HTML approach of defining how the world's computers should act (by defining an ideal file format, then hoping others implement engines for these formats, and that these various renderers match behavior to support the design, and that consumers choose the designer's preferred renderers). I think that both user-controlled and presenter-controlled formats are important in the ecology, but I also suspect that designers' desires can quickly over-reach the shared areas of cross-browser functionality -- HTML started simple, but has gotten more complex and less approachable over the years. There's a good discussion here about the balance between predictable design and multiple engines.

Posted by John Dowdell at 3:46 PM

Flex 2, tell a friend

Flex 2, tell a friend: I'm asking your help with something, because there will soon be a short window in which we can have a big impact. I want lots of new people to actually try Flex 2 when in goes in public beta, very soon. The Flex 2 alpha, described in Mike's article above, has been extremely well received -- by those people already working with Macromedia/Adobe technologies. But people who work in Perl or Python, Java or .NET, XHTML or XUL, they need to learn about this too. Flex 2 is really a big advance, of long-term significance for the web, and those who do any work in this area deserve to know the truth. When the Flex 2 Public Beta arrives, I'd appreciate it if you could download it, or even just watch the Breeze presentations, and then recommend it for investigation to people whom you think it might help. No hardsell, no evangelism -- other people know their own situations better than we do, so we've got to respect different decisions. But if you can check into Flex 2 Public Beta yourself when it launches, and then spread the word to friends who might benefit from it, then that would really help the whole platform... just say what you see, how it benefits you, and how you think it might benefit your friend who may never have used Flash-y things before. I want to see this XML separation of authoring and deployment succeed -- I think such a success would be a good advance for everyone. So when Flex 2 hits Public Beta, please tell a friend from outside the MXNA circle -- thanks!

Posted by John Dowdell at 1:25 PM

January 24, 2006

Opera Mini page translation

Opera Mini page translation: Low-end phones are enabled by a serverside rewrite of existing web content: "Instead of requiring the phone to process Web pages, [Opera Mini] uses a remote server to pre-process the page before sending it to the phone." The idea makes sense, and it helps add functionality to cheaper hardware, but I'm wondering which group will be first to object to having its web content reprocessed and reserved like this. I've got no stake in the issue either way, but I know how possessive some people get of their HTML design work....

Posted by John Dowdell at 3:42 PM

PC tower with tailfins

PC tower with tailfins: Got a desktop tower with an empty drive bay, and a $20 bill you can spare? Then trick out your computer with a sturdy cup-holder and lighter. Classic outfit, particularly when paired with the USB ashtray.

Posted by John Dowdell at 1:57 PM

Sparkle preview

Sparkle preview: Microsoft releases a Community Technology Preview of the project codenamed "Sparkle". This project has often been portrayed in media stories as "Flash-Killer!", because it designs interactivity with vectors and nice graphics, but I suspect that audience needs, not the technologies employed, will tell the real story -- it's being a universal media/interactivity layer, not drawing vectors, that defines Flash these days. More discussion at Microsoft forums, and Robert Scott at Robert's Scoble blog has a good comment: "Visual Studio / WPF developers need a default tool for building vector graphics". I'm not interested in deathmatch comments on this item, but am interested in how you see the technologies and their actual audiences, thanks.

Posted by John Dowdell at 8:12 AM

January 23, 2006

Search privacy

Search privacy: Danny Sullivan has what looks to be a great piece here, tying together various articles on search engine privacy. There are traces on your computer, at your ISP, at the search engine, and in the outbound document.referrers from a clicked hit, which in turn can be picked up by third-party analytics on the world's content pages. There are other ways your data can leak, such as packet sniffers and keyloggers, but Danny seems to have the basics covered here on what happens "out there" when you use a search engine portal.

Posted by John Dowdell at 5:42 PM

Flex 2 alpha survey

Flex 2 alpha survey: If you spent time with the Flex 2 Alpha on Macromedia Labs recently, then could I ask you to spend a little more time answering 20 questions on your experience with it? Thanks! (If you want to forward the survey, then please snip out the User ID added in the browser's location bar first... I've got the bare link in the citation above.)

Posted by John Dowdell at 5:24 PM

Face muscles

Face muscles: Great SWF which isolates and illustrates the muscles of the human face... try the "Level II" screen in the application to set transparency for skull and muscles, then choose individual emotions on the right side of the screen.....

Posted by John Dowdell at 4:58 PM

iPod battery FAQ

iPod battery FAQ: Apple doc says that it doesn't matter either way whether the battery completely runs out before recharging. There are also tips on extending battery life.

Posted by John Dowdell at 4:52 PM

Text vs content

Text vs content: Jeffrey Veen here, with a quote that struck me: "This reminded me of doing primary research for a history course once in musty old volumes of Time Magazine from the first World War era. It so interesting to have such a dramatic first draft of history without a blur of hindsight. But also, I was struck with how much more powerful those accounts were when set in their original typeface, following layout principles from nearly a century ago, juxtaposed against advertisements for girdles and Model-T's. It was unmistakably better than the raw text, if only to help evoke the time in which the words first were set down on the page." The actual message was more than the text alone. Epistemographer blog has the flip side, talking about how the emphasis on text-manipulation techniques in "Web 2.0" may make today's presentations invisible to future viewers: "In a sense, the whole point of Web 2.0 is to make it harder to archive and preserve knowledge." [via Jeffrey Zeldman]

Posted by John Dowdell at 4:04 PM

Google News out of beta

Google News out of beta: One of the longest betas I can recall, nearly three-and-a-half years. Now let's hope no government body asks which articles people click on most.... ;-) [via Search Engine Watch]

Posted by John Dowdell at 3:12 PM

Elevator pitch

Elevator pitch: An investor describes how to compose a description of your work, which someone can understand in the time it takes to ride an elevator. He recommends a sentence to describe the problem, a sentence to describe what you do about it, a sentence to describe how you're better than other solutions, and a sentence to describe who already believes in you. In comments there's a followup 10 Tips to a Perfect Pitch, for when you've moved past the quick paragraph and into a longer, more formal presentation of your work.

Posted by John Dowdell at 8:52 AM

January 22, 2006

What's Flex?

What's Flex? I'm bumping up Christian Cantrell's piece from last week, because I think this info will prove very valuable for people reading this blog. Flex 2.0 is now in public alpha, and will soon go beta, and will prove a significant event in web application development, I believe. Christian describes the different parts of the Flex 2.0 ecology: the Eclipse-based Flex Builder to create SWF interfaces from XML instructions on a standalone authoring machine; the optional server-based Flex Enterprise Services for live compiling of XML to data-fed SWF; the Flash Player 8.5 to work on consumer machines worldwide to predictably render these interfaces; the Flex Framework, a standard to describe advanced interfaces in XML; the Flex Charting Components to add advanced numeric visualization to the browser; the Flex Compiler which can be used inside of Flex Builder or in other types of workflows too. The first discussions of abstracting rich interactivity into XML took place on the Director mailing lists in the late 90s, and now a practical implementation is almost here. Unlike many web technologies, which develop under hobbyists and then try to scale up to enterprise, the Flex approach started in enterprise with server compilation (and high ticket price), and its strong success among those buyers now helps bring a proven framework and rendering out to the world's wider set of developers. I think that more and more people will ask you, as each month goes on, about what Flex is and how it works. Check out Christian's description and the links... puts you ahead of the game, gives you the answers ahead of time.

Posted by John Dowdell at 8:12 PM

Vertical markets

Vertical markets: One other angle I learned more about this week was how certain groups of large customers subsidize the overall technology base. A "vertical market" refers to the unique needs of groups of many people working together -- government, education, manufacturing, medicine, publishing, etc. These groups fund technology efforts beyond what could be achieved with only a single sale at a time. If you've attended a presentation or collaborative meeting in Macromedia Breeze, then it was the enterprise need for cost-reduction in meeting and training which paid its cost. The pharmaceutical industry's support paved the way for Adobe Acrobat to develop paperwork reduction and management technology. The strong support for Flex 1.x in business development both ratified the research and helped underwrite the rapid diversification of this smarter way of interface development. The new Adobe covers a lot more verticals than Macromedia did -- pretty much anything you can see out in the world, which once had a connection with a computer, has passed through the Adobe imaging model at some point -- and those large vertical needs regularly provide the financial support for technologies which then anyone can use.

Posted by John Dowdell at 10:48 AM

Adobe Business Units

Adobe Business Units: This week I spent much time at the Adobe Worldwide Sales Meeting, a weeklong event which covered the entire business of the new company. I learned a lot, particularly at the Q&A sessions with the Sales Engineers. Some of this material is still NDA, so I can't directly report, but many of the themes will publicly emerge after the analyst meetings later this month. The best framework for these new efforts may be the list of Adobe Business Units on the FAQ page, above. The entire company shares a technology base of a device-independent media/interactivity layer, but the BUs break out by customer needs: those using the creative tools (imaging, video, illustration, web design)... enterprise developers (emphasis on ColdFusion, Flex, LiveCycle)... the needs of knowledge workers (Acrobat, Breeze, collaborative production)... the varied players in the mobile market... and those who work on classic publishing to PostScript and HTML. I'm in Kevin Lynch's Platform Business Unit, a sort of meta-BU, where we'll be taking this univeral interactive media layer to the next level (Apollo and more). There's a lot going on in the new company, and I'm already convinced that the next year will be a very exciting one, but the above layout of the customer-focused business units, each taking slightly different advantage of the shared technology base, may be the best way to organize the information which will be in the news over the coming weeks. Shared universal technology, with business units organized around different customer needs... this seems like the key to the whole picture.

Posted by John Dowdell at 10:16 AM

PDFs as SuperCookies?

PDFs as SuperCookies? Lots of people know more about electronic documents than me, but I'm coming at it from a background influenced by ColdFusion, Flash, RIAs. This "PDFs as a Standard for Archiving" whitepaper (PDF, 270K, ten pages) really changed the way I look at things, and I'd recommend it to your attention. We're all familiar with storing data on the server, but some documents have more stringent requirements: each participant needs an authoritative copy of the material -- the presentation can't change in different environments -- some documents need to be authenticated, protected, guaranteed to be as they were when all participants entered the agreements. Browser cookies can store some local data, but they don't replace a hardcopy document of the full presentation. My headline of "PDFs as SuperCookies?" trivializes the format a bit, but it gets across the idea of permanence and reliability in a way far exceeding the HTTP serving model for keeping a copy of your formal documents. Optional barcoding can help turn static paper forms back into live electronic forms. The archiving profile for PDF is just universal formatted data, without the interactive desktop features for collaborative creation of these documents, and is similar to the PDF mobile format. This article is both well-written and concise, covering the various audience needs, the different types of standards (de jure, de facto, and mandated), the workflow of server integration, more. If you're intrigued by better local storage of data, this short whitepaper gives a good overview of the unique ways that PDF can help.

Posted by John Dowdell at 9:26 AM

Bloggers myths

Bloggers myths: The link is to the front page of tech.memeorandum.com, whose editors* this week carried two campaigns which still seem offbase to me. The "search engines snitch your search!" story had large volumes of commentary which didn't seem to acknowledge that the embattled material is all on the public record anyway (for better info, see MSN Search blog, the final item in Declan McCullagh's CNET FAQ, or just do a web search over the past ten years for terms like "search voyeur spy terms"). The "WaPo censors comments!" story's commentary didn't always acknowledge that there were large amounts of anonymous, off-topic and ad-hominem commentary in only one particular blog item, whose address had been targeted by the Kos bloc. (See Deborah Howell for what happened to her... the followup title "L'il Debbie still doesn't get it", in its personalized acrimony, is what finally pushed me to write.) Decentralized web publishing can help reveal hidden things, but it can also hide things, distort things, and raise the wrong things to prominence. I believe quality and accuracy will overcome the noise, eventually, but a little more skepticism, agnosticism, and kindness in the meantime may help reduce the damage to our collective consciousness. Thank you, and I'll step off this soapbox now.... ;-) (*Disclosures: I'm appreciative that Gabe Rivera included me in the initial pool of Memeorandum tech editors, but I'm always hesitant to jump into hot issues because of the risk that an impulsive reader may ascribe my thoughts to the company.)

Posted by John Dowdell at 8:29 AM

January 20, 2006

Search privacy

Search privacy: At WIRED, Ryan Singel has a good rundown of cookies, search engines, and central databases. If the personal data of many people is very centralized, then that database becomes very attractive to many interests.

Posted by John Dowdell at 7:41 PM

Metro FUD

Metro FUD: Weird article, "Support for XPS, Microsoft's PDF-Killer, Gaining Steam"... according to this account, MS staff are saying an upcoming OS-dependent document format enjoys several advantages over PDF: digital signatures, compression, open documented format, transparency/gradients, all of which have actually been in PDF for years. The most startling line may be this: "Another advantages is that XPS documents will be independent of software and hardware, and thereby users won't need a separate reader (such as Adobe Acrobat) to open and read XPS documents. Just the same, Microsoft is planning a stand-alone XPS Viewer that's similar to Acrobat." Either you buy new hardware and new OS to see it without a plugin, or you use some type of non-Vista plugin to view it, and we all know how the Mac versions of Microsoft's browser and media engines have fared lately... even older versions of Microsoft's own Windows won't have the same level of support Acrobat provides today. Or maybe this is the more remarkable stance: "The release of the XPS standard may very well become one of the major milestones of PC-based imaging history... All documents will be able to print to XPS without an intermediary file converter, such as Acrobat PDF. XPS aims to integrate that functionality in all Windows applications, not just high-end, professional applications, as with PDF." Most apps can print to PDF already, regardless of whether you buy new hardware and a new operating system or not. I hope we're not in for a campaign of people loudly telling us things which aren't so....

Posted by John Dowdell at 1:16 PM

January 19, 2006

Social-engineering a database

Social-engineering a database: WIRED has an article here on how Bad People access the telephone records of Good People via pretense. Meanwhile, memeorandum shows lots of bloggers reacting against a governmental request for search engine records. For me, there's a mismatch -- the core issue seems to be that any sufficiently exhaustive private database will become an attractive target, vulnerable to social-engineering techniques, or employee-blackmail, or even just outright invasion through hackery. The rules surrounding use of such a database will deter Good People, but not Bad People, and the latter are the ones who should really inspire the most concern. (I know lots of people are happy with centralized social services on the web, but I'm not entirely at ease with putting so much personal data into one silo somewhere.)

Posted by John Dowdell at 3:52 PM

Scripting Photoshop

Scripting Photoshop: Jeff Tranberry has a good set of links here on ways to automate Photoshop through JavaScript. (I'd credit the link, but forgot how I got here! :( The Fireworks automation model is also driven by JavaScript, is documented on LiveDocs, and can be run as a headless background agent. A third geekification of the graphics world is Acrobat PDF Library, a way to integrate actual Adobe PDF handling within standalone applications.

Posted by John Dowdell at 3:37 PM

Diagramming interactivity

Diagramming interactivity: At Boxes & Arrows, Bill Scott writes of "Storyboarding Rich Internet Applications with Visio". (He uses the narrow sense of "RIA" which can include JavaScript-only approaches, rather than the richer audio/video/communications emphasis in the original RIA definition.) The browsers' page-jumping architecture is traditionally easier to diagram than user experiences where any element can change at any time.

Posted by John Dowdell at 3:27 PM

Graphical passwords

Graphical passwords: Roland Piquepaille describes research in using procedural graphics to reveal knowledge of a password. This seems like it would be a good opportunity for someone with SWF development skills who is seeking higher exposure for their work....?

Posted by John Dowdell at 3:00 PM

Bullpen RIA

Bullpen RIA: The "Baseball Visualization Tool" from Visual i|o uses a SWF interface to control the various factors influencing a manager's decision to replace a pitcher. They have a online walkthrough where you can modulate sample data, and see how the RIA processes the results. It's hard for me to imagine Felipe Alou at a computer during a Giants game, but the SWF itself is a great example of how to handle what-if scenarios with multiple variables. [via Jason Kottke]

Posted by John Dowdell at 2:40 PM

MacTel ports

MacTel ports: This CNET interview with Adobe CEO Bruce Chizen is still the best resource I know for estimating completion of new Intel-based Macintosh products -- I haven't seen any more recent or more detailed announcements yet. (The reason I'm pointing to this again is the subject hit various blogs this morning, and a comment I made to the PS blog on my morning shift hasn't made it through their comment-moderation process yet. (Tip: If a comment needs an email response, better to put that in the header, not as afterthought.)) Anyway, last August Bruce Chizen said that it would be more likely to build a port for the new hardware into a new full software release, rather than port for only half a product cycle. Impact: If you're buying a new architecture, it can take awhile to get native apps, so checking against Apple's Rosetta emulation would be advisable, at least for the near term.

Posted by John Dowdell at 1:06 PM

January 17, 2006

MacManus on Reddit

MacManus on Reddit: Richard MacManus describes the social reputation system behind Reddit, a community news-navigation site, and contrasts it with Slashdot and Digg. Where Slashdot's editors choose articles and readers can highlight or submerge individual comments, and where any of Digg's readers can get either introduce a new link or encourage a prior link, Reddit applies a higher value to recommendations from readers who have most often met the needs of other readers -- someone whose recommendations matches the recommendations made by others then has more influence in the system. Little jiggers and changes to the social rules of a system can change the subsequent dynamics of the system. Related: Vauhini Vara writes at WSJ.com of Digg and Slashdot, and has some great quotes: "It's hard to aggregate the wisdom of the crowd without aggregating their madness as well." [Nat Torkington, O'Reilly]... "Rob Malda, founder and co-editor of Slashdot, said that while Digg has occasionally posted news stories faster than Slashdot, it runs a greater risk of posting an inaccurate article."] A dollar is a very simple way to aggregate the value decisions of many actors... we need equally simple rules to sustainably aggregate human attention too.

Posted by John Dowdell at 12:26 PM

Aavelin digital signage

Aavelin digital signage: Environmental display manufacturer MagicBox adds SWF support... check this quick video for the advantages they see. I'm really bullish on such ambient computing, displays embedded into the workaday environment around us -- right now these are mostly static presentations, but our pocket devices will eventually synch up with such displays -- when you pass a specific place you'll be able to call up services on a large local display. Workstations, personal devices, living room computing, environmental display -- all these are the delivery environments of the very near future.

Posted by John Dowdell at 11:54 AM

January 16, 2006

KDE SWF discussions

KDE SWF discussions: I missed this last Tuesday, but it's an interesting read... Zack Rusin nails a point which many miss: "SWF is very different from SVG though. Yes, they both are technically vector graphics formats, but their usage is completely different. SWF is used to create complete applications." But he also says something which is counter to my own experience: "The reason people use SWF is because the creator for them is simply really good." I've always found a bigger reason to be the predictability of the format on Other Peoples Machines... the reliable capability of the Macromedia Flash Player played a bigger role than the niceties of the Macromedia authoring environments, from what I've seen. The comments are largely about who misquotes whom, but one says: "By empowering closed formats we ourselves are giving the power to control the creative future in the hands of the companies controlling those formats. You are the only person around who I have seen who gets this." Adobe does retain an influence on SWF9, SWF10, and future file formats... but SWF8, SWF7, SWF6, these are all a done deal, and Adobe cannot change them. It's also nigh impossible to make a new renderer which significantly degrades the performance of those existing de facto standards... the San Francisco building may be of brick, but I'm confident sufficient torches and pitchforks could take it down, were we to break backwards-compatibility. (Matter of fact, it's the opensource Player efforts which seem more dangerous to predictable backwards-compability -- cloning and forking and feature subsets would replicate the chaos and slow growth of the HTML-related spec-first approach.) SWF8 is now a given in the world, and Macromedia Flash Player 8 is rapidly becoming a given on the world's machines, and whether these now meet your needs or not is a bigger consideration than how a future enhancement may evolve. The conversation here is a good read, though, to see things through a different group of opensource contributors. (Scary quote: "Influencing the political process with the goal to forbid closed file formats is imho the better way to solve this problem for all future file formats, instead fighting the windmill vanes again and again." Removing the right of individuals to agree on the formats they wish to use sounds like a very centralist, top-down, authoritarian approach...!)

Posted by John Dowdell at 5:13 PM

Status notes

Status notes: The link goes to the Adobe Financial calendar, and it's still looking like that Jan31 analyst meeting will trigger the most news about plans for this first year. There's tons of staff meetings this month, so it's likely that Adobe staff presence on mailing lists and blogs might be lighter than what we're all used to... this should change once public announcements are made about various things the workgroups are doing. Me, I'm particularly studying up on PDF 7 now -- thinking about things like how a document may be the natural interface for a database, how Acrobat has already been working on the problems of local storage & network synch, how Bill McCoy described similarities between the mobile profile and the device-independent archiving profile, an ISO Standard... that "archiving" whitepaper is a very good read, as the Wikipedia overview is often very good too. Anyway, lots of my own listening will be directed inwards this month... we're not going dark, we're just trying to catch up, but then, whoo, watch out.... ;-)

Posted by John Dowdell at 4:13 PM

MacTel Player

MacTel Player: CNET has an article about how someone has ported Firefox to the new Macintosh hardware, and how Macromedia Flash Player and Java do not work there yet. From what I understand Macromedia has not yet made any shipping Player for the new hardware, so it's a little confusing to read the discussion. I'm still trying to learn more about this -- this blog entry is more to acknowledge the issue than to have the final word yet. If you see questions from others on this subject, could you point them here to this provisional item, and tell them to watch the blog of Player Product Manager Emmy Huang for best info? Thanks! (For this week's hardware I don't recall seeing any shipping dates for new versions... I recall earlier interviews with execs advising that authoring tools would likely be ported when new full versions arrive... I'll log any such dates here when I see them, thanks.) [Additional search terms: rosetta, intel, macintosh, universal binary ]

Posted by John Dowdell at 12:26 PM

Scam-proofing systems

Scam-proofing systems: I pulled this link off Technorati... the world's largest film industry is in India, and they're coming to terms with how easy Google has made it for people to upload any video. Bollywood films had massive piracy before, but now it's simpler. Google Video doesn't have a reputation system in place, no way to assess the reliability of contributors. Now they've got to fix a conflict. We can't just look at these things as machines to be built -- they're more like gardens which must be cultivated, and which can sustain themselves over time. (For those who say "All Bollywood should be free!", please tell it to the cameraman, the investor, the stunt and scenery crews, not me.)

Posted by John Dowdell at 12:18 PM

January 13, 2006

Smarter power strips

Smarter power strips: Home hardware... a multi-outlet power strip which can sense when you power up or shut down your computer, and which then powers on or off your peripherals. Makes sense, cuts the daily routine, cuts the daily costs.

Posted by John Dowdell at 10:58 AM

Library of network visualizations

Library of network visualizations: This is a gallery of websites which have turned complex abstract relationships into graphical images. I don't know if there's a systematic way to browse these different projects, but it's inspirational to just click through examples and see how different people visualized different data sets in different ways. Making things make sense -- whether images, or interfaces, or presentations, or text, or even just code blocks -- that's a hard task, so surveying how others make things makes sense is always useful. Thanks to Manuel Lima for setting it up, and to Jason Kottke for the link.

Posted by John Dowdell at 10:50 AM

AJaX bandwidth

AJaX bandwidth: Jonathan Boutelle has a piece here on how the MacRumors site reported on the MacWorld Expo keynote via automated XmlHttpRequest ("literal AJaX") and realized a bandwidth savings. I left a comment at JB's place but received a server error, and so am reposting here. It's great that MacRumors separated their text from their presentation, but I'm not sure that the bandwidth comparisons are apples-to-apples -- calling for a fresh XML version every minute may have a different refresh rate than how often someone may do a full-page refresh in their browser. There's another variable in whether the every-60-second XML delivery is the full body of text, or just the delta of changed text from the last request... you could write your JavaScript and server routines either way. Calling it "AJaX" may not be as accurate as saying that the content was finally separated from the presentation, because the JavaScript XmlHttpRequest call is just an implementation detail, with the big difference in being the re-architecture of the document to separate text from interactivity (JS), styling (CSS) and layout (HTML) instructions. Good news, though, and I appreciate the tip from Jonathan.

Posted by John Dowdell at 9:59 AM

WMF, RIA, WPF/E

WMF, RIA, WPF/E: CNET reports that there will be no more development of Microsoft video for Macintosh. There's a quote from an MS staffer that there are "no plans" for further development, which leaves some ambiguity ("no plans to do so" is different from "we plan on not doing it"), but assuming the conclusion is true, this makes me wonder about the announcement that at some time there will be some degree of portability layer for Avalon/Longhorn/Vista (Windows Presentation Framework Everywhere, or "WPF/E", if memory serves). "RIA" means "Rich Internet Application", which is more than just text (XmlHttpRequest, eg), and video is a very approachable and increasingly economical media type to produce and distribute -- I'm not sure how rich WPF/E could actually be if there's no video. Maybe they plan on invoking Flash video, I dunno.... ;-)

Posted by John Dowdell at 9:08 AM

Automatic time zones?

Automatic time zones? Off-topic question... have you ever seen a computer utility which can detect when you change your physical location? When I travel, then connect, I usually send out a few emails before going "doh! I forgot to reset where I'm at, so my timestamps are off". I'm not sure how such detection would work, however (location of nearest connectivity point? GPS requirement? some type of analysis of timestamps on incoming documents? other?). Does this topic ring any bells for you...?

Posted by John Dowdell at 8:23 AM

January 12, 2006

Player consumer privacy links

Player consumer privacy links: I'm offsite in meetings this week, but came across the above blog entry on Pandora, local shared objects, and other consumer concerns. If you see similar issues from others, then the top-level link on the subject in the website is under Flash Player, Security, or http://www.macromedia.com/software/flashplayer/security/. The technote has the "what to do" angle, the article has a more conversational approach -- either is useful if you get flack about "flash cookies". (In this case, Pandora might well have been logging contacts entirely serverside, with no local storage whatsoever -- I haven't researched their implementation.) The weblog required registration to comment, but I hope they'll accept this trackback. And fwiw, I expect my blogging to continue to be light for awhile.

Posted by John Dowdell at 12:32 PM

January 10, 2006

Snitch and Grow Rich

Snitch and Grow Rich: Business Software Alliance extends its piracy bounty program to the US: "And now, for the first time in the United States, BSA is offering rewards of up to $50,000 for qualifying reports received via its hotline or online reporting form before midnight (PST) on Tuesday, February 28, 2006." If you know of a business which uses unlicensed software, then go to bsa.org and choose your region -- the first choice is to settle by just paying for what they use, but if litigation is needed, then there may be something in it for you.

Posted by John Dowdell at 1:56 PM

Apple, Adobe notes

Apple, Adobe notes: This is a stub entry -- I'll be adding notes throughout the day, and if you see good resources then I'd appreciate a comment here with the link, thanks. Already on the lists I'm seeing "When will applications run on the new hardware?" I don't think there's a real answer yet, whether for porting or emulation, but I'd like to tie together the current info into this single entry, thanks. (The link above goes to a MacWorld keynote report which describes how Apple's pro apps will be available with a slight upgrade price later this year.)

Posted by John Dowdell at 12:59 PM

January 9, 2006

You take photos?

You take photos? I don't, but if you capture a lot of imagery on a digital camera, then check out Adobe Labs for the early Shadowland/Lightroom release... here's a quick on-demand demo from George Jardine. Lightroom seems a smart, fast way to manage large sets of images, ranking & culling them, labeling them, sorting them, correcting them. At MAX I see lots of people documenting what we see -- Adobe Lightroom is still in an early stage of development, so helping shape it to your own needs would be great, thanks.

Posted by John Dowdell at 9:02 PM

Recursive legislation

Recursive legislation: There's a lot of bloggery about Microsoft's weblog offerings in China -- Rebecca MacKinnon opened the latest charges, and an MSN PM has the most cogent replies -- but this Reporters Without Borders campaign to regulate businesses sounds a little strange -- it reads like they want to have one government control whether businesses do what other governments say. I'm not sure that urging governments to arm-wrestle over details of indy businesses would be as direct as just opening your own blogging service in China, if you don't think MSN adds enough options to Chinese communication. (That "protected keywords" clause sounds untenable too -- GovtA blacklists terms, but some are on GovtB's whitelist, and I still believe the agreements should be between the citizens and the businesses themselves.)

Posted by John Dowdell at 3:15 PM

Portals' video matrix

Portals' video matrix: Tristan Louis tries to sort out the recent news about video galleries from Apple, AOL, Google, Microsoft and Yahoo. I haven't confirmed all details in his grid, but have seen only endorsement from other weblogs, without obvious problems raised. Related: John Battelle had been NDA on Google's video announcement, so his analysis had a little more time to ripen.

Posted by John Dowdell at 2:18 PM

Shadowland history

Shadowland history: Jeff Schewe describes how today's Adobe Lightroom beta evolved over the past few years. (What's Lightroom? It's a photo-management tool, the natural partner to a digital camera -- Photoshop processes images, and Adobe Bridge manages cross-app resources, but Lightroom helps a photographer manage and process large collections of images.) Sample: "A great deal of time was spent researching to determine exactly what Photographers needed and wanted. Mark Hamburg, Sandy Alves, Andrei Herasimchuk and researcher Grace Kim made a lot of site visits to photography studios all over the country. There they interviewed a wide variety of photographers -- some famous and some just regular hard working folks -- from all walks of photography. The aim was to identify where the current pain points were with digital, and to design innovative solutions to relieve the pain...." The article gives a great idea of how new products grow, how there's a lot of exploration necessary at the start -- recommended, if you're seeking context on software development. The Labs site is here, with a video overview and a particularly relevant FAQ -- John Nack has personal context here.

Posted by John Dowdell at 1:48 PM

January 6, 2006

NYT on MSN/China

NYT on MSN/China: The Grey Lady covers the issue, but includes something I hadn't noticed in coverage from Rebecca, Robert or others: "A former computer programmer, Mr. Zhao worked as a journalist for a Chinese newspaper and as a research assistant for The Washington Post before joining The New York Times in 2003." Maybe the New York Times could let its staffers blog, in the normal fashion, on a NYT server? They wouldn't have to open it up to the public, as MSN tries to do, but they already give Zhao a partial voice, could they add a full voice too...?

Posted by John Dowdell at 3:56 PM

Shea on opensource, Flash

Shea on opensource, Flash: In case you haven't seen this already, Dave Shea at mezzoblue has an essay on opensource and Flash stuff. If you're reading my blog then you've probably got the info already, but you might still be interested in how Dave and his commenters see things.

Posted by John Dowdell at 3:09 PM

Lynda on Flash

Lynda on Flash: Lynda Weinman writes on possibilities she sees over the next year or two. The article already has recommendations on MXNA, and many of its predictions seem reasonable to me too, but I'm also linking to it mainly because of one line: "It is likely that future Adobe applications will be able to export FLA files in addition to SWF files." When I've asked about this over previous years I've been told that any type of FLA i/o in other apps would be tricky, because "FLA isn't so much a file format as a data dump from the application... essentially, you'd have to be the Flash authoring tool itself to make sense of the file" (or words to that effect ;-). Someone might be able to find a way of doing this, but from the info I've picked up it seems like there might be technical barriers. Lynda's got a good overview to SWF possibilities, though, check it out.

Posted by John Dowdell at 2:44 PM

Techbloggers, rumor, reality

Techbloggers, rumor, reality: This one shows how nutsy the whole thing is getting, this scene of referring to unsourced rumors just because they're juicy. I'd write more, but Jessica Simpson and Angelina Jolie just stopped by my cube for some high-priority meetings, gotta go.... ;-)

Posted by John Dowdell at 2:29 PM

CNET, cookies, II

CNET, cookies, II: Yesterday I noted how CNET's story about cookie use on US government sites was ironic considering the article's own use of long-term cookies and third-party served graphics. Today there's a followup article, and Ben Forta has a strong reaction. Me, I was struck by this quote: "'It shows their lack of understanding of technology,' said Sonia Arrison, director of technology studies at the Pacific Research Institute, a nonprofit group in San Francisco. 'It's willful ignorance. They're complete hypocrites. How can they accuse companies of poor data management when they're not doing it on their own Web sites?'" I wasn't sure who "they" were in this quote, but am guessing Sonia is calling various governmental officials hypocritical -- but when I go to the PRI site I see that their own "CP" cookie is set to expire Dec31 2019, so logically Sonia might be speaking of herself as well. Odd story all the way around.... :(

Posted by John Dowdell at 12:27 PM

January 5, 2006

CNET's cookies

CNET's cookies: I'm highlighting this article, even though Ben Forta already debunked the ColdFusion angle, because something seems inherently unfair about this to me. The article raps US government agencies whose websites have cookies with long expiration dates, and which host third-party graphics for analytics or other purposes. But the CNET article itself sets a bunch of longlived cookies: their various "XCLGF" cookies expire Dec31 2009... their "newsab" cookie expires Sept21 2025... "10433_uu" expires Nov30 '06... "cnet_newsVideo" expires Mar30 2020... "7143_uu" expires Jul22 '06... and the CNET article hosts images from 2mdn.net, i.i.com, adlog.com, dw.com, ads.com, all of which can set their own cookies when someone visits that CNET page. I don't much care about CNET's use of cookies myself, but I do think it's unfair to suggest there's something evil in all those government agencies, when CNET is doing the same exact thing itself...?

Posted by John Dowdell at 3:03 PM

Bloggers on Gates

Bloggers on Gates: Memeorandum shows a lot of activity around Bill Gates' presentation at the Consumer Electronics Show. I dutifully scanned much of this, but may have missed something... is any of this actually shipping, or was it just about things that may happen some day? I've scanned Scoble, but am still not sure....

Posted by John Dowdell at 2:41 PM

Clever blogspam

Clever blogspam: The link goes to an old item here, which had a vague comment from someone self-identifying as "Picki". I've deleted the URL, but you can visit the intended comment-link at perso.dixinet.com, slash, picki. On the surface it appears a story, in French, about Japanese people, without any visible outbound links. But if you inspect the invisible links (I used Firefox -> View Page Info), the story contains a half-dozen outbound links to gateway sites in the same domain, which then go out to the usual porn and warez sites. The goal, I'm guessing, is to use the high adobe/macromedia pagerank to increase the scammer's search-engine placement. Just think, if only they used their time, their cleverness, for useful purposes.... [sigh]

Posted by John Dowdell at 2:02 PM

Anti-beta comments?

Anti-beta comments? At Publish, Stephen Bryant had an op/ed decrying the number of beta applications on the web. I think much of this is arguing over a label, rather than a thing, but am opening up this blog item here to collect comments from anyone who'd rather not have Adobe public betas, or even the public alphas now at the Labs site. Anything in this article you'd recommend to other Adobe staffers, any related thoughts you'd like heard? Thanks in advance for any feedback.
[via Anil Dash]

Posted by John Dowdell at 12:47 PM

CES portable audio

CES portable audio: Here's a single article listing the various portable audio devices being shown at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas this week. It includes the iRiver U10, which seems actually more of a four-button computer than just an audio player. Another more-than-audio device in the list is one which includes global position sensing and map displays. A few other devices here include linear video or linear radio, but I suspect the real action will eventually end up with interactivity, with letting the viewer influence what they see and hear.

Posted by John Dowdell at 12:02 PM

Flickeur

Flickeur: Pretty and, I suspect, quite practical -- Mario Klingemann procedurally sequences and blends still photos in a SWF applet -- seems useful as a computer screensaver, or television display, or for electronic wall-hangings. Right now he's pulling source bitmaps at random from Flickr (via proxy server, so I hope he doesn't get Slashdotted or Dugg), but the process seems a good way to review your own photos, or those on a buddy list. I'm betting that consumer devices will eventually ship with something like this built in...? [via John Nack]

Posted by John Dowdell at 11:34 AM

January 4, 2006

Engadget on CES

Engadget on CES: Multiple gadgetbloggers are contributing to this group blog, and they seem to be handling pre-event coverage pretty thoroughly -- here's a virtual case of caffeinated beverages for ya'll, hope you can keep it up. ;-) I think this general Engadget search term on "adobe" should surface anything interesting... for instance, that Sony eBook may have an Adobe connection, from hints I've seen.

Posted by John Dowdell at 4:56 PM

January 3, 2006

Links from December

Links from December: I'm closing out some browser windows, and these varied links were too interesting to just throw away without archiving here....

On Dec17 Andrew Orlowski of The Register wrote "Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales has been shot dead, according to Wikipedia, the online, up-to-the-minute encyclopedia." It was a farce, of course, but the structure of the story followed one commonly used by AP, NYT, CNN and others: someone else said something was a fact, so it's news, even though there's no way or effort to test the accuracy of the statement. Replace the phrase "Wikipedia" by "highly placed officials", and....

On Dec 8 Mena Trott raised some valid points about "things you write become the public record, so make sure you say stuff you're proud of". Ben Metcalfe snarked comments in backchannel messaging (which was also projected behind the speaker), and was challenged by Mena to own his words. Some of the comments at Metcalfe's blog were remarkable, citing his courage in standing behind his speech -- that should actually be a given. Bloggers may think the whole communication process started in 2001, but Steward Brand's "You own your words" at The WELL nailed it at the start of online conversations. Speech can stand on its own, but some of its meaning is contextual, and whether the speaker will actually own their words, and link their reputation to their advocacy, plays a big part in the overall usefulness of that speech too.

On Dec13 David Coursey concluded "'Open Source Content' Has No Quality Control" because of an unsubstantiated factoid in a Wikipedia article on one of the yet-controversial Kennedy deaths. I think David's right in noting that not everyone will become a useful content producer (Usenet taught us that much), but there are indeed checks and balances when the means of production are democratized more fully. Many of those who became used to owning the channels of communication still don't seem to have much of an integrated appreciation of Salinger Syndrome -- it isn't "Wikipedia isn't useful" so much as "untestable stories aren't as useful". (Writing at eWeek can suggest believability, but doesn't guarantee a story should be believed for merely being told there.)

I like this ionizing clothes cleaner... just a prototype now, not yet in production, but it seems a smart, convenient way to do things.

The PCWorld 50 Greatest Gadgets story got a lot of linkage, but I liked how they started the list with the Sony Walkman -- it was not only a new form-factor for a device, but really changed the sociology of how people used electronics -- it seems far away now, but there was a time when someone walking down the street with headphones was regarded as... as... as someone walking down the street talking to their earpiece was regarded five years ago, I guess.... ;-)

There are some more open links on my other computer, so I'll continue this entry later....

More:

Engadget mentions an android boxer.

Longtail and SocialText are tracking whether, at Fortune 500 companies, employee weblogs correlate with stock trends.

James Coates of Knight-Ridder writes of the consumer accessibility of Adobe Photoshop Elements 4.0 and Adobe Premiere Elements 2.0. (As applications add more features they become more difficult for new users to approach -- refactoring a user interface to the needs of new audiences makes sense to me.)

Digg likes a SWF-based recreation of Apple's Macintosh OS X operating system.

Christian Cantrell is interviewed at AjaxInfo.com by Alexei White -- good reading, here's a sample: "There has been pent-up demand for building powerful Flash applications outside the traditional Flash Authoring environment for a long time, but our pricing was such that it wasn`t realistic for everyone. I spent a lot of time asking people to be patient, and explaining that quite frankly, we didn`t want it to be available to everyone yet. Flex 1.0 was our first attempt to bring RIA development outside of an animation environment (Flash Authoring), and we wanted to make sure we got the framework right before opening it up to everyone. We took what we learned from our enterprise customers and rolled it into Flex 1.5, and now with Flex 2.0, it`s ready for prime time." Much more.

Rich Ziade gets into that subject of better ways to use serverside applications in a world where you're occasionally unconnected.

Turdhead asks "Where did you learn to animate like that?"

MySchizoBuddy has an extensive survey titled "Best codec for Screen capture content (benchmark)"... the summary says H.264 quality beats WMV v9 but is slower to encode, yet Sorenson Sparc reaches the widest audience.

Jonny Axelson of Opera writes of the effects of the recent Google and Microsoft rumors, and ways to lessen the effects of such blogosphere infections.

Ray Ozzie, now at Microsoft, says "If 2005 was a year of 'change' for me, 2006 will be a year to 'build'."

Nettie Hartsock writes at PDFZone.com on "How to Manage PDFs on Your Mobile Devices", detailing PDF reading strategies for Palm, Blackberry, Symbian and PocketPC. (Free readers at Adobe site.)

Matt Hines of eWeek writes "Interactive Nature of Browser Colors Past and Future"... on page three he has a long segment on how Flash Platform already goes beyond the browser.

Posted by John Dowdell at 8:00 PM

Date Slider

Date Slider: Adaptive Path releases, under Creative Commons License, a Flash widget which communicates with hosting JavaScript. You use the SWF interface to set a date range, and the JavaScript/HTML has the text with aggregate totals. (Yes, if you're SWF-centric you could show the text in SWF too, but if you're HTML-centric then it's a clear demonstration of the benefits of multiple media types.) [via Rael Dornfest]

Posted by John Dowdell at 4:44 PM

In-browser FLV encoding

In-browser FLV encoding: If you're not in Korea you can't subscribe, but it's useful to know that this community site is using On2's transcoding service to solve a key problem: people can record video in all types of formats, but usually want to impose few viewing hassles on their audience. The solution? Make it easy to convert to Flash Video. More momentum.

Posted by John Dowdell at 4:35 PM

Website credibility

Website credibility: Interesting analysis -- this isn't about whether the text of a website article is internally consistent and matches observable reality, but more about how the structure and features of a site can add or detract to the sites overall believability. The "Contact Us" section is one place where people judge you -- body text needs to anticipate the critical questions of readers -- stats need to be backed up by source evidence -- an increasing client base increases your credibility -- the actual appearance may be the first indicator people process when deciding whether to trust a website. There may be something useful here if you're trying to persuade a client of something you notice about their current site.

Posted by John Dowdell at 3:55 PM

January 2, 2006

Player forking effects

Player forking effects: On the OpenSource-Flash mailing list there was a whole discussion last week about what would happen if someone distributed another renderer for SWF files -- Keith Peters has an effective summation here of the actual effects, but there are lots of other strong comments one level up. There's a big difference between the software we want to customize to our own machines and uses, and the software we rely on to work predictably on Other Peoples Machines.

Posted by John Dowdell at 3:48 PM

SANS WMF FAQ

SANS WMF FAQ: Last week a security flaw emerged, but the conversation flopped around a bit before settling down -- this FAQ has the most direct synopsis I've seen so far. Basically, the oldtime Windows Metafile Format can call external procedures, and it was this aspect of the "deep integration" strategy which was vulnerable to evil files. Unusual aspects of this case: WMF instructions can apparently be triggered by desktop search software doing its usual indexing (!); deleting the executing files likely won't work because they're automatically backed up by the system; some hardware integration can apparently help protect against this misuse of software integration. This is not a browser issue -- the key is to protect your system from seeing and acting upon the instructions hidden within an image file. I'd defer to source info on this whole issue, but from what I can piece together it does seem like a significant exploit.

Posted by John Dowdell at 2:33 PM

Sign change

Sign change: For those keeping track of such things, this morning the front doors at 601 Townsend had the Adobe logo stencilled into the glass, and the metal "macromedia" sign outside is gone. There's still Macromedia signage above the reception desk.

Posted by John Dowdell at 11:36 AM

January 1, 2006

Cleaning Digg

Cleaning Digg: The popular link-recommendation site notes that it has become large and important enough to attract spammers and other abusers, and so is seeking systems to discard content which does not benefit the group. "We are going to be releasing some features that give administration of this fraud/spam to you, the users. In the near future, you will have the ability to join together and ban inappropriate content site wide (of course we have also come up with some systems to prevent this power from being abused)." Tricky problem... many web services are trying to harvest group decisions now, but the social dynamics change as the service scales up.

Posted by John Dowdell at 12:34 PM

Open Source Action Items

Open Source Action Items: Jim Phelan has a great article here at Sys-Con about the intersection of Adobe and Open Source technologies, particularly around Flash Platform. I'm expecting the Adobe Developer Relations group will be in a bunch of meetings this month, getting acquainted, setting priorities, working within the larger Adobe Platform group -- it would be a good time to evangelize changes. The most frequent request I see is for legal standing on individual projects, but that's outside my scope -- should really be handled by a particular Product Manager or the Legal group. What would you like me to focus on about Adobe and Open Source, what would be helpful for you if it could be resolved? I can't promise results, but if there's some change you'd like to see, then it would be real helpful for me to hear it here, thanks!

Posted by John Dowdell at 12:16 PM