JD on EP: February 2006 Archives

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February 28, 2006

Design by committee

Design by committee: Hilarious video, but important truth. It's ostensibly about "What if Microsoft redesigned the iPod package?" but it's actually about how easy it is for clear, engaging design to turn into a monstrosity by a multitude of well-meaning tweaks. My question: How do we prevent this from happening? When you've been in a group decision situation in the past, how have you been able to retain value for the hard-to-measure stuff, while still accommodating the easy-to-measure stuff? Anecdotes welcome, thanks in advance. Update: Link changed to a search term at YouTube.com.

Posted by John Dowdell at 5:11 PM

Expression vs web

Expression vs web: Wayne Smith of Microsoft has some context on Sparkle for web work, as opposed to platform work. Scroll about 2/3rds down, to the "WPF Everywhere" section, where they discuss environments other than Vista and WinXP: "That's a little way in the future. WPF/E will make a subset of the WPF available to other platforms and to a range of devices which have yet to be decided, although I think we have announced that it will be available for the Apple Macintosh. Build work is proceeding but at the moment it's very much at the stage of being defined and specified. There aren't any dates attached to it yet, but I can say that it certainly won't be a reality in the immediate Vista timeframe, so for instance it's not something that Expression Interactive Designer will initially target. It'll be a future version of Interactive Designer that will work with WPF/E... Ours is more of a platform story than a player technology. Yes, the WPF/E will also be in effect a player, but it is designed to extend the reach of WPF, rather than being a separate entity in itself... where we're different [from Adobe] is that we're not trying to be technology-agnostic. We are very clearly in the ASP.NET camp with Web Designer, and we drill down very heavily into it." This seems more in line with how many of us were reading the story a few months ago, rather than the "Quartz vs Dreamweaver" type of stories that were in the press at the time. Microsoft's in the business of providing a deeply-integrated operating system; Adobe's in the business of providing a neutral media/interactivity layer atop the wide variety of the world's devices. Both take advantage of good technology like vectors, HTML, data-binding, and the rest. The news about Expression seems to be that it will be easier for designers to work in a straight Windows environment, and it won't be coders-only anymore.

Posted by John Dowdell at 4:59 PM

Free as in beer

Free as in beer: I was always a bit confused by that phrase, when trotted out in the middle of a conversation to mean something -- I always had to translate it as "let's see, they contrast that with 'free speech', so which one do they think is unfettered by any contract and which do they think is no-cost again -- beer has no contract, but then again maybe they meant someone buying you a beer, or maybe it was 'no such thing as a free lunch' kind of thing", and by that point the conversation was already two paragraphs further in and I was 'way behind. ;-) Anyway, guess I wasn't the only one to not see that label as intuitive... here a group of students in Copenhagen give away the recipe for the beer they market. I guess that means you can change the recipe and brew it yourself differently, but hold it, you could always add a shot to make it a boilermaker or blend it with another beer to make a black-and-tan, so maybe they mean "free as in speech" with this, or... oh, no, there I go again.... ;-)

Posted by John Dowdell at 3:49 PM

Antidisintermediationism

Antidisintermediationism: A different way of looking at Google's business... USA Today has an article describing how they're seeking to broker advertising in traditional print & broadcast media channels. There's a sidebar on Dmarc, a recent Google acquisition, which matches advertisers to unsold radio space at net-like speeds.

Posted by John Dowdell at 3:24 PM

FlashForward 2000

FlashForward 2000: Just reminiscing... six years ago the event featured previews of Flash 5, but the big news was Adobe's presence at the San Francisco event... there had been a few months of press leaks on Adobe's "Ground Zero" project, which was revealed as the ImageStyler revamp named LiveMotion... lots of people were surprised to see such a heavy Adobe presence at the show, and there was a lot of money spent to influence people, secret meetings, even the giving-away of large amounts of shipping software as the new company tried to make an impression among the designers at the event. The above link goes to an audio interview with Mike Ninness, who was product manager for LiveMotion at the time... here's a text interview which also gives an idea of all the intrigue and mystery when that company first attended FlashForward.

Posted by John Dowdell at 3:11 PM

Video-style Flash

Video-style Flash: The link goes to the "Engage with Flash, from desktop to devices" presentation which went live last week -- it focuses on a half-dozen uses of embedded Macromedia Flash engines, from pocket devices like mobile maps, cameras and iRiver u10, to auto navigation systems and home entertainment systems. There's not much technical info here... more about exposing some of the new devices and the situations in which they're used. This could be useful for showing to a friend who doesn't understand why you're so bullish on this area. The interesting thing for me was the reliance on large-area video to convey the message -- feels reminiscent of a TV ad for a luxury automobile, where the feeling is more important than the details. It made me realize that, with the upcoming integration with After Effects, Premiere Pro, and Premiere Elements, we'll probably see lots more SWF with a straight video sensibility. In the Flash authoring tool we construct interfaces, and in Flex we declare interfaces, but from the video specialists we'll probably see them do a lot more capture, with minimal interfaces. No big point from me here, I'm mostly musing... I suspect that the range of SWF content will vary a lot more over the next year or two, as other constituencies find it increasingly easy to create SWF files which are useful for them.

Posted by John Dowdell at 1:50 PM

Windows Live UI

Windows Live UI: Microsoft introduces a photo database with a browser-based map UI... looks like they took a whole lot of photos in Seattle and San Francisco, and by navigating the map you can look around at what the camera captured that data. Layout is in HTML, interactivity in JavaScript, with ongoing image requests through the course of a session. The interface confused me a bit... the top half shows photos (looks best at 1024x768 pixels), while the bottom shows your choice of avatar and an optional map (click "street"). You can orient your avatar in ninty-degree increments, which may work better on a street with a pure north-oriented grid layout than on SF's off-angle streets. It's an interesting interface, but I'm still not sure I've figured out how to use it....

Posted by John Dowdell at 1:27 PM

February 27, 2006

Malik & Kennedy on Flash

Malik & Kennedy on Flash: Om Malik and Niall Kennedy have a text transcription of an audio chat they held, and they mention Flash Player version towards the middle. I left a comment there, but there was a glitch in the TypeKey registration, and I'm not sure it took... I'll leave it in comments here so I've got a log of it. I was basically in my "half the internet was upgraded in three months ohmygosh do you know what this MEANS!?!" mode, which you've probably heard from me before.... ;-) (I like how they provided a text version of their audio content, by the way... search engines are getting better with varied media types, but full-text search is still useful for presentations which are just words.)

Posted by John Dowdell at 5:15 PM

Torrone on clones

Torrone on clones: Phillip Torrone writes at Make, in part: "A forum member named 71M seems to have created a Macromedia Flash player for the PSP and won the PSP SWF player coding contest on PSPHacks." I've got a slight quibble on the phrasing: an actual "Macromedia Flash Player" is made and distributed by Macromedia (or Adobe ;-) and offers predictable capability on Other Peoples Machines. Unless this hack is hijacking the Macromedia codebase somehow, it's actually just a generic SWF renderer with some undescribed level of support for some level of the SWF file format. Accepting SWF files is a popular decision for software makers because there are so many talented people out there who can produce interesting SWF files -- but a different engine may support a different set of features, and more importantly, may act slightly differently from the reference renderer in the features it does support. No big thing, but it's something to watch out for: if someone tells you that a non-desktop environment "has Flash support", then it's important to qualify exactly what that label means...!

Posted by John Dowdell at 4:06 PM

February 23, 2006

Horwith, Forta

Horwith, Forta: Simon Horwith, ColdFusion editor at Sys-Con, does a video interview with Ben Forta, ColdFusion evangelist at Adobe. Ben says that the Adobification of ColdFusion means that the Scorpio and Mystic projects are continuing on-track... he gives a quick overview to Flex advancement from a ColdFusion perspective, then a good lengthy rundown on exactly what's new about the 2.0 generation of Flex... at 18 minutes they discuss ways to minimize Flash abuse in the world... it's a 25-minute interview, with the main theme being that you should actually get your hands on Flex 2, because it's quite an improvement over various ways we've tried to accomplish web tasks before.

Posted by John Dowdell at 5:04 PM

Nuthin' but net

Nuthin' but net: "Girl jumps through basketball hoop," one of the short video clips at VideoSift which caught my eye. They apply a group-recommendation system to the firehose of content at GoogleVideo and YouTube. But this stunt makes Jonathan Swift's hero look like a chicken... I mean, how would you practice for such an all-or-nothing kind of trick...?

Posted by John Dowdell at 4:20 PM

Adobe on Linux

Adobe on Linux: Not much new here, but I'm logging it into the blog's archive for reference... NewsForge gets a quote from Adobe's Pam Deziel: "Adobe says demand for its products on Linux is not strong enough for it to act upon, although the company is aware of customer's desires for Linux versions. Pam Deziel, director of platform strategy for Adobe, says that Novell's survey is in line with the company's own internal data. She says that, of Adobe's products, Photoshop is the most requested application for Linux, with Acrobat coming in at a close second. And although she says Adobe does not comment on unannounced products -- and could not reveal whether any of its products are currently being ported to Linux -- Deziel says that the company is 'paying attention to the Linux platform' in its server products, more than in its client software. 'It's an area that we continue to monitor,' Deziel says. 'We make product decisions based on the vector that we see.... [But] we haven't found sufficient business opportunity for offering desktop applications on the Linux platform.'"

Posted by John Dowdell at 4:12 PM

Adobe Mouse

Adobe Mouse: Logitech introduces a new input device optimized for those using Adobe Creative Suite 2. It's a circular knob, held on the desktop by your secondary hand, for functions like panning and zooming large layouts or images. More info from Logitech, where they're using little Flash videos for testimonials.

Posted by John Dowdell at 3:27 PM

Game usability

Game usability: John Rhodes offers a list of 17 of his favorite articles on gameplay and user experience. He's seeking additions in comments, if you know of other strong resources.

Posted by John Dowdell at 3:21 PM

Mobile porn

Mobile porn: Seems like this must mean something significant, but I'm a bit too caffeine-deficient at the moment to figure out what it might be. From New Scientist: "Computer scientists Maryan Kamvar and Shumeet Baluja analysed 1 million searches made using the firm's mobile search software. They found that 'adult' material constituted 20 per cent of the searches on cellphones, but only 5 per cent on PDAs. Just 8.5 per cent of searches on desktop computers are for adult material." More details in this 10-page PDF. I'm not sure whether "Google's XHTML server logs" are completely restricted to mobile, particularly considering the anomaly they saw with the number of URLs as search terms. Lots of additional data there, though, about how search terms vary by the device form-factor.

Posted by John Dowdell at 3:15 PM

Shockwave installer

Shockwave installer: There was an inline update to the Shockwave ActiveX installer yesterday, to prevent a rogue site from overfilling the ActiveX read buffers when someone in IE/Win updated Shockwave from a suspect site. All already-installed Players are fine; it was the ActiveX installation process itself which had a potential vulnerability. I haven't heard of similar buffer overflow in the other Adobe ActiveX installers. No action needed on your part, or your clients... I'm blogging this here in case you get questions, or hear the story with other details elsewhere. Thanks to 3Com for the find... if you ever have security concerns about a possible path, then the Security Center is the best path for reporting it, thanks.

Posted by John Dowdell at 12:09 PM

February 22, 2006

Funny headline

Funny headline: Ran across this at CNET: "Congressman quizzes Net companies on shame". Wish I were there, I always do good on experts' true-and-false quizzes.... ;-) (If you're interested in such things, then search term "able danger china" is turning up much under-reported news this week.)

Posted by John Dowdell at 4:25 PM

Photoshop vs Fireworks

Photoshop vs Fireworks: In case you didn't catch this through the aggregators, Photoshop PM John Nack is seeking feedback on some specific questions on how you'd like to see the two imaging tools evolve in the future.

Posted by John Dowdell at 4:11 PM

Balthaser patent

Balthaser patent: I see this CNET article about some type of internet multimedia patent... for what it's worth, I've been backing off more and more on any public patent discussions, because (a) usually I don't know any more than any other commenter would on the subject and (b) opposition lawyers do comb through public postings by staff to see who knew what when. No upside, only downside. From reading the article it sounds relevant to much of what we do, but I'll defer to the Adobe website for any statements on this whole area, and I imagine most other staffers will do the same. So in case you're wondering why I don't have anything useful to say here, well, that's why.... ;-)

Posted by John Dowdell at 3:28 PM

Chizen on EP

Chizen on EP: Wharton School of Business interviews Adobe CEO Bruce Chizen. Lots of material I haven't seen elsewhere. Engagement Platform: "The combination of Acrobat's PDF file format and the Adobe Reader with Flash's SWF file format and the Flash Player enables us to create an 'engagement platform.' Think of it as a layer or a vehicle in which anybody can present information that could be engaged with in an interactive, compelling, reliable, relatively secure way -- across all kinds of devices, all kinds of operating systems... If we execute appropriately we will be the engagement platform, or the layer, on top of anything that has an LCD display, any computing device -- everything from a refrigerator to an automobile to a video game to a computer to a mobile phone." Universal Client ("Apollo"): "We won't do a browser. But we do think that there are applications that need to run on the user's desktop client software that need to work in both a connected and a non-connected fashion, that require the richness of Flash, the reliability, the relative security, the layout capabilities of PDF -- but also need to consume HTML. Imagine a ubiquitous client that allows you to do all three of those -- and then a series of programming tools, like Adobe's Flex, making it easy for anyone to develop applications for this ubiquitous client. (Q) So this would be a desktop runtime environment? Chizen: That's a good way of thinking about it, yes." Lots more on enterprise development, the Adobe Business Units and how they were staffed, hints of future product integration & development, getting the Engagement Platform to pocket-sized devices, the importance of Macintosh and Linux in platform-neutral computing. Lots more here. Final line: "Just about everything you look at -- a label, a movie you go to, a video on the web, a billboard, a sign when you get off the airplane -- was probably touched by a piece of Adobe software. By having that engagement platform we could do more of this into the future. We can make our customers' lives easier and make the user's experience that much more interesting. All of us are being bombarded with information. I want a great experience, even if I am filling out a boring mortgage application or a tax form. I want a great experience. Ten years from now we will be providing that."

Posted by John Dowdell at 3:20 PM

February 21, 2006

Why Ajax sucks

Why Ajax sucks: Because it allows excess, like Flash has. "Web standardists: I love you guys. I really do. As far as internet users go, web standards advocates will back their bench like nobody else... Know what else is a primary reason standardists have come together? The banishment of flash User Interface sites... Right now, I think that the next big usability and accessibility problem on the web could be the rampant use of AJAX." It could be worse... we might be talking about how some people drive when using mobile phones. ;-) Writer Phil Renaud, at the end, gets to that consensus point about using technology for the benefit of user experience... we're all on the same page on that, even if we get there through different means.

Posted by John Dowdell at 9:26 PM

Gaming conflicts

Gaming conflicts: This article in the Financial Times has been bothering me much of the day... there's a multiplayer roleplaying game in Korea, with a realworld connection to its internal financial system, and they have had conflict with players from the Peoples Republic of China. The newcomers have not obeyed some unwritten social rules of the game, and the oldtime players feel aggrieved, so at the place where newcomers to the game arrive, if they can't speak the language, their characters are executed. There's the realworld angle of economic disparities between regions... the greater degree of social/business structures in some areas than others... the language barrier... I know it's just a game, and isn't real, but in a sense it is real, there are enough connections to the real world to give it a different type of reality than the things we've experienced before. Maybe, now that I've blogged about it, I can stop thinking about it....

Posted by John Dowdell at 8:52 PM

Trendalyzer accessibility

Trendalyzer accessibility: Great example of data visualization... a professor lectures on the differing relationships between newborn life expectancy and a nation's general production, over time, but finds that the words don't do as good a job as a data-fed animation -- easier to visualize the relationships, more accessible to people with varying language skills. We humans have had centuries of visual and aural processing before we added language abstraction... those who reduce the idea of "accessibility" to "can text describe it?" are really offbase, I think. Sample: "Seeking to make its visual tools available to the broadest possible constituency, Gapminder has worked from the beginning to create software that allows others to create their own visual presentations of the data. Accordingly, Gapminder has been developing a program called Trendalyzer that works from the data itself, rather than a fixed graphical presentation. Developed in Macromedia's Flash, the current beta version of Trendalyzer is preloaded with a built-in data set, but can also accept imported Microsoft Excel files, allowing users to create animations derived from hundreds of different variables." I don't know if they're trying to present particular conclusions with this data, and didn't readily see an illuminating example from their site, but I like their conclusion about how multiple media types and interactivity can convey ideas in ways that text alone cannot.

Posted by John Dowdell at 8:35 PM

Mobilization

Mobilization: Mike Rankin had a piece this weekend which I appreciated... he urges action in getting the word out on some of the newer technologies, and has specific action items for people in various job roles. Today Ryan Stewart had a piece in similar vein, about how early innovations are often ignored until a larger firm reaches the masses. You guys both made my day, thanks. :) But I'm still not sure how to approach this -- I've been online long enough to be leery of "evangelism" in general -- it seems like things have to be in the listener's own direct interest in order for the relationships to not get weird. If it's in your interest to tell a friend about Flex 2.0, and if it seems to be in his or her interest to hear, then it would be great to clue them in, thanks... I'd really like to see this platform-neutral approach succeed. Ryan describes the dynamics in ways that feel accurate to me... in Tech High School, the Advanced Placement Physics class may have the most important work, but it's Gym and Lunch where the real changes often occur. But somehow, I just can't see myself in this kind of scene... I respect great schmoozers, but am not one myself. We're on the cusp of something new here, and there's a real risk of it being ignored/misunderstood until late... give a read to Mike and Ryan, see if you don't agree that we've got to take advantage of this special time....

Posted by John Dowdell at 5:04 PM

Lots of links

Lots of links: My browser has windows full of tabs, and I don't want to click that little red X to close them out without at least logging them here... more in the extended entry.

Ballmer on mobility, the Microsoft keynote at 3GSM. Requires Windows Media Player to view. (I haven't had the time to invest watching this, so if you've got any observations after watching it then I'd appreciate hearing, thanks.)

SYS-CON has a call for papers on "Rich Internet Applications -- AJAX, Flash, Web 2.0 and Beyond". Deadline for submissions is mid-April, but I'm not sure of time & place yet.

Max Shuleman had a cute line in his essay "Putting AJAX in Perspective": "There have been attempts to add "richness" to the standard HTML "experience". Macromedia Flash brings us all the way up to the level VB programmers enjoyed in 1992. And if someday Sun people pull their collective head out of their collective asses and deliver simple to install and thus usable Java on the desktop, it will rule the world. Meanwhile the current meme is the AJAX - the attempt to raise Javascript silliness to the level of application frameworks." I don't know if I could defend that "Flash 06 = VB 92!" stance to others, but it gave me a kick.... ;-)

Dion Almaer has an audio interview with someone from Tibco, an IE-only JavaScript library. Dion posted his interview questions; if you've got notes on the audio answers then I'd appreciate a summary, thanks.

Niall Kennedy has a great few paragraphs on the vital difficulty of simplicity... the real key to everything, I think, is in making interfaces which are natural and easy for diverse audiences to use. Niall's also hosting an office app faceoff at CNET in SF this Thursday.

Here's a list of forbidden emoticons, so you'll know what not to send in email. And, as an equal-opportunity blasphemer, I finally found the lyrics to "He's Giovanni Montini, the Pope", in waltz time, chord progression I V I I, I V I I, I V I vi, ii V I I.

The first-ever "Sex in Video Games" conference will be held in San Francisco in June... I wonder if they'll have a game of Twister set up in the hall....

That "Flash controls your webcam" meme is still spreading around... fortunately, Jack Schofield of The Guardian did do some quick web searches before publishing, so he has a link to source info in there. Oddest comment: "flashplayer not the only new player group called NEW ORDER creating information resevoirs using prisoners inside penal institutes via internet and phone technology...." Now that you mention it, Jonathan Gay does look a little like Adam Weishaupt.... ;-)

LiveJournal seems to have a lot of discussions like this recently, about warez infections... I think their solution is to go where a stranger says, which doesn't seem like the strongest advice to me.

US movie studios are apparently suing Samsung because they once produced a DVD Player which didn't respect their privacy bits. I suspect this is mostly a legal move, to establish that they're indeed trying to protect their intellectual property... hardware prohibition is like other prohibitions, it just increases the incentive to enter the greymarket.

Om Malik hits a sensitive point, in discussing online video services: "I believe that the growing popularity of You Tube and other online video sites has less to do with amateur content, and more to do with copyright infringing content... I wonder how many people actually visit You Tube to watch broadcast content online." I think we'll eventually get to a place where it's easier & cheaper for small groups on small budgets to produce audio/video content which captures significant audience interest, but these days it's still strange to see how those who don't buy into BigCo stores still buy into BigCo content... I mean, and I hope this isn't a shock to anyone, Britney Spears is not actually much of a singer, even though she's at the tops of the warez charts.

I guess this is a good place to link in the Rice Krispies theme song, too... I like the way three singers interweave their lyrices in the final go-round.

Getting back on-topic, Marcus Alexander had a piece earlier this month on diagramming interactivity... it's easy enough to storyboard a linear presentation, or to wireframe a site navigation, but more complex interactivity requires a stronger set of visualization techniques.

The lost camera story seems to be spurring some net vigilantism reminiscent of Dog Poop Girl.

A Microsoft Product Manager proudly shows off a new feature, but after getting Slashdotted, there's just a long list of comments about how ugly the interface looks. Some days ya just can't win.... ;-)

A discussion on Google, Measure Map and privacy correctly notices that many online services are involved in third-party content on websites, which raises the ability to do some tracking of some visitors across multiple sites. I'm not sure why the author singled out Measure Map, though... AdSense, Amazon badges, lots of other off-site content all contributes to a trackable web. (I have no reason to suspect that Google is collating these various bits, but just know that it will be a constant temptation to do so... centralization creates attractive targets more quickly than decentralization does.)

Posted by John Dowdell at 4:08 PM

Google, open source

Google, open source: LinuxFormat magazine interviews Chris DiBona, Google's "open source program manager". I'm ambivalent about the piece as a whole -- I've heard enough latenight stories about machinations to keep a little skepticism when big companies make significant investments without a direct ROI -- but I was struck by his answer to the question "In four years‚Äô time, will Google be a 100% open source company?" "Oh, no. There's no way. There are some things we can't open source, because they're either licensed and not open to people, or it would be wasteful to open source it... If it's not going to see some concerted broad use, there's no real point in releasing it, because it takes time to release software... We're never going to release PageRank, we're not going to release things like that, because to release them would ruin them. If you release how you do the ranking function, suddenly every web scrambler in the world screws up the rank and Google search becomes useless. We don't want to do that." One talking-point against Flash is "they won't give away their engine's source code", but just as Google's company & customers would suffer if it were easier to pollute their engine, so would Adobe suffer if its engine varied a bit on each consumer machine. Hunan food is great, sure, but I'm not sure how well it works for breakfast... production and distribution models work better when they're tailored to the situation rather than applied on a priori principle.

Posted by John Dowdell at 2:43 PM

February 20, 2006

Cross-domain requests

Cross-domain requests: I'm blogging this here in hopes of generating a trackback to a blog which otherwise requires registration for commenting... Dion Hinchcliffe writes predictions from Mashup Camp, and laments "The cross-domain security problem. Fixed? Not anytime soon." Clientside browserscript can run behind a firewall, just like Flash Player can, so invisible access to intranet servers remains a problem. Unless every request to a new domain is visible and subject to user approval (as in Java and Shockwave), having your server request the remote data and then proxying it to the client still seems the most straightforward way to go. (A "mashup" is a single presentation of multiple web services, such as combining a house-rental list from one site with a map delivered from another site.) His tenth prediction is about usage rights on webservices... I have the feeling that we'll see much more discussion about "what you can do with the data I provide" over the next year....

Posted by John Dowdell at 9:42 PM

Text DRM

Text DRM: Kathy Sierra laments an online service which creates robotic papers on any subject by scraping the screens found through a search engine. (For a related example, try saveflex.com, which I found through searching technorati with "macromedia"... they snip articles from varied sites in order to get clicks and earn ad revenue, on either this page or their linkfarm.) Om Malik sparked a big discussion in December about unauthorized repurposing of his words elsewhere. Digital-rights-management may be difficult to build into a stream of ASCII, but we've got to find better ways that creators can have some say over how their creations are eventually used.....

Posted by John Dowdell at 4:33 PM

Mobile game distribution

Mobile game distribution: Greg Costikyan notes that only a small percentage of "western" mobile users have ever downloaded a game: "Suppose I'm a mobile game publisher, and I want to promote my games to consumers. However I do that--advertising, PR, whatever--it's difficult or impossible to tell them how to get my games. The navigation path to find a particular game is going to be different on Cingular than on Verizon--never mind Vodafone or Sonera. At present, I'd need to have teeny tiny text in my ad with navigation paths for five or six operators, and that's in US markets alone." He proposes a uniform resource locater... I'm wondering how close BREW is to what he's seeking...?

Posted by John Dowdell at 4:25 PM

"Active Cookies"

"Active Cookies": Roland Piquepaille summarizes a research paper (23-page PDF) on a possible way to foil DNS-poisoning exploits. (When you type "www.abc.com" into a browser, a Domain Name Server translates that into an Internet Protocol address to identify where the content is on the net -- if you use a found WiFi connection, for instance, it's possible for them to redirect you to a spoof site, bad news if you're banking at an airport lounge, for instance.) The essence of their solution is to have some clientside interactivity confirm the website's identity through a hard IP address. From a quick read I'm not sure whether in-browser Flash will be able to help -- sounds like their client needs to set up a separate connection -- but I'd like to open this up to the wider braintrust here, to see if anyone sees a way that we can help protect against pharming/phishing attacks. If this area is of interest to you, then notes in the comments would be appreciated, thanks.

Posted by John Dowdell at 4:18 PM

Cross-domain security

Cross-domain security: Now that people are more comfortable using JavaScript to retrieve less-than-page-sized data, they're getting more aware of what can happen when such transparent requests occur behind a firewall. There's a lengthy discussion here, with the consensus appearing to converge on the desire for browsers to implement cross-domain policy files, as available in the Flash Player the last few years.

Posted by John Dowdell at 3:13 PM

Browser divergence

Browser divergence: This post on the Evolt mailing list made me realize something I should have realized before. The post itself asks whether a website's music player should be in a frame or new window, so that music can be played seamlessly while a visitor navigates the site -- he'd prefer not to use frames so that bookmarks are still easy, but the increasing number of window-blockers available to browsers today make this tricky. My realization? I've long understood that the various browsers do gradually converge on a common set of abilities, with roughly similar implementations -- this slow convergence is why dedicated engines like Flash, Shockwave and Acrobat can offer new abilities more quickly, more predictably. But the browsers are simultaneously diverging in functionality too... five years ago a "new window" request was much easier to implement than it is now, and we could count on browsers having a good amount of screen area for display, there were few worries about user agents stripping images or other parts of the display, and so on. Because each individual can choose their browser and its configuration, then even as the core engines resemble each other more in base functionality, there's still an increasing range of possible experiences available with the same HTML content. Your thoughts, agreements, objections...?

Posted by John Dowdell at 12:45 PM

Proper webcontent

Proper webcontent: Interesting argument over at digg.com about a photo portfolio with JavaScript/CSS opacity wipes. As browsers start to uniformly support features introduced in the late 90s by Microsoft's browsers, we're starting to see the old "text media is the only media" arguments pop up against JavaScript too. (When people say that something "breaks the Back button" I wish they added what they thought that document-navigation button should do in that specific case.)

Posted by John Dowdell at 12:23 PM

Waterfall 2006 conference

Waterfall 2006 conference: Held in London on, uh, April 1 2006. Includes sessions like "Pair Managing: Two Managers per Programmer" and "Slash and Burn: Rewrite Your Enterprise Applications Twice a Year". There's lots of ways that humans can do work together, and here's a good dissection of some of the ways that don't.... ;-)

Posted by John Dowdell at 8:07 AM

February 19, 2006

Bank of Montreal

Bank of Montreal: Russell McOrmond writes of security/privacy concerns with a use of Flash by Bank of Montreal. When I read the bank's FAQ it sounds like they're using Flash's encrypted cookies to bypass a lengthier set of identity-confirmation tests... I'm assuming they still add at least a password to avoid someone logging on to your private machine. Robin Hilliard already posted a request for more info on Russell's blog. I was going to do so as well, but the blog requires a password account for posting. From Russell's words it almost sounds like he thinks that anything which is not first ratified by a vendor consortium is inherently insecure, and there's also some blurring of the differences between de jure, de facto, and mandated standards (see "PDF Archiving" intro PDF). I'm particularly seeking clarification of the meaning behind this troublesome line: "I already recommend customers disable these insecure client-side technologies, and would need to recommend customers against being a BMO customer as you seem to be promoting and dependent on these insecure technologies." The FAQ reads to me as if IE/Win is not required... the only mention of ActiveX is when an IE/Win visitor's permissions may be set to not use any ActiveX Controls, which does not imply these are the only visitors permitted to the site. If there's an actual issue here I'd like to learn what it is, but if there is no issue, then it may be useful for Russell to update his recommendations.

Posted by John Dowdell at 4:07 PM

"Device-independent" history

"Device-independent" history: While studying "Adobe Engagement Platform" I've kept returning to John Warnock's 1991 "Camelot" paper, where he laid out the rationale for what would become PDF and the Acrobat technologies. One realization I didn't quite have before is that PostScript was an early device-independent imaging language -- it allowed a similar design to be displayed on a high-end imagesetter or a low-end office printer, or to display at lower res on a computer monitor through any of hundreds of applications. PDF refactored the complex PostScript spec down into a smaller, easier-to-support format -- with the mid-90s growth of HTML browsers you could make a single download to add this imaging ability to your choice of web browser. (In the early part of this decade Adobe did a lot more work on server-enhanced collaboration via such documents, but the core was on displaying across devices.) During the birth of PDF, MacroMind and Authorware were pursuing device-independence through a different path: making runtime engines across a range of platforms to process rich-media interactivity, first in standalone downloadable executable code (projectors, standalones), and later in the early HTML era to one-time runtime downloads (plugins, controls) which could display varied content safely within an HTML browser. Allaire took a third approach, focusing on making device-independent HTML documents by having the server handle the interactivity. The one thing all these different technologies have in common is that they float above varied operating systems and applications, allowing different people to have similar experiences across a wide range of viewing environments. These aren't the only device-independent approaches explored over the last two decades -- Java is a another, for instance -- but for me this early "device-independent PostScript" work gave me a key to how we may be understanding the neutral Adobe Engagement Platform over the coming year. Do you have additional thoughts along these lines...?

Posted by John Dowdell at 1:23 PM

Download offers

Download offers: Stephan Manes of PCWorld says that he prefers the Google Pack interface for optional downloads to the website offers for some Flash Player and Adobe Reader downloads. I'm guessing it's because it gives a single clearly-defined interface for Google Pack's multiple download options, as opposed to the single checkbox for the Yahoo Toolbar offer. But this doesn't seem a straight comparison, because Google Pack's multiple offers seem to mandate a dedicated interface, compared to the fewer offers checkable in an Adobe consumer download... it's hard for me to see how to put a Google-style interface up for fewer offers. Do you have other thoughts when reading Stephen's article? Assuming a download offer is a given, what do you need in a consumer interface for such a selection?

Posted by John Dowdell at 1:14 PM

Kawasaki touching bloggers

Kawasaki touching bloggers: Guy Kawasaki, ex Apple evangelist and current VC, offers a list of ways to influence weblog discussions. I was vaguely uncomfortable reading it, and saw similar reaction from Michael Arrington and Om Malik. I think the core may come out of our different employment experiences -- Guy was a celebrity persuader who aimed at turning people around to his point of view, and I come out of a tech support background and look more towards helping people achieve their goals, identifying and removing problems with use of the technology. Sometimes those problems are technology evaluations with colleagues, so I list here the best technology arguments I hear, but I don't really think about persuading others directly, more like setting up the conditions where others can persuade as they see fit. I think that Guy's demonstrably got a good point that it can be profitable to send gifts to influential bloggers and the rest, but that just doesn't feel right to me, I wouldn't be comfortable doing it. Then again, I've been disappointed in the past about where weblog conversation is and isn't, so I'm not all that sure my support-oriented approach is right, either. Do you have thoughts on this? Should Adobe weblogs try to actively persuade, per Guy's approach, or do you prefer other approaches to enriching a network of technologists, helping to get better choices deployed in the world? I think Guy's got a lot of good points in there -- it's not all-or-nothing -- but I'm sort of uneasy with the essay as a whole. Do you have thoughts in this area? Thanks.

Posted by John Dowdell at 12:42 PM

Neuberg on externalInterface

Neuberg on externalInterface: Brad Neuberg wrote a long essay on his dissatisfaction with the externalInterface feature in Flash 8, for cross-browser browser/plugin intercommunication. (I wrote a comment there, then saw that he requires a Blogger.com password, and so I had to trash the comment.) It sounds like he wants to send 1.2 megabytes of data, first from server to browser, then from browser to plugin. Or it might be 1.2M from server to plugin to browser. He found that such large clientside transfers were slow, and got a speed improvement from chunking the transfers. All this work has browser dependencies as well as plugin dependencies, and I can't tell whether his task performs the same across the browsers which now offer this update to the old LiveConnect message-passing mechanism. The spec doesn't seem to offer guidance on the size of the messages it passes. The various implementations of this spec may be optimized for such massive local data transfers, may not... seems like some too-bounded docs met some unbounded expectations... wouldn't usually be worth a comment here, but I've got an emotional response to lines like "Flash 8's broken ExternalInterface" and "whoever coded ExternalInterface should be fired". I'd be hesitant to send 1.2 megabytes of anything to anything in a browser, myself, much less start to transfer it around locally after that. Wish I knew what he was actually trying to accomplish, would be easier to make progress that way.

Posted by John Dowdell at 9:06 AM

February 17, 2006

CSS game

CSS game: I've had this piece from Stu Nicholls open on my desktop a few days, and couldn't really tell you why... it's not the most riveting of games, yet I respect that he reworked styling descriptions to such odd purpose... strange little thing, it is, d'you have thoughts on it...?

Posted by John Dowdell at 1:11 PM

Social indicators

Social indicators: This SLATE article is nominally about "Have blogs peaked?", but author Daniel Gross lays out some indirect tests for assessing various phenomena... if a topic hits magazine covers it's likely no longer news... smarter investors cash out at peak (although it's hard to tell peaks until they're past ;-)... if big, slow-moving organizations, or new gullible latecomers start talking it up then it may be past peak, although these are difficult to pick out without hindisght too. Well, maybe these guidelines are too subjective and after-the-fact to be have good predictive power, maybe, but it read good to me the first time.... ;-)

Posted by John Dowdell at 1:00 PM

February 16, 2006

Frontpage to fishwrap

Frontpage to fishwrap: I think yesterday's press release may have had the first clear details on the widely popular (for better or worse!) HTML editor. "(Q) What is happening to the current FrontPage product? (A) After we fully release SharePoint Designer 2007 and Expression Web Designer, FrontPage will be discontinued gradually... Microsoft will continue to provide current FrontPage customers with full product support through June 2008." One other tidbit here is that the upcoming "Microsoft Office SharePoint Designer 2007" and "Microsoft Expression Web Designer" is that "While both products are partially based on Microsoft Office FrontPage technologies, they are tailored to very different usage scenarios." Frontpage may live on, under the hood...?

Posted by John Dowdell at 3:58 PM

Firefox, Google, Winer, scams

Firefox, Google, Winer, scams: Dave Winer reported "Firefox bundles Google Toolbar"... I was surprised, figuring that if all Firefox downloads included extra bits that it would have been a bigger conversational topic by now. I saw nothing on the Mozilla site, nothing on quick blog checks... after seeing his screenshot I did a search with term "intitle:'download firefox'" and saw similar sites. I'm guessing Dave went to a web search for his software and accepted the first results, which may or may not be affiliated with the creators, and which may or may not bundle other things with the branded software. (Google pays for affiliate Firefox & Toolbar installs, so this might have led to an increase in economic activity on the "firefox" search term.) Dave's issue aside, this raises an important general point: You've got to know whose bits you're executing! Doing a web search for executable code is not safe computing... clicking a link in an email will not guarantee you visit whom you expect... it's better to go to the actual creator of some bits to get them, so that their reputation is firmly attached to the stuff running on your computer. Let's hope that getting an unwanted toolbar was the only thing added to that bundle....

Posted by John Dowdell at 2:53 PM

JS framework comparison

JS framework comparison: Kevin Yank compares yesterday's Yahoo JavaScript UI library with Dojo, Prototype, and Zimbra's AJaX toolkit. The comparison doesn't go deep, but does give a good flavor of each project. The Yahoo User Interface library has a nice interface itself, with examples linked on the main page for each entry. While looking at these I had a very strong sense of deja vu... where Dreamweaver 1.0 put its JS animation power into the application's interface, Yahoo provides external textual material describing how to trigger it via text. Examples like the targeted drag'n'drop remind me of the JavaScript used in the CourseBuilder extensions for Dreamweaver. The big difference seems to be that development workflow here is text-based rather than UI-based. Related note: One big unknown for me here is the actual effect of multiple HTTP connections to fetch external CSS files, external JS files... an under-appreciated benefit of SWF file format is that the number of four-step HTTP negotiations is dramatically reduced and (with appropriate authoring) the content can start to display 'way before all media & instructions are transferred to the browser... no big thing, just affects scalability, and it's always hard for me to see what a page actually does when its source code is scattered among more than three or four files. Anyway, there's good stuff in these articles, as well as the Yahoo Design Patterns, but I'm a little puzzled at the differences in perception of such material over the last decade.... [via Chris Cornutt]

Posted by John Dowdell at 1:21 PM

NPR news visualization

NPR news visualization: Neat... Geoffrey Gaudreault offers an interactive timeline display of stories on the US National Public Radio website. This experiment displays NPR stories tagged with "iraq"... his front page has adifferent, geographical visualization of where stories occur. More info at neurofuzzy.net.

Posted by John Dowdell at 12:10 PM

Novell Linux poll

Novell Linux poll: Novell's been running a "Which apps do you want most on Linux?" poll, and according to Desktop Linux Adobe apps hold four of the top six positions. I know that there has been regular research into Linux ports at Macromedia over the past few years, and have heard that the internal Adobe interest has been high too, but the sticking point has always been making that work pay for itself: Linux has many configurations and lower media support, and atop that many choose Linux for the lower capital costs. If the Novell poll included a "how much I'd pay for it" field, then that datapoint would help make it easier to build a business case for this work.

Posted by John Dowdell at 11:48 AM

Mac exploit

Mac exploit: Seems hard to get infected... surfbits reports that you need to decompress and activate an email attachment while Admin privileges are open... but MacRumors reports that it's nasty if activated: it uses system-level search to find and infect all applications. I don't see that Robert Scoble has picked up on this yet.

Posted by John Dowdell at 11:18 AM

Blogging languages

Blogging languages: In an interview in The Guardian, David Sifry of Technorati drops stats I haven't seen elsewhere: "Other notable trends include the growth of blogging in eastern Asia: last month, more posts were made in Japanese than in any other language - English-language posts represent about 28% of the blogosphere. In part, this is because Japanese bloggers tend to post lots of shorter entries, a habit that is spreading, Sifry says. "More people are using blogs as a sort of conversational medium, as opposed to the long-winded 'here's my 500 to 1,000-word essay' medium." As a result, the average number of links in each post is dropping." I regularly search Technorati on company names, and have seen a particular increase in Chinese-language RIA blogs the past few months too. English may be the internet's common language when people speak globally to any and all strangers, but when people speak locally about their own interests with their own friends, then the language diversity increases again. This interview also has good stuff about Technorati's early development.

Posted by John Dowdell at 8:16 AM

Office Live def

Office Live def: I had heard of Microsoft Office Live for awhile but didn't dig into the talk, and reading at Memeorandum wasn't giving good comprehension for the reading time either. Then a key line came from Michael Parekh: "Calling a web-hosting services package 'Office Live' is confusing given that most people would expect some sort of a web-hosted version of Microsoft Office." Knowing I shouldn't take the name at face value helped. But how should I think of it then? Dare Obasanjo of Microsoft has the best overview I've seen yet... "Office Live" sounds to be a combination of turnkey website/email/domain hosting, with optional privacy/workflow/collaboration services. Good screenshots here, too.

Posted by John Dowdell at 7:53 AM

SE/30 + HyperCard

SE/30 + HyperCard: There's no law against it, and they're consenting adults, so why can't they have fun with old gear? "You can say what you want about its cramped, nine-inch, black-and-white monitor and its snail's-pace 16MHz Motorola 68030 processor, but it's impossible to keep yourself from grinning once you start monkeying around in Hypercard, an easy-to-use program that inspired Macromedia Director, Flash and the World Wide Web."

Posted by John Dowdell at 7:41 AM

February 15, 2006

Flaraby2 beta

Flaraby2 beta: For right-to-left scripts (Arabic, Hebrew, etc) in Flash Player. I'm not in a position to test it, but wanted to spread the word. More discussion at NewHive... thanks to Ahmad for the link.

Posted by John Dowdell at 5:17 PM

Lots of links

Lots of links: Many of my browser windows have interesting articles, but I don't have enough interesting to say to make them first-class weblog items here... check the extended entry for some of the stuff I just couldn't throw away....

Trevor McCauley gives an overview of creating custom panels in Fireworks, from SWF graphics to JavaScript to having them control the app. (Both JavaScript and Flash can be used to control the various Macromedia Studio tools.)

Glyn Moody of Netcraft talks with Miguel de Icaza of Gnome about Gnu, Linux, Microsoft... the part that got quoted the most is about "What do you see as the greatest danger to the continuing adoption and progress of open source?"

Ryan Stewart has a meaty two-part interview with Wes Carr of Gtalkr.

Joe Wilcox writes two essays about Microsoft's releases this week, What Office Live Is Not and What Office Live Is. I'm still not sure how to describe it -- "it's the all-new .NET!" is probably politically incorrect of me -- but there's mention of advertising being used, which will probably shape a lot of blogosphere debates in a month or two.

Jon Udell touches on an upcoming skill in web-development work -- the ability to compose an interface with varied data feeds.

A discussion of why mobile customers in Japan use data services so much more effectively than do mobile customers in North America.

zone-h has been monitoring the rise in attacks on websites by people offended by cartoons (the most offensive of which were apparently designed by imans). That report was picked up by the BBC last week; this week Michelle Malkin has links to other attacks on varied websites.

Stefan Richter collects a whole bunch of rarer Windows shortcuts, such as making a screengrab of just one window on the monitor.

.... hmm, not as many links as I thought, but I hope some of these were of interest to you, though.

Posted by John Dowdell at 3:49 PM

Rob the Mint

Rob the Mint: Shaun Inman describes how theft of his web-analytics tool Mint imposes actual costs on others. (My take: All digital producers are at risk of having their work exploited, it's just that the problem appeared first with software and then music.) But Shaun proposes a novel solution, a Firefox extension which would tabulate out-of-license Mint uses. There's a followup post where he reacts to the previous commentary. When the cost of copying becomes zero we need to figure out new social/economic systems, but I'm not sure how to get from here to there yet....

Posted by John Dowdell at 3:02 PM

Looks like a nail

Looks like a nail: Microsoft staffer Ian Mouster writes: "In the world of application delivery there has long been a choice between reach and fidelity: either your application is high fidelity (eg a rich client with a rich user experience) or it has really broad reach (eg an HTML page). The Nirvana is to bring these two things together so that you get broad reach with a high fidelity application. And for many years now the Microsoft platform has been one of the few ways - maybe the only way - of getting close to that ideal...." I've seen this "rich vs reach" discussion as a Microsoft talking point for about a year, whether for presentations or applications or archivable documents, but, I don't know, that storyline just seems to be missing a certain, ah, je ne sais quoi.... ;-) (I definitely agree with his point that lots of people use Windows, and so a Windows-only technology reaches many people deep into their computers, but considering that Flash Player 8 is already more popular than Windows XP, it seems that if you wanted the widest reach for predictable yet system-safe interactions then Flash work would be the ticket.)

Posted by John Dowdell at 2:28 PM

February 14, 2006

Yahoo browser strategy

Yahoo browser strategy: Nate Koechley talks about how Yahoo handles the testing of HTML/JS/CSS interfaces. I think it boils down to them having a whitelist of browsers which they test and work ("A-grade"), a blacklist of browsers which they test and don't work ("C-grade"), and a greylist of browsers they haven't tested ("X-grade"). The blacklist gets a simple HTML presentation which all the browsers can render. The untested greylist includes rare browsers which aren't cost-effective to test, and new browsers which could not be QA'd during the last development cycle. They assume that untested browsers can handle their normal content. A striking quote, which I can't document: "There are over 10,000 browser brands, versions, and configurations and that number is growing." The core strategy seems to be to use an alternate representation for certain audience members. This strategy is also used by some for audience members with different sensory or motor capabilities... a version of the site which is optimized for screenreading, eg. Other people argue that this creates "second class citizens", and say that one document should be made perfect to fit all audience members. (I'm also thinking of alternate representations for those with low English skills... I don't know of any real analytic work on "How many versions of my website should I make?") Nate offers an appendix with a chart showing various browser brands, versions, and OS combos, and whether each supports their app, does not support their app, or whether its support for their app is currently unknown -- basically they like Firefox 1.07 or 1.5x, any IE/Win past v5.0, Opera/WinXP, and the most recent Safari versions on the most recent Apple OSs. If you put the amibitious stuff in Flash, of course, this whole testing regime would be a whole lot cheaper.... ;-)

Posted by John Dowdell at 4:57 PM

Measure Map, Google

Measure Map, Google: The SWF-enhanced web analytics tool joins Google, along with principals such as Jeff Veen. Congrats to the whole Adaptive Path group on this success.

Posted by John Dowdell at 4:08 PM

Firefox memory

Firefox memory: Ben Goodger discusses aspects of how Firefox handles memory: "Firefox 1.5 implements a Back-Forward cache that retains the rendered document for the last five session history entries for each tab. This is a lot of data. If you have a lot of tabs, Firefox's memory usage can climb dramatically. It's a trade-off. What you get out of it is faster performance as you navigate the web." He discusses how to tweak this preference. In a related discussion, Robert O'Callahan notes how JavaScript control over SVG primitives in Firefox 1.5 requires promoting each primitive to a first-class browser entity in XPCom, with significant memory effects, and Brendan Eich responds: "Don't use XPCOM in core rendering and layout data structures. Do use XPCOM where it wins, as high-level inter-library and inter-programming-language glue, where the QueryInterface and virtual method call costs are noise, and the benefits for programming in the large are obvious." (The Adobe browser extensions use XPCom, but more as that "inter-library glue" than for changing colors on mouseover and other simple tasks.)

Posted by John Dowdell at 4:04 PM

Audio commentary

Audio commentary: Odeo's doing a neat little thing here... they've got a SWF widget you can stick in a page to capture and playback audio comments people leave on your blog. I was just talking with Dom Sagallo here in the Townsend St. Cafe (Odeo's down the street from Adobe, and Dom still comes over to visit)... he says they're still trying to get a handle on the social uses to which audio commentary are put. If you'd like to experiment with it, see how it would work, then Evan Williams and Dom both have examples at the above links.

Posted by John Dowdell at 3:41 PM

Ambitious CSS guidelines

Ambitious CSS guidelines: Roger Johansson offers tips for using CSS when you wish to go beyond the basics, into those areas in which the various realworld implementations your audience may choose do no tyet fully coincide. He recommends to remove all defaults for all elements, to do most of your viewing in Firefox or Opera and then to test in the popular IE/Win, to shun "CSS hacks", and to have your markup approved by the spec-validators. This seems like good advice for the future, too, even though the various browsers will eventually converge in implementation details for the CSS specs... rendering engines are always pushing the edge, and with multi-engine format like CSS, HTML and JS some engines will always advance faster than others... staying in the mainstream where implementations have already converged is safest, but if you've got to get ambitious, then Roger's guidelines can help.

Posted by John Dowdell at 3:31 PM

MS browser changes

MS browser changes: Microsoft details some of the effects of a change to ActiveX handling in a future version of the browser. The biggest difference is that such browsers will mandate a click in ActiveX screen area for user interactivity -- if you've been following the Eolas news over the years then this seems a lot less onerous than what we all were looking at back in 2004. I've heard there will be orientation material up on the Adobe site soon, but it's still unclear to me when and how this browser change will actually ship, and how many people it would actually affect in what timeframe. Red flags: This Microsoft document notes some problems in current testing: window scrolling, DHTML "wmode" layering, CSS settings, Google Toolbar issue, and I can't tell if these will be addressed before consumer distribution.
Update: [Additional blogsearch terms: eolas, patent, activex, Active Content]

Posted by John Dowdell at 3:05 PM

Webpage design trends

Webpage design trends: Ben Hunt surveys a number of recent sites and finds common design principles: simple layout with large text and plenty of whitespace; generally muted colors but high saturation used for emphasis; graphic effects such as icons and 3D used sparingly. [via John Rhodes]

Posted by John Dowdell at 2:58 PM

Altoids SWF8

Altoids SWF8: The candy company offers a customizable Valentines Day card, and the presentation uses some of the video-overlay and compositing methods available in Macromedia Flash Player 8. [via Todd Dominey]

Posted by John Dowdell at 2:54 PM

February 13, 2006

Technorati filtering

Technorati filtering: New user-interface element at blogsearch site technorati.com... a four-position horizontal slider to choose the amount of "authority" (incoming links) a blog must have in order to display in your results. The slider works via JavaScript; the new filtered results via a page-refresh. In quick tests "a little authority" removes the bulk of the warez and linkspam sites, and "some authority" gives a good overview of actual current conversation. I'm not sure of the sustainability, though... if this approach gets popular then that's just incentive for spammers to include a mutual-link module... maybe Technorati requires inbound links from sites on a list of known-to-be-good weblogs deciding it's real, I don't know. But it also cuts out new blogs, too, if that's an issue in your search. Anyway, it's a nice customization, very handy if you try to search blogs, and they've got a feedback loop too. Now, if Technorati could just get rid of its "sponsored links" offering "macromedia software at 70% off!", "studio mx for $65!!", then after that bit of filtering I'd be even happier, I bet.... ;-)

Posted by John Dowdell at 9:46 PM

Vista varieties

Vista varieties: At ArsTechnica, Ken Fisher has one of the more comprehensive summaries of how the new operating system will display differently on different types of systems. Some older PCs won't run it at all, and other machines can run in software emulation, and there will be at least one, and possibly two, levels of hardware-enhanced rendering support. I suspect the degradation would be fairly predictable with the standard interface elements, but may require minimum hardware requirements for more ambitious work. Ken's final line still holds the core truth: "Until a release candidate sits before us, predicting the future remains a risky business."

Posted by John Dowdell at 5:11 PM

Browser overview

Browser overview: InternetWeek compares UI handlings in the Microsoft, Firefox, Opera and Maxthon browsers. It's 18 pages, but is segmented logically into subjects. There isn't much here on CSS differences or JavaScript differences, but a lot on how different browsers approach different tasks such as bookmarking a group of webpages, detecting suspicious URLs, handle XML versions of websites, more.

Posted by John Dowdell at 5:01 PM

Non-universal forms

Non-universal forms: This is why I believe in Adobe's mission of providing a lightweight media/interactivity layer above the range of the world's machines... the link goes to a Washington Post article which may disappear, but here's the gist: "The new [US] 'Grants.gov' system, under development at a cost of tens of billions of dollars, aims to replace paper applications with electronic forms. It is being phased in at the National Institutes of Health, Department of Housing and Urban Development and other federal agencies. All 26 grant-giving agencies are supposed to have their application processes fully online by 2007. The problem: Although many U.S. scientists and others depend on graphics-friendly Macintosh computers, the software selected by the government is not Mac-compatible. And it is expected to remain so for at least a year. Last week, faced with evidence that the system will not be fully accessible to Mac users by this fall as promised, NIH quietly dropped its plan to switch to electronic applications for October's $600 million round of major R01 grants." Inappropriate use of platform-specific technology may be the "skip intro" of OS companies like Microsoft or Apple -- it's easy for an individual development group to say "works great for me!" and then not check in on the actual reactions of their audience. I don't know why the decisionmakers here didn't choose a more evolved technology like Acrobat and LiveCycle for their forms/documentation needs... looks like the decision flowed down to Grumman and then out to a subscontractor in Canada... anyway, as a society we're still uncovering damage from apps which require a certain operating system or browser to work. (On an unrelated note, one link that's hitting internal email today is CuteOverload.com... the diversity of the web is a constant surprise.... ;-)

Posted by John Dowdell at 4:05 PM

MS cross-platform video

MS cross-platform video: Much of the focus in Microsoft's work is in exploiting the power of Vista, just as Apple's work tends to exploit the power of Mac OS X. Universality is still a concern, though -- with the discontinuation of Microsoft's browser and media player for Macintosh makes this tricky. The way they're apparently handling this, for video, is to offer a free 3.6M download of Windows Media codecs for use in the Apple QuickTime shell. But it requires QT6.5+ and MacOS 10.3.9+ to use... Adobe's approach isn't so much on exploiting new hardware as it's about increasing the size of the audience for your work.

Posted by John Dowdell at 1:47 PM

OracleBoss

OracleBoss: Small of me, I know, but ever since the rumor hit last week that Oracle might purchase JBoss, I keep on trying to visualize Larry Ellison and Marc Fleury discussing things around a conference table, the thought keeps on bubbling up in my mind... looks like other people have the same curiosity, with characters this large this may be bigger than Galloway on Big Brother....

Posted by John Dowdell at 1:33 PM

Adam & Eve

Adam & Eve: I'm linking to some Adobe tech you may not know about, at opensource.adobe.com... "Eve" is a layout engine used within Adobe application development, and "Adam" is an interactivity engine to make things happen when you press buttons. In the foreword Sean Parent writes: "I am convinced that writing correct, high performance, and feature rich systems can be orders of magnitude simpler than it currently is. By my estimate, 70% of Adobe's current code base could be better represented declaratively. The remaining imperative logic could be largely generic - reused both within and across Adobe's applications. Realizing even a fraction of this potential would open up a world of opportunities. I strongly suspect the proportions are similar throughout the industry. Why would Adobe give such technology away? The answer is twofold. First, we want to give back to the wonderful open source community which gives us so much. Second, we are releasing ASL because we want these problems to be solved. We want to be able to see our designs turned into quality products. We believe that technology that helps us build better products will make us a stronger company. We want to build Photoshop and Acrobat and not struggle with the small implementation details. And we realize the problem is far larger than us alone." (Adobe Flex is a way to declare how an interface appears and acts, bypassing the step-by-step tweaking of procedures to make this interface appear and function -- declarative programming is the common thread.) You might also be interested in the Adobe Extensible Metadata Platform work, which is a way to embed data about a file within the file itself, already implemented in Adobe Creative Suite -- titles or keywords embedded within some Photoshop artwork can be viewed, edited, and sorted in other Adobe applications. This short SWF slideshow gives a quick overview of the what & how.

Posted by John Dowdell at 12:20 PM

Entwistle warez

Entwistle warez: Odd coincidence... this season's Scott Peterson had apparently been selling Macromedia & Adobe software on Ebay at the price of a large technical book, before he hit the big time, as WhoIs seems to confirm. Doesn't seem to be a causal link between the two behaviors, but....

Posted by John Dowdell at 12:11 PM

February 12, 2006

Mobile Olympics

Mobile Olympics: Matt Croydon surveys mobile coverage of news from the Olympic Games. There's apparently less data available than on the computer website, and a greater emphasis on marketing. He also compares how the HTML interface looks on different browsers in different phones, and will soon have an article on the greater engagement offered by Sprint's mobile video coverage. Scrolling through his blog, the entries aren't frequent, but he does have good discussion on mobile user experience issues, from the point-of-view of someone who has already learned HTML techniques. Good reading. (I haven't heard any talk of Flash Lite with this Olympics, although the big 3GSM conference in Barecelona this week apparently has an expo guide delivered as a richer, more predictable SWF-based interface.)

Posted by John Dowdell at 9:53 AM

February 11, 2006

Carson conf notes

Carson conf notes: Simon Willison took extensive notes during the Carson Workshops Future of Web Apps conference. He features quick-scanning summaries of presentations from people at del.icio.us, Flickr, Yahoo!, 37 Signals, Google Maps, Mint, Adobe Flex. I haven't read it all yet, but I definitely appreciate the work he (and the speakers) contributed here.

Posted by John Dowdell at 12:13 PM

Adobe phishing

Adobe phishing: I'm logging this here because it's an Adobe-related issue in public discourse, but it's not really a new issue... WebSense Security Labs describes a phishing fraud from "Adobe Shopping Inc.", whose site is registered in Utah USA but said to be hosted from China, and which uses artwork in the style of store.adobe.com at prices below academic levels. The WebSense report does not seem to provide the actual addresses used in the email, so it's hard to confirm, but even if true, there are such sites listed in pretty much every Technorati search I do on "macromedia", and the fake email links are known techniques too. I think such problems will eventually fade, as more people understand the risks of becoming zombies from adulterated bits, but it will probably require a significant outbreak to bring this warez vulnerability into mainstream attention. Anyway, if people ask you about this, it's a good idea to know whose instructions you're following, and to copy/paste links into your browser rather than click on them in an email. [via "donna" at MSMVPS.COM]

Posted by John Dowdell at 10:55 AM

"Lightweight EP"?

"Lightweight EP"? In comments on a prior item here, Rob from Belgium raises a reasonable objection to my description of the Adobe Engagement Platform as an "effort to provide a lightweight yet persuasive media/interactivity layer floating above the range of the world's devices". He responds: "i have to disagree on your account that it's already here, since Acrobat isn't lightweight at all." It's true that the free Adobe Reader download is a browser-sized download, so compared to the Flash Player it isn't "lightweight". But compared to changing your browser, or changing your operating system, the full Acrobat functionality does remain a transparent, lightweight services layer. There is no impact upon the web-browsing habits of the audience, no chrome change, no menu or keyboard shortcut impositions, no need to doubleclick a new application. (The PDF content does present its own navigation/functionality buttons, but does not change the current browser habits.) But "engagement", I think, goes beyond just network applications -- when people go to print or film they use Adobe technologies to reach their audiences more persuasively, and the rendering is handled by known "players" such as PostScript printers, or DVD playback devices, or television screens, all of which are already part of our environment and so are "lightweight" in changes to user experience. When people use Dreamweaver, GoLive, Contribute or ColdFusion we're rendering to the audience's choice of browser for HTML, JPG, other formats. For mobile and embedded there's still work to do, but as phones are becoming more capable and operators continue striving for increased data revenue the number of phones with baked-in Flash Lite abilities correspondingly increases, providing lightweight, transparent support here too. Doing a multi-megabyte download for PDF support *is* a one-time audience cost, but considering how many computers already include Adobe Reader at purchase, even that cost may be invisible. We're trying to make stuff that just works, with the audience able to view your message without hassle, without cost, without changes to the computing environment each audience member has chosen... engaging the audience, with the most persuasiveness, while minimizing their costs in receiving your message.

Posted by John Dowdell at 10:12 AM

Data request differences

Data request differences: David M. Peterson compares implementation details in XmlHttpRequest support across various current browsers. "I keep on bumping up against implementation inconsistencies on IE vs. Safari vs. Opera vs. Mozilla. Although the interface exposed is pretty much the same, what it does in the background is very different, especially with regards to HTTP." All these browsers can use the same call to refresh text data without reloading the rest of the web page, but there are differences in exactly how each browser handles this chore. He has set up a test page which examines implementation details for your current browser, and a future step is to catalog and compare the results across browser brands, platforms, and versions. [via Chris Cornutt]

Posted by John Dowdell at 10:00 AM

February 9, 2006

JD on EP

JD on EP: Two points to Nisse Bryngfors, in comments on a previous item here, who noticed my change in blogname and figured out it stood for "Engagement Platform", the Adobe effort to provide a lightweight yet persuasive media/interactivity layer floating above the range of the world's devices. For awhile I was thinking of retitling the blog with the general "jdowdell", but "JD on EP" has that symmetrical three-groups-of-two lettering scheme that just seems so satisfying somehow. ;-) This week there have been a whole lot of Adobe engineering meetings where we've been getting prepared for the phase of work on the technology architecture... I'm really excited by what we'll all be attempting here, but I need to get my thoughts in order before summarizing the thrust of the meeting. Anyway, thanks to James and Nisse for noticing the title change so quickly... more info soon! :)

Posted by John Dowdell at 10:14 AM

Freedom of disassociation

Freedom of disassociation: Dan Rayburn writes at StreamingMedia.com of how Google Video promotes much content which is at odds with its terms-of-service. It's great that the internet can bring people together, but we need ways to ignore people too -- the "right of free association" implies a right to not associate with anyone you deem undesirable. Google Video apparently was planning on staff review of all content, but that single-source examination doesn't scale, and the ongoing maintainence costs become a target during any budget-cutting cycle. The flagging system at CraigsList helps harvest the collective intelligence -- Slashdot's moderation system doesn't always promote the best comments -- link-analysis such as Memeorandum is always a target for manipulation. It's a tough problem to figure out who to ignore in such a connected world, and we're not quit there yet.....

Posted by John Dowdell at 7:57 AM

Calendar needs

Calendar needs: Joel Spolsky details features he needs in a calendar application: planeflight-friendly... control over sharing parts of the calendar with friends... a notification mechanism, to computer or preferably to phone too... ability to make an intelligent bundle for printing. He has been examining JavaScript applications and hasn't found a satisfactory implementation yet.

Posted by John Dowdell at 7:51 AM

February 7, 2006

Sparkle realities

Sparkle realities: Jim Rapoza of Publish dissected many of the "Sparkle vs Flash" discussions earlier this week, by focusing on audience needs: "But there's one problem: As things stand now, these Sparkle-based GUIs will work only on systems running Windows Vista or Windows XP Service Pack 2 systems with WinFX components (and, most likely, a Windows Presentation Foundation-compatible video card). Let's look ahead to, say, mid-2007, approximately six months after Vista's expected release. If Sparkle is massively successful, with heavy adoption by everyone who could use it, what would that be? Five percent of the market?" I'm still not sure what non-Vista support will actually be, given the need to fully exploit and showcase the new capabilities of Vista itself -- from what I've seen myself so far, the need to reach deep into Vista is opposed to the need to reach widely into the world -- waiting for functional details. But such work could be sold to controlled environments inside businesses, where the entire audience can be locked into a particular operating system. I'd rather not see that myself -- I still run across web apps which bit on the "embrace & extend DHTML" meme and require IE/Win to use. Flex doesn't require a particular operating system, and I'd rather see this type of openness in business apps myself. That's one reasons I'm blatantly asking for your help in exposing your business contacts to Flex 2 at this early stage -- the sooner we get widespread awareness of the actual options available, the less chance we'll see lock-in in intranets, I suspect. So if you run across colleagues, friends or other contacts who might benefit from the greater platform-independence of Flex 2, it would be great if you could let them know what you've seen of this initiative yourself, invite them to explore it. Right now we have a special window of opportunity, where a little extra effort can make a big difference in the inclusiveness of future web apps -- my thanks to you in advance if you can help spread the word!

Posted by John Dowdell at 7:07 PM

Too much Flash

Too much Flash: Molly Holzschlag, who volunteers with the Web Standards Project, writes of her experience in judging themed websites developed in a 24-hour period. There were some good points: "I was in awe to be sitting with him and numerous other colleagues who truly made me feel that I was part of the WORLD in Word Wide Web." But one particular aspect she found frustrating: "Everything, and I do mean everything was done in Flash. Out of about 20 competitors, only one had valid XHTML and CSS along with Flash. Everything else was either pure Flash or table-based layouts with Flash embedded just about everywhere... This is not Web design. It is motion design. Flash design. Interactive design. Any of those things: motion, Flash, interactivity can be a part of Web design, but not one of them stands alone as a means of designing truly usable, accessible, interactive and beautiful Web sites." I've got no take on this either way -- as far as I'm concerned, individuals can assess things on whichever basis they see fit. (And, FYI, I'll delete or edit any comments here which denigrate Molly's point of view!) But, for me, it's worthwhile to remember that there are people who have different value systems than us. I strongly suspect that predictable and universal use of varied media types can help in the goal of achieving "usable, accessible, interactive and beautiful Web sites", but different people do have different perspectives, and the more we keep their needs in mind, the better we can help at improving the web, together.

Posted by John Dowdell at 6:00 PM

Fireworks news

Fireworks news: From Danielle Beaumont, Product Manager for Fireworks: "Fireworks continues to be an important product to the combined Macromedia/Adobe portfolio and is actively under product development for a yet-to-be announced product release... We know that for many years Fireworks has been an integral part of your workflow with Dreamweaver and Flash. It will be our goal in the Product Development team to preserve all of the features you value in Fireworks 8 while developing a more cohesive solution with the Adobe Creative product line." Thanks to Stephanie Sullivan at CommunityMX for the pointer! (I'll log other news here as I see it, with blog search term "product futures"... I'm seeing clear trends internally towards maintaining current customer workflows, but have seen few specific announcements so far.)

Posted by John Dowdell at 5:37 PM

February 5, 2006

Intel Mac FAQ

Intel Mac FAQ: I'm bumping this up... John Nack has a summary of Adobe apps on the new Macintosh hardware, and points to the official PDF FAQ... generally, look at the next full version for the new hardware's native code... Tinic Uro has additional info on Flash Player.

Posted by John Dowdell at 10:12 AM

February 4, 2006

How free is Flex?

How free is Flex? I like David Mendels' phrasing, in a discussion at Dion Almaer's Ajaxian weblog: "The Flex SDK is free. Free free free. There are no limitations on development or deployment or runtime of Flex applications. No limits at all. Your site will never go down if you exceed certain limits. Free‚Äìfree development, free compilation, free deployment, free runtime. Flex Enterprise Services is *never* required. Flex Builder is *never* required. Again, the Flex SDK is free. :)" Anyone can get into this. Adobe is betting on the business of providing better solutions, better workflows, but the only investment you need to take advantage of this new Flex technology is the time it takes you to download.

Posted by John Dowdell at 3:36 PM

Winer on Flash, +10

Winer on Flash, +10: While searching for something else I found this from Dave Winer, Jan 5 1996: "Now Charlie Jackson has started FutureWave, http://www.futurewave.com/, a new software venture that holds a lot of promise for making the web a much faster place, dramatically lowering the bandwidth cost of graphics on websites. Everyone is going to love this idea, everyone from sysops to pre-teen web surfers. It's such a simple idea, I wonder why Netscape hasn't done something about this already. If Charlie and company can really deliver the technology, it's a no-brainer -- everyone is going to want this stuff." (In similar vein, a conversation with Kevin Lynch about PGML in 1998; Angus Davies on PGML and SWF; Winer warning about "skip intro" in June 1998: "Take the high road if possible, ease into this stuff.")

Posted by John Dowdell at 3:03 PM

February 3, 2006

Lots of links

Lots of links: I'm reading lots, but don't have time to say much yet... here are some of the interesting things others have said this week that may have slipped by among other events....

Jesse Warden had a good essay Feb1 putting the various parts of Flex 2 in context, and there's an "i saw the light" post from the person whose blog is named "Bitch Who Codes" (it's hard for me to refer to someone with that hotword when I've never even met them.... ;-) Both offer a quick way of seeing what all the excitement is about.

Thomas Landspurg writes an "Analysis of Flash Lite" which was prompted by recent adoption by more high-profile partners... in the Adobe Analyst Call I recall one section in the Q&A which announced an even larger deal which was nearing conclusion. [Thanks to Marco Casario for turning up this review.]

Adobe Video Terrorist Studio may not be in the best of taste, but it did make me laugh. (The cartoon jihad is not making me laugh, but did prompt me to wear a button in solidarity today.)

Jeff Schiller wrote a guide to invoking SVG capabilities among various browsers with PC HTML... puts a different perspective on the way we've tried to get SWF invocation past the various specs which proscribed EMBED.

Vera Fleischer, recent Macromedia alumnus, is now offering you Psychic Valentines.

During this week's Technorati trawl, my favorite title so far is "Must... contain... geek-gasm...".

Tony MacDonnel has an essay exploring the effect of recent mainstream attention on refreshing data in a browser while retaining the presentation and logic: "The story should not be: 'Ajax is redefining the way we develop for the web'. It should be: 'Unfortunately it took 5 years for the standards movement to realize that XML could be used asynchronously to improve web development'."

If you follow how big media companies are adapting to new technologies, then Richard Edelman has a collection of short pullquotes from NYT, Reuters and more at Davos. I particularly like the Sergei Brin line "Not all content wants to be free but it needs to be easy."

Autobytel served about a thousand hours a day of video last year... that's about forty television stations' worth of content.

According to The Gematriculator, I am more evil than Scott Fegette, but both of us are far more foul than Sean Corfield.

A district judge in Nevada has ruled that Google Cache is fair use, and does not constitute unauthorized republishing.

I know that ESRI ArcWeb Explorer is important, but I didn't have time to dig into it this week... see Glenn Lethem, Kirk Mower, James Fee... Jeff Thurston says "The only viewer service with world data"... I'm not sure whether some of the negative appraisals were due to configuration, server load, design or what, because I'm confused by comments like "It uses Flash 8, which seems to work fine. It's Java, so you need not download anything." Orbit FlashMap is apparently another service with Flash interface and mapping data for Europe, but I'm behind-the-curve on this effort, too. :(

For some reason, an old entry here which mentioned Entertainment Tonight still gets tons of late, off-topic evangelism....

Matt Haughey talks about timeshifting Usenet, mailing list, weblog conversation along with his timeshifted TV shows, as well as the place-shifting of minor league sports funding.

Flash Voice from Matteo Penzo sounds interesting, but I don't know much about it yet.

Posted by John Dowdell at 12:47 PM

Summary, preview

Summary, preview: Big news this past week... Adobe analyst call laid out the basic business plans and initiatives to the investment community, and this long video will be online for another ten days or so (my apologies for the lack of chapters, bookmarks or scrubbing in current UI)... NPD found that 50% of consumers tested had installed Macromedia Flash Player 8 within the first fifteen weeks of its release, half-again-as-fast as the Flash Player 7 which was already the most rapidly-adopted piece of internet software in history... Flex 2.0 enters public beta, with dramatic announcements about the flexibility of the pricing model, the openness of the workflow. For the new Intel Macintosh hardware, there are FAQ and advisories from John Nack, Steve Kilisky, and Tinic Uro -- the next versions of existing apps are being developed against the new platform. SWF8 file format is almost live, just waiting for the final legal pass on licensing to minimize forking risks. Next week staff blogging will likely remain light, due to a super-secret cross-product engineering summit in an undisclosed location. During February I expect to see more news on future work emerge from various development groups here, as the Adobe/Macromedia integration enters its final stages and we get in the new groove.

Posted by John Dowdell at 12:24 PM

February 2, 2006

Gtalkr improvements

GTalkr improvements: I haven't been able to evaluate this technology myself (reticient to open a Gmail account), but Gtalkr has received a good amount of praise inside the shop and on the lists. Here, Michael Arrington of TechCrunch lists some of today's improvements.

Posted by John Dowdell at 2:56 PM

February 1, 2006

Player adoption significance

Player adoption significance: Yesterday's news about Flash Player 8 adoption being 50% more explosive than even "the most pervasive software in internet history" (FP7) did not make headlines across the New York Times, as I would have expected. Two more aspects on this, though. One, it proves that Adobe can push innovation to the world's computers faster than anyone -- faster than Mozilla, faster than Microsoft, faster than Apple. (A pure server-based app like Google Maps can update its instructions on every visit, but it can't change the capabilities of the viewing browser itself.) "AJaX" can't match up in growth rate, even if everyone used only one browser brand -- OS adoption and browser adoption are bigger commitments, and are orders-of-magnitude slower than the little Flash plug-in. Kevin Lynch made a great point during the analyst meeting yesterday, and it bears repeating: The Adobe pace of innovation atop the world's computers is unmatched. (Yes, them's fighting words, at least to some out there, I'd wager... but these words are true! ;-) The second implication is for Flash Player 8.5 and ActionScript 3. The faster script processing in ActionScript 3 will require the 8.5 engine, now in developer beta, going to general public later this spring. I don't know how the demand produced by content sites will vary between the graphics-oriented FP8 and the logic-oriented FP8.5 -- advertisers and destination sites seem like they'd make use of live video compositing before they'd push for scripting improvements -- but the overall incendiary pace of consumer adoption means that a Flex 2 audience will always be bigger than a Vista audience, from day one. Yesterday's stats were indeed a highly significant event in computing, both for what they say about today, and imply about tomorrow. Now, let me get the editors of the New York Times on the phone, see what I can do to getting this more widely recognized.... ;-)

Posted by John Dowdell at 4:18 PM

Why Flex Matters

Why Flex Matters: Last week I asked your help, to tell a friend about Flex 2 Public Beta if you thought they could use it, in hopes of escaping the ghetto of early adopters in which new technology can languish. Yesterday, Christian, Danny, Sho and Mark made the announcement of the live launch, and the news about the signficant opening of the platform. If you know someone who really should know about these new options, particularly if they haven't used Flash Platform before, then it would be great if you could tip them off about the Flex Labs page, such as Sho's Build a Flex App in 15 Minutes video. Why does this matter to me? Aside from providing a paycheck and making my job more interesting, there are three big reasons I want to see this Flex 2.0 effort succeed: it's more open, it's more global, and it will help give us a more usable web experience. More on this in the extended entry....

Disclaimer: I'm writing this piece pretty much all in one go, from things that have been seething around in my brain the past few weeks... apologies in advance if I seem to ramble. Also, the following is my own personal feeling, and is not The Considered Group Opinion -- if you see ways this essay can be improved, then please add it right here to the record in the "comments", thanks.

Sidenote: past and future

Abstracting an interactive computer experience to XML has been a goal for a long time... I remember discussions with Kurt Cagle on DIRECT-L back in the late 90s... the SMIL presentation format sounded great but never really received reliable rendering support... XUL was always intriguing too but the runtime was too rare... Microsoft has also adopted this "abstracting to XML" approach for their upcoming operating system. With Flex we have a chance to actually make it work.

Flex 1.0 was targeted at the small audience in enterprise development who could pay to subsidize further research and testing. Sales of Flex 1.0 surpassed expectations, with many pilot programs now generating fullscale deployments. This technology started out at enterprise level and is scaling downwards -- the opposite of what we see with many other technologies (PHP scales up, Flash Player started simple, etc). The homework has already been done.

And for the future, I want to see more use of describing richer experiences via XML, abstracted from any particular authoring tool. I don't know how the "universal client" Apollo project will play out, but I'd rather see an open XML way of approaching this than an older 90s-style dedicated authoring system -- I want to see this become accessible to those who use any of Adobe's creative tools. If Flex is a success then the odds increase; if Flex remains hidden then it's harder to argue for openness.

Open: Adobe's big gamble

Look at the workflow: Adobe FlexBuilder is a fast way to create an application -- although you don't have to use FlexBuilder. The Flex framework and components provide a reliable way to create an application -- although you can extend the framework or add new components if the Adobe defaults don't match your needs. Adobe Flex Enterprise Server is a proven way to scale and deploy an application -- although you don't need to buy a server from Adobe for your own work. And then there's always the Flash Player, in which Macromedia/Adobe have invested much time, money, and work in getting deployed on Other Peoples' Machines -- yet you don't need to use anything Adobe-ish in order to take advantage of this significant realworld capability.

Adobe has opened up each step of the workflow. There will be competitors. The gamble is that Adobe can provide a better experience at each of those workflow stages, enough to recoup the significant investment made in Flash/Flex architecture. The company is betting on a smaller piece of a bigger pie.

I like this approach to doing business, and I want to see it continue in the future. That's one reason I really want Flex 2.0 to see rapid, widespread adoption among people who may never have used Flash Platform before -- I want to see these more open business models succeed.

Global: openness at the individual level

The above focuses on how the openness of Flex 2 affects Adobe. Let's flip it around and look at it from the point of view of each individual who may need to create things in Flex.

Don't have enough money for a live server for your apps? No problem, Flex can create static SWFs delivered by a standard web server. Can't afford the visualization and layout of the FlexBuilder development environment? That's fine, just like with HTML you can write the XML in a text editor. Don't want to buy Adobe components, or Adobe support? That's your option -- the core technology remains available to you.

There are a lot of smart, creative people in China, in India, South America, in all parts of the world. These places have different capital flows than New York City or Tokyo -- it costs more dinners to buy a software package in some areas than others. With Flex 2 you have options for each stage of the workflow. You can use the technology despite the size of your wallet.

Standard: a better web experience

I don't want to see any more web applications which require a Microsoft browser to run. I don't want to see more which require a certain version of Firefox to run. I want advanced interfaces that are supported invisibly in my choice of current operating systems and browsers.

I don't want to see each site hand-rolling their own scrolling mechanisms, their own tabbing mechanisms, their own history mechanisms... I've got enough to do without trying to dope out interface peculiarities from each application's development team. I want to see predictable, standard ways for the low-level behavior of varied applications -- I want to see component sets get commoditized down to part of the background experience of using a web applications.

As a web user, I want more predictability in the basics of how an application works, and I don't want to have to change my current browser and workflow to use it. This is part of why I want to see Flex succeed.

So what can we do?

Part of how Flex will be judged internally would be whether we add new developers to Flash Platform, or if we just cannibalize sales from Flash authoring... as Jeff Whatcott says, the company's goal is to increase the number of Flex developers from several thousand to a million.

It's important to get out the word to people who would not have otherwise bought into Adobe technology. Slashdot won't help us, Memeorandum is all about Google and Microsoft, commercial press will cover the press releases but won't go heavy until there's a juicy competition and dramatic stories.

If you also value the goals I outlined above, then you could really help by exposing Flex to someone new, someone who doesn't read MXNA, who could honestly benefit from this better way of creating interfaces. No hardsell, no evangelism -- just connecting people to this news could help a lot. I think Flex 2 will sell itself, if enough people know about it in a timely and accurate fashion.

Do you see someone during your realworld travels who could benefit from Flex? If so, could you point them to one of the videos, or even convince them to do a download and quick "Hello" app? We need this widespread exposure to what Flex really is in order to succeed in this work. If you see it's worth your while to pass a recommendation to a friend, then I'd sure appreciate it, and so would all the folks who have been working so hard this past year to make Flex 2 a reality. Thanks in advance for any support you can provide!

Posted by John Dowdell at 1:30 PM

JD on EP

This is a historical site. New entries are at blogs.adobe.com/jd. Comments are closed on these old entries.

February 28, 2006

Design by committee

Expression vs web

Free as in beer

Antidisintermediationism

FlashForward 2000

More links

Video-style Flash

Windows Live UI

February 27, 2006

Malik & Kennedy on Flash

Torrone on clones

February 23, 2006

Horwith, Forta

Nuthin' but net

Adobe on Linux

Adobe Mouse

Game usability

Mobile porn

Shockwave installer

February 22, 2006

Funny headline

Photoshop vs Fireworks

Balthaser patent

Chizen on EP

February 21, 2006

Why Ajax sucks

Gaming conflicts

Trendalyzer accessibility

Mobilization

Lots of links

Google, open source

February 20, 2006

Cross-domain requests

Text DRM

Mobile game distribution

"Active Cookies"

Cross-domain security

Browser divergence

Proper webcontent

Waterfall 2006 conference

February 19, 2006

Bank of Montreal

"Device-independent" history

Download offers

Kawasaki touching bloggers

Neuberg on externalInterface

February 17, 2006

CSS game

Social indicators

February 16, 2006

Frontpage to fishwrap

Firefox, Google, Winer, scams

JS framework comparison

NPR news visualization

Novell Linux poll

Mac exploit

Blogging languages

Office Live def

SE/30 + HyperCard

February 15, 2006

Flaraby2 beta

Lots of links

Rob the Mint

Looks like a nail

February 14, 2006

Yahoo browser strategy

Measure Map, Google

Firefox memory

Audio commentary

Ambitious CSS guidelines

MS browser changes

Webpage design trends

Altoids SWF8

February 13, 2006

Technorati filtering

Vista varieties

Browser overview