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March 31, 2006

Flash coup

Flash coup: uh-oh, this could be bad news... I just had a thousand new business cards printed: "Microsoft's own scripting efforts are regarded as relatively inferior to the cross-platform Flash, which now supports XML, Unicode, MP3 and HTML and which was taken closer towards Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE) in 2002. The Flash Player, meanwhile, is compatible with most browsers and used on nearly 90% of desktops. Flash would give Microsoft access to tools for building rich interfaces on both desktops and mobile devices, furthering .NET." (My point with all this Foolishness? Here. We humans are a flawed lot, but skepticism may be our most valuable trait....)

Posted by John Dowdell at 9:36 PM

VRML becomes mandatory

VRML becomes mandatory: It is now standard, for websites. ISO-approved, no less. Many sites will probably implement this over the next week, on principle alone, just as they've already switched to PNG instead of JPEG or GIF. I must have missed the memo on this one....

Posted by John Dowdell at 9:25 PM

MS web plugin

MS web plugin: Hey, this sounds significant... Microsoft's Steve Ballmer says: "One of the most exciting is something that we call Chrome Effects. Chrome Effects was just released to our hardware manufacturer partners. They are integrating it with the Windows that they are now shipping on new machines. Chrome Effects is a set of technologies that we've built using XML that live inside the browser, and let you do very exciting 2D and 3D publishing and animation work inside our browser. Chrome Effects requires a machine that's 300 megahertz. Chrome Effects requires a machine with a 4 meg 3D video card in it. You can buy a machine that runs Chrome Effects today for $1,100-1,200. And we have hardware vendors who say they'll have Chrome Effects machines in the market by Christmas that sell for $900 with the monitor included. It's a very, very mainstream technology for the future, but of course as you look at it, you'll say to yourself, it's not mainstream in the install base today. But I think when you see the kinds of things that you'll be able to do from an online publishing perspective, you could get very excited about the potential. And it will be a mainstream technology as OEMs start offering it standard on their machines over the next several months." Bill Gates has more. Sounds impressive, if they can bring it to fruition....

Posted by John Dowdell at 9:18 PM

April Foo

April Foo: For weeks I had been thinking about gaming Memeorandum today, but Scoble beat me to it. I was going to link to each new article and write things like "OMG! Google Talk has 2D avatars! But Flash Player 8 reached 50% consumer adoption in its first 15 weeks!" or "OMG! Facebook may sell for $2B, but did you know Flex 2 is free free Free-Free-FREE!?!" and so on. I would also try to work phenteremine ads in there, somewhere, somehow. But Robert Scoble and Shel Israel were shown insufficient deference by the CTO of Amazon, and got scads of links for their umbrage today, and so my heart ain't really in it anymore. (For a real reason why corporations should also reside in blogland, check out this forgery about Borders and censorship... the company website does not suffice in stemming the confusion.) So, I need a new April Fools gag, let me think....

Posted by John Dowdell at 9:02 PM

Two demos

Two demos: No public links, sorry, but yesterday I saw two demos internally which affected me. One was how Acrobat 3D is being used already by one of the world's top manufacturers... when accepting bids from contractors they used to have to send out their native geometry databases, leading to fears of plan loss or repurposing... now they import for viewing to Acrobat 3D while still holding the originating file themselves. The complementary text material on specs, tolerances and the rest can be packaged right into the model now -- toggle a part in the list to inspect it in the 3D model -- and for collaboration they open the whole thing in a Breeze session. Speaking of Breeze, we saw the US Army's Stryker Brigade using Breeze for realtime collaboration over intelligence information, with maps, captured imagery, charts and other custom pods being used in real mission-critical applications each day. Neither of these applications are public-use, internet-style work, but I was impressed by how beyond-the-internet workgroups are making real use of these technologies today.

Posted by John Dowdell at 3:36 PM

Smilebox design opportunities

Smilebox design opportunities: If you can create SWF templates for photo presentations, then Smilebox is offering a revenue model... the press seems like it will be bigger on Monday, so there's a little bit of headstart here....

Posted by John Dowdell at 3:35 PM

More SF events

More SF events: Please pardon the regional chauvinism, but the San Francisco Web Innovators Network will be meeting in the Adobe building at 7th & Townsend on Thu April 13... keep an eye on Niall Kennedy's Tech Sessions too, if you're trying to network with people interested in pushing the edge.

Posted by John Dowdell at 3:02 PM

Another Eolas wrinkle

Another Eolas wrinkle: Earlier this week Microsoft announced that they'd offer a switch to defer the expected April 11 installation date, and today Mark Swords of the patent-holding firm laments all the work people around the world are doing in complying with this set of events. ... ... ... I've been sitting here five minutes now trying to figure out how to end this paragraph without giving Adobe Legal a heart attack, but this is the best closing line I've got. ;-)
Update: [Additional blogsearch terms: eolas, patent, activex, Active Content]

Posted by John Dowdell at 2:37 PM

Mobile Monday US

Mobile Monday US: If you're in Northern California this Monday, then the local mobile user group will be focusing on Flash Lite, SVG, and Beatware. The meeting will be held at 7pm on the America Online campus in Mountain View. Antoine Quint will be representing the pro-SVG stance (see recent sample, with interesting-yet-unsourced stats)... Beatware was one of the first third-party SWF producers until the market got crowded and they moved to SVG. And with any luck, there will be a juicy announcement or two to start off that meeting on a fun note.... ;-)

Posted by John Dowdell at 2:15 PM

Apple failures

Apple failures: Andrew Brandt lists some bowsers I had forgotten about, and ends up with a great closing line: "But in the end, a history of high-profile failures does not mean that Apple is on the road to ruin. To the contrary, the high number of failures indicates a willingness to take big risks---and reap, on occasion, huge rewards."

Posted by John Dowdell at 1:44 PM

RSS webpage comparison

RSS webpage comparison: At TechCrunch, Frank Gruber assembles a feature-matrix of nine online RSS readers (Bloglines, NewsGator, etc). Applications are compared on features such as: number of panes, date/relevance sorting, recommendation abilities, mobile access, etc.

Posted by John Dowdell at 11:52 AM

RIA positioning

RIA positioning: I'm listening to an internal presentation by Adobe's Jeff Whatcott now, and he crystallized things for me about the current "Rich Internet Application" scene. Paraphrased, Macromedia was ahead of its time in 2002 when introducing the term "RIA", with people reacting "Macromedia wants to control the web" and the rest, when we showed how the classic webapp's HTTP-refresh model didn't suffice for faster interaction. Now Microsoft is marketing our themes for us ("experience matters", "richer interfaces", "beyond the computer" and the rest), and "Ajax" campaigns are raising audience expectations even as developers are realizing they're bound by the basic clientside abilities of the browsers. It's a confusing time, sure, but the big takeaway is that the work in this field is being validated and popularized by everyone else, and the whole Adobe Engagement Platform work will deliver on these shared goals before any other group can possibly do so.

Posted by John Dowdell at 10:29 AM

Inclusive news video

Inclusive news video: Mark Glaser continues his research on video services which don't accommodate diverse audience needs. In this case, Cox newspapers made a decision to remove the video feeds from Associated Press because they used a Microsoft-only architecture. Lots of strong quotes from some of the newspaper editors against making their audience jump through hoops to meet them. (Flash video is useful for some of these projects, but not all, because it doesn't offer any real management of subsequent use... those who invest in production are often concerned about out-of-contract reuse.) The next year should be interesting, as Adobe & Macromedia technology fuses, and Flash video becomes a feature of the Adobe creative tools. Anyway, there's real recognition here of the audience costs in engaging with some content.

Posted by John Dowdell at 10:06 AM

March 30, 2006

Hive7 reaction

Hive7 reaction: I took a few days off this week, light blogging... anyway, this site got high Memeorandum exposure this week, many "ohmygawds" from assorted bloggerati. It's a multiuser environment with 2D sprite animation in a 3D space... here's a history of The Palace, similar UI/UE, back in WWW browsers in 1995. Data-transfer without a page-refresh is a handy ability... imagine if the web-influentials accepted this idea ten years ago...!

Posted by John Dowdell at 2:37 PM

Lots of links

Lots of links: Lots of tabs & windows open in my browser, mostly with content that did not appear in MXNA (although Samurai Kittens is, like, really freaking me out)... hit the extended entry for varied interesting links....

Tips on optimizing weblogs for higher placement in a range of search engines.

Flaraby offers Arabic text in Flash Player, now in beta2 and free... more info here.

Robert Reinhardt had one of the most interesting takes on Microsoft's MIX06 event last week -- he was a speaker at one of the sessions. WPF/E guy Joe Stegman has a blog, and even Wikipedia sounds a little confused about how the talk relates to the eventual reality. Tim Anderson seems to be the most diligent in understanding the talk -- here he seems to imply a fullsized WPF, the WPF-Compact, and then WPF/E as something like a WPF-Tiny -- but I'm now sort of waiting until they commit to a ship, myself.

AppleInsider seems to suggest, with its "Despite rumors to the contrary" lead, that part of the reason Scott Byer's MacTel essay got such heavy linkage was that it contradicted a ThinkSecret "sources say" piece awhile back. Check your source evidence, best longterm cure.

I'm not sure, but this reads like PGP encryption has been comprompised... the press release cites password-recovery on an intranet network, but the same distributed processing could occur on a stolen botnet as well.

Claus Wahlers has implemented his DENG multiformat renderer in Laszlo development workflows to SWF.

The latest campaign from Rebecca MacKinnon feels increasingly strange to me... leading with describing the head of Yahoo as "spewing excrement", responding to his "we think the balance makes things better" with "tell it to someone in jail"... something doesn't smell right about this deal, and I don't see full finance/influence disclosures on her blog. Maybe my view is colored by knowing prior CNN influences or underreported cooperation stories, might color my judgment. Just feels like there's something odd here, pieces don't seem to me to hang together, different groups pushing and pulling over how various group endeavors should act....

Notes on Casual Gaming session at GDC... development funds will more likely come from sponsorship and product placement... piracy in Asia helped push towards more online-connected gaming... gaming supply is quite high, so developmental efficiencies, good distribution & business modesl will likely be key. (Darrel Plant has a photo of a recruiting poster there for Flash & Director developers.)

I don't remember how I pulled this site, and haven't had the chance to research it, but here's an interesting-looking list of satellite TV coverage in North American continent.

It's been six years since Liquid Motion faded away.

A mobile report says that it's the actual user interface which is the gating factor towards full use... this is hard to bake into a box, universal for all audiences... lots of support behind "experience matters" these days....

Arul Prasad has the first comment I've seen with an official "Adobe Flash Player" sighting.

Posted by John Dowdell at 1:24 PM

March 29, 2006

Casual video boost

Casual video boost: Ken Fisher discusses at ArsTechnica how YouTube.com is avoiding complaints from content creators while still being accepting of all video submissions by charging a membership fee to those who wish to upload video greater than ten minutes in length. Makes sense in a number of ways, and also shifts the distribution power away from pushing unauthorized copies of BigCo media programming, towards pushing original, decentralized, small-team programming.

Posted by John Dowdell at 12:12 PM

WPF/E Walkthrough

WPF/E Walkthrough: Mike Harsh of Microsoft, who wrote the clock and other demos appearing in Vegas at MIX06, goes through some of the XML markup used to declare such interfaces. Oddly, he embeds his XAML inside his HTML, with different versions of HTML served to different browsers for OBJECT/EMBED tags. He then adds JavaScript and HTML buttons to change the stroke of a shape rendered inside his browser plugin. (I'm assuming that the supporting browsers would be the same as Flash 8's externalInterface.) Tim Anderson is also writing about this "let's make another plugin" approach. Even if Microsoft doesn't publish to SWF, I'm pretty sure some developer out there would create some app in XAML, find a practical deadend in widescale deployment, then translate XAML to MXML or even directly to SWF for audience reach... the pressures seem to indicate that someone would do it.

Posted by John Dowdell at 9:48 AM

Chizen on MacTel

Chizen on MacTel: With Charles Cooper of CNET, back in August 2005. I'm logging this here for later reference. "Q: So, when do you think that Adobe will be ready to take Photoshop? Chizen: I haven't given a date yet, I'd be surprised if we did a MacTel only release. I think you'll find us doing what we did with OS X, which is to enhance the product and support the new environment at the same time. If you look at our product cycles for products like Photoshop and Creative Suite, they tend to be in the 18- to 24-month cycle, which means that you're talking about either Q4 of '06 or Q1 of '07." I also remember hearing similar guidance before the Macromedia acquisition was announced, but haven't dug it up yet. (Although, for a howler, check how I read his March 05 interview on Dreamweaver & mobile... turned out more collaborative than confrontational.) Anyway, there's a long history of guidance that the software's cycle was not solely dependent on any hardware cycle.

Posted by John Dowdell at 9:16 AM

Why use IE?

Why use IE? Not snarky, serious... the author chooses Microsoft Internet Explorer as his default browser, and collects reasons from others for their similar choices. His readers are presumably just tech readers, so the sample is skewed. Top reason seems to be "to hit IE-only web apps", although there are some who just haven't seen a problem, and some who need to see the web through consumers' eyes (design, support etc). (btw, I'm posting light this week, taking some vacation days, not on the mailing lists 'til Thursday.)

Posted by John Dowdell at 8:58 AM

March 28, 2006

Recent MacTel stories

Recent MacTel stories: For the record, some of these read oddly to me... feels like there's an attempt at creating drama. The above one is headlined "Adobe Resistance May Signal Trouble Ahead for Apple", others include "Adobe says univeral Photoshop CS2 binary will take too much time" and "Updating Photoshop for OS X on Intel Too Costly". I thought Scott's post was pretty clear about the practicality and the timing of moving the development environment in order to port the app. I remember hearing Bruce Chizen giving guidance about "look to the next versions for MacTel" even before I heard about the acquisition last April. If they're seeking story lines to boost adclicks, might I propose "Flash Player 8 adopted by 50% of consumers in its first three months!" or something like that...? ;-)

Posted by John Dowdell at 9:25 AM

March 27, 2006

Linux screencaptures

Linux screencaptures: At O'Reilly Network, Justin Clarke describes how he made a viewable screencapture presentation on his Linux box, using various SWF-producing tools out there. [Searchterms for future reference: screencast, captivate]

Posted by John Dowdell at 4:06 PM

Web Standards, Ajax, Web 2.0, microformats

Web Standards, Ajax, Web 2.0, microformats: I've spent about eight years being confused by the "web standards" line... I go "okay, so you like W3C Recommendations, but real standards like PNG and PDF/A are still a no-go? and why are you using all those GIFs?" The term signified something, but seemed to signify different things to different people, so most conversations kept on chasing their own tails. We've got the duality of literal AJaX and literary Ajax... the whole Web 2.0 babblefest... now I'm hearing from Tim O'Reilly that "microformats" are like obscenity, you know them when you see them. Meanwhile, I'm appreciative that Drew McLellan and friends have contributed a Microformats extension for Dreamweaver, with the explicit comment that it supports three particular mini-schema (is that correct?), but I'm still at a loss for how to describe to someone else what they are, or how to know you're making an "acceptable microformat" yourself. T'was all brillig, I guess, so let me get to gyring like a good tove does.... :(

Posted by John Dowdell at 3:49 PM

Dude! FLV!!

Dude! FLV!! Leander Kahney, at WIRED's "Cult of the Mac" blog, laments how many websites have difficulty with video and audience inclusiveness. (Related: Mark Glaser's whitelist/blacklist from earlier this month.) Leander notes early on that video-centric sites like YouTube and Google Video already minimize audience hassle through use of Flash, but then the rest gets into a Flip4Mac/h264/embedded/newWindow melange of verbal coleslaw. A commenter named "Bret" says that Flash works pretty well for a range of configurations, and some chucklehead comes back with "Flash sucks. It's proprietary." Apple tech works for Apple, Microsoft tech works for Microsoft, and Adobe tech seeks to paper over the cracks. It's a deployed capability out in the world -- Macromedia can't recall those billions of Players. This stuff is available for you to use today. Businesses, if you want to minimize audience hassle, then merge Flash video right directly into your page.

Posted by John Dowdell at 3:32 PM

More SWF signage

More SWF signage: Helius MediaSignage 2.1 adds Macromedia Flash support for in-the-world electronic signage. (I'm guessing this is the real Player rather than just a partial-function clone, but don't yet see results on a site search.) I don't know marketshare for ambient electronic displays, but I've seen a half-dozen similar announcements the past year -- SWF seems to be de rigeur now. Getting wall displays into a common format is one task... I'm looking for live network addressability too, so that rooms can really respond to people walking through.

Posted by John Dowdell at 1:47 PM

One person can make a difference

One person can make a difference: New generations of enabling technology help both groups and individuals do more... even mighty Napoleon could never make a phone call. This Washington Post article may suffer link rot; if so, search on "younis tsouli". It details how a single 22-year-old Londoner, who buttressed native talent with many hours work in web techniques, enjoyed great success in furthering the goals of Al Qaeda. One person could provide the initiative and support for a whole network of websites and attacks. This enabling technology is available in communications today; soon it will be available in the biological and nanotechnology realms as well. We've got to solve the problems surrounding technology, not just the technological issues themselves. If even one person is unhappy that may be one person too many....

Posted by John Dowdell at 7:53 AM

Digg Reader bypass

Digg reader bypass: I'm highlighting this for other staffers, because I won't have access to email for a few hours yet... Digg.com promotes a link to Reader Enterprise Download, bypassing the initial user-info screen. They seek to avoid exposure to the Download Manager and the third-party offers on the regular navigation path. The comments verge off into promos for various incomplete clone implementations, like FoxIt and Preview. Link went up early yesterday.

Posted by John Dowdell at 7:46 AM

March 26, 2006

MIX notes nixed

MIX notes nixed: I've been on the computer all weekend, procrastinating transcribing here my notes on Joe Steggman's WPF/E presentation and of other later sessions at Microsoft's event in Las Vegas last week. Instead I just keep reading the implications of Vista missing 2006, the first news of which arrived late in the conference, and whose ripple effects on the industry are still being discovered. I have little expectation that the good-faith info from MS staffers at that conference will be the way things finally turn out -- sorting the apples by size doesn't matter after someone upsets the apple cart. Other folks on the web already transcribed what they heard, so I'll bow out of duplicating whatever I wrote down at the time. My "MIX Rough Notes" from the last day of the conference, although subjective, are probably the best overview of my final understanding of the event's news, while "The Big Winner" is what I still feel was the most significant real news of the event. I still have a good feeling about the Microsoft staffers I spoke with at the event -- they're smart, they're sincere, and I think the world needs Microsoft to succeed in its work. But the overall volatility of the Microsoft situation now makes me question whatever information I recorded at the time, so I think I'll call it a day instead.

Posted by John Dowdell at 10:39 PM

If I were Scoble

If I were Scoble: Microsoft blogger Robert Scoble handled the "60% Vista rewrite" rumor ad-hominem ("credible vs non-credible journalists"), instead of ad-rem ("what are the facts, how can we learn more?"). For professional practice I put myself in Robert's shoes, tried a draft at how I would have handled it.... "David Wright writes in Smarthouse [link] "60% Of Windows Vista Code To Be Rewritten". This surprises me -- it's counter to what I'm seeing with my own eyes, opposite of what I'm hearing inside the shop. I'm not sure how David reaches that conclusion -- the best sourcing he offers is "a Microsoft insider has confirmed...". David also includes what appears to be a memo from Windows VP Kevin Johnson, [which I'd confirm if I saw or publicly remain agnostic if not]. But the only evidence for the startling headline I see is an unsourced single-speaker rumor -- the "60%" comes up only in the headline and the first line -- hard to figure out how that headline was reached. I'm highlighting the issue here because David's article is in the news and you may get questions about it. Please drop a comment here if you see any other meaningful links about it. (I'm not interesting in debating the implications if that story *were* true, I'm just trying to learn what David has seen that leads him to assert that that *is* true.) More as it comes... thanks in advance for any leads in sourcing/proofing this story." That's how I'd do it... more interested in figuring which facts and reasonings are credible and which are non-credible, less interested in which people are credible and which people are non-credible, guess that's the main distinction. (I got interested in how I'd phrase it after I saw the negative effect in places like Investor Relations Blog.)

Posted by John Dowdell at 2:16 PM

Degradable Ajax

Degradable Ajax: It's taking me awhile to get through this... near as I can make out the author is testing whether the browser has JavaScript enabled in order to determine whether to issue, parse and render an XmlHttpRequest text-refresh. Halfway down in the comments someone asks "Hey, what about JavaScript-enabled browsers which don't have XmlHttpRequest?", and they start to retune it to an actual capabilities-test on that text-refresh function available in some-but-not-all browsers. Feels strange to me that such a long article with so many positive comments would all mistakenly assume that a JavaScript test is an XmlHttpRequest test, but maybe it's me that's missing something there. (Also seems to me the title should be "Biodegradable Ajax", but that would be just too cute. ;-)

Posted by John Dowdell at 11:22 AM

PC pricing prediction

PC pricing prediction: I just realized that there will probably be some pretty good deals in the last half of this year on new PCs and other things out of the manufacturing distribution chains... volume of total sales will be down due to the Vista pushback, so the manufacturers will try to entice on price, or new types of offerings (they've got six months to restrategize). Hmm, if that works -- if consumers stock up on cheap PCs during 2006 -- then that will affect the adoption cycle when Vista does get out to consumers. Phil Sim wrote: "Is Microsoft stuggling with Vista? Abso-farking-lutely. Not hitting that pre-Christmas deadline is one of, if not the BIGGEST screw-ups in Microsoft history. You cannot possibly underestimate how much angst this is going to cause Microsoft's hardware partners. You cannot possibly underestimate how much this is going to ruin Microsoft's Vista marketing plans. With this delay, Microsoft has pretty much single-handedly ruined Christmas for the PC industry. The single-biggest season for PC sales will flop because nobody is going to buy a PC when a new OS is just around the corner."

Posted by John Dowdell at 9:49 AM

March 25, 2006

Byer on MacTel, II

Byer on MacTel, II: Photoshop engineer Scott Byer's essay this week on porting to new hardware/OS hit a need and was heavily linked... this morning I see he has collected an incredible number of comments at the blog. I can see waves coming in from the Mac fansites' links, then later comments from a more diverse audience. (NB: Some of the early comments are pretty dispiriting, but other readers correct these by the end.) Also see context from Rick Schaut of Microsoft's Macintosh Business Unit, who notes at the end how Apple engineers are also working hard with the other companies to get the big apps ported.

Posted by John Dowdell at 10:50 AM

WPF/E vs Flash

WPF/E vs Flash: Dax Pandhi has a lengthy rebuttal to Branden Hall on the Microsoft predictions seen this week, and how such things might work in the future. Lots of links to other commentary in here too. (It's "WPF/E vs Flash", not "WPF/E vs Flex", and of course we're not at "WPF vs Apollo" yet... got some kimonos to open here as well.) I'm sitting this one out, but if you're tracking this subject, Dax's post is worth a read. (Hmm, most of the links seem auto-generated to Microsoft, but he also points to Mike Henderson's notes on the event's first WPF/E presentation, from Michael Wallent.)

Posted by John Dowdell at 10:07 AM

MIX videos on the way

MIX videos on the way: I'm focusing so strongly on the Microsoft conference this week because it's significant when a major player in the world's computer experience like Microsoft so strongly endorses themes like "experience matters", declarative interfaces and the like. Here, Michael Swanson, Technical Evangelist with Microsoft's Expression team, says that they'll have videos of all events available for free online viewing sometime within the next month. Get the source evidence of the event's predictions directly; make up your own mind. (psst, Mike, my Firefox/Mac plays SWF video easily, if you'd consider....)

Posted by John Dowdell at 9:49 AM

Embedded microbrowsers

Embedded microbrowsers: These two examples are pretty cool... Robin Good shows how Grazr and Bitty use JavaScript and XmlHttpRequest to make functioning little browser-like interfaces within your own web page... lets you drill down into RSS feeds or other linked page structures. (Bitty's tag line: "Bitty is the little browser that goes on any Web page, it's like Picture-in-Picture for the Web.".) Part of the reason I like these is because it took me a moment to realize how I could interact with these "EMB"s... part of the reason I like these is because people are using Ajax to emulate what others were doing with Flash five years ago, albeit with higher production values and greater audience inclusiveness. One advantage over SWF is that the browser's "Find Text" finds text in the display -- the feeds are in the browser's rendering domain. Robin notes "you may need firefox" for some of this, but Google searches on the two sites with term "firefox explorer" don't turn up testing or support info. I'm not sure whether each microbrowser's chrome is customizable... guessing it's IMG tags but comes from a single server because of the advertising model. Good stuff here, worth a look.

Posted by John Dowdell at 8:53 AM

March 24, 2006

Adobe earnings Breezo

Adobe earnings Breezo: Thanks to a comment from "nz"... Wednesday's report from Adobe execs to the financial community is now available as a recorded Breeze presentation, with audio, video, chapters and the half-hour Q&A session. If your own income is based on these technology tools then knowing the dynamics of the business can help predict trends.

Posted by John Dowdell at 5:26 PM

Time for IE7 work

Time for IE7 work: Eric Meyer gives a "start your engines!" alert as the upcoming browser gets locked down on layout behavior: "A little while ago, I said that designers should remain calm and not hack their sites to fix them in the IE7 beta because it was a moving target. That is no longer the case. It's now time to start testing sites in the IE7 beta and identifying any layout problems that may occur... I'll be doing this as soon as I can, and I encourage everyone who can to do the same... IE7 is scheduled to go final in the second half of 2006, so we have a calm period of at least three months in which to find out how things stand before IE7 goes final." If you have websites with ambitious use of browser features, then it's a good time to download here and make sure the new engine meets your expectations.

Posted by John Dowdell at 4:41 PM

[via Steve Champeon]

[via Steve Champeon]: Anyway, this seems a definitive resource. At some point most of us give up, and some even give in. Digest versions of mailing lists have been a significant casualty. If you've ever received a top-posted "What do you think of this?" and wasted time guessing which of their nested quotes contained the meaning of "this", then you know what I mean. This Wikipedia entry describes the range of user-experience effects from different styles of quoting, trimming, and responding to email. Email quoting styles:

Posted by John Dowdell at 4:24 PM

Commercial apostasy

Commercial apostasy: The Association of National Advertisers and Forrester Research released a poll this week where 80% of television advertisers thought that the traditional commercial insertions were less effective than two years ago. This is significant because these people make the buying decisions. Why am I linking it here? Because these buyers will be looking for other ways to get their messages across, using the extremely engaging media type of professionally-produced video. Product placement is one approach, and wholesale subsidy is another (I always figured "The West Wing" had political backers, and Ben & Jerry's ice cream financed the Cindy Sheehan campaign via Fenton Communications -- message films seem like they'll increase). What other possible outcomes? Video-for-hire seems likelier in the future... short-form video and casual video won't have the same production costs and will also change audience style expectations... lots of ways it could go. But this study marks convinction among ad buyers that they'll have to change, so I bet we'll see increased pull from them towards whichever directions video production goes next.

Posted by John Dowdell at 3:33 PM

Scoble on credibility

Scoble on credibility: Robert Scoble, Microsoft blogger, addresses a recent unsourced rumor this way: "Whenever you see a story that says 60% of any OS is gonna be rewritten you should demand that the journalist who wrote that be immediately and publicly fired. Totally 100% incompetent. Did NOT do their homework... A journalist and an editor needs to be fired. In fact, two journalists and editors need to be fired since the story is now being rewritten without any brains being engaged." I disagree. I think people should be free to publish any damnfool bit of nonsense that enters their heads. But we need to crack down on giving credibility to people who believe rumors when evidence is lacking. (For a recent horrible case, the "riot against cartoons in defense of Allah!" murders were caused by a direct lie -- the three truly offensive cartoons were apparently produced by the Danish Imams themselves -- I don't know of anyone who was actually offended by the innocuous Danish cartoons the North American newspapers were too timid to publish. But people were told to riot, and urge beheadings, and they did. It's the blind obedience to whatever programming enters your teeny noggin that we've got to protest, not the inevitable uttering of stupid stuff itself.) Anyway, journalists and publications which do not provide links to source evidence are low-class, yes, but should not be prohibited from speech on that reason alone. Yes, their allegations will cause real damage to others, but any investor who bases their future on unsourced stories will pay the longer-term, heavier price than Microsoft will here, so the incentives are placed correctly. Better to encourage skepticism than to do the Red Queen routine on all the weaker folk, I think....

Posted by John Dowdell at 3:03 PM

Poetry Slam

Poetry slam: Get your voting shoes ready... public judging of this year's ActionScript Poetry Contest starts next week. (Sorry I missed Last Call while travelling, but it's never too early to start working on next year's literature.)

Posted by John Dowdell at 1:55 PM

Full IE/Eolas Apr 11?

Full IE/Eolas Apr 11? Robert McMillan of IDG News Service has an article which entered wide commercial syndication today. He says that Microsoft expects to mainline their "click to activate content" change to Internet Explorer in their April 11 version of Windows Update, although the exact timing is still subject to change. Full info on user experience and hassle-minimization is at the Active Content Developer Center. I've been seeing the issue continue to appear on mailing lists, from people who just learned of the change and are shocked... I'm figuring we'll get newbies on it for another few months. Fortunately, most of the people who have already worked through the browser change find that they can get the results they wish. It's apparently most alarming when you first hear the news, less alarming after you examine it more.
Update: [Additional blogsearch terms: eolas, patent, activex, Active Content]

Posted by John Dowdell at 1:14 PM

Flash/MacTel wrap

Flash/MacTel wrap: I like the way this MacFixIt summary is organized... first they offer the link to the version-test page, then identify 8.0.17 as the early Apple preview, 8.0.22 or 8.0.24 as the security updates for Motorola Macs (which must run under emulation on Intel Macs), and 8.0.27 as the official MacTel preview, to tide us over until the full 8.5 release for all platforms later this spring.

Posted by John Dowdell at 1:06 PM

MacTel info

MacTel info: Scott Byer of the Photoshop team describes the engineering workflow of migrating Photoshop to the new Apple computers atop an Intel architecture. Because this hardware migration also requires a change in development environments, there's no way to patch code. It's the next version of the imaging application which is being built with Apple's new Xcode development environment. Other apps are in a similar situation, and need a new development cycle to migrate. Some new efforts, like Lightroom and Flash Player, are already in preview on Labs. Photoshop, as part of Adobe Creative Suite 3.0, is expected for delivery "in the second quarter of 2007", according to Adobe CEO Bruce Chizen in Forbes. Last month John Nack had more info on Photoshop and general Adobe tools, and Tinic Uro talked about the Flash Player porting process. There's hunger for this info... Scott's essay hit Memeorandum today, being recommended by several of that site's "editors". (Me, the first big computer I bought was an Apple Quadra 800 the day it shipped, and I remember how dismayed I was at having to wait for the new Swivel 3D I purchased to be patched. In the MacTel case we've got emulation in the meantime, but it's still hard to wait for the development process to be ported over before the code can be.)

Posted by John Dowdell at 7:59 AM

March 23, 2006

Holloway on MIX06

Holloway on MIX06: This evening I've been hitting the blogs to learn more about Microsoft's recent event. Randy Holloway's account stood out from those I've seen so far. He works at Microsoft and writes about the main presentations and many of the Web2.0 panels, which I missed in favor of the technical Q&As on interface technologies. Randy calls them as he sees them and has a wide overview... recommended. (I did find my paper notes for the second WPF/E session and lunch/hallway talks, and expect to have them transcribed here this weekend.)

Posted by John Dowdell at 10:55 PM

mm.com outages

mm.com outages: Apologies if you're trying to read blogs on macromedia.com or use MXNA... we've been getting hit with more DenialOfService-like problems recently, as trackback and comment spammers seek to take advantage of the high macromedia.com pagerank... looks like an escalation through automation is in place today. Hard to get legit requests in to these servers. Work is being done by teammembers inside Adobe to improve the situation, but this morning the resulting responsiveness seems particularly bad.

Posted by John Dowdell at 10:55 AM

Flex as Cross-Browser Solution

Flex as Cross-Browser Solution: On an "ajax" theme, I'm bumping up this DevX article which hit the aggregators last week... Shari Nakano and Steve Samson examine the cross-browser JavaScript needed for even a simple task like text retrieval, and compare the much cheaper coding/maintainence costs when using Flex's XML layouts to invoke the clientside Flash Player. Asking the server for new text is a real simple task. Deserializing XML to in-memory objects, rendering stuff, all the media tasks... these show even greater efficiency (and possibility!) differences between Ajax and Flex. The authors conclude, as I do, that both available technologies should be used, as appropriate... that Ajax is in no way "wrong"; it's the Ajax-triumphalist *argument* which is wrong.

Posted by John Dowdell at 8:46 AM

Ajax marketing milestone

Ajax marketing milestone: There's now a product named "ajaxWrite". We've seen "Ajax" name in frameworks and libraries, but this may be the first tool aimed at normal people which has the very successful marketing label in its name. More reaction to the in-browser doc editor is at Memeorandum... I was more interested in the name itself than whatever it does. (btw, I gag when I hear people go Ajax-triumphant like this... hate it when people use the verbal shortcut "Ajax" to describe something attractive in a web browser. It would be more accurate to say "the deployed browsers' varying implementations of the ECMAScript interactivity language, along with HTML and CSS implementations, and the 'evil, proprietary' XmlHttpRequest introduced by Microsoft last decade but accepted by Firefox-friendly webInfluentials as 'web standards' now". Okay, well "Ajax" fits better in a sentence, but still.... ;-)

Posted by John Dowdell at 8:32 AM

iPod, France, MIX06

iPod, France, MS MIX: Leander Kahey, in WIRED: "New legislation in France would force Apple Computer to open the iPod and iTunes to competitors -- and that's a good thing for consumers, in the long run." Oh yeah? Let's open France. (This post is actually an attempt to get some visibility on a Memeorandum item to increase readership on my Microsoft MIX notes, which didn't include links to any particular articles and so would be invisible to Memeorandum otherwise. Bad form, I know, but I've got an April Fools prank planned that's worse.... ;-)

Posted by John Dowdell at 12:56 AM

March 22, 2006

MIX rough notes

MIX rough notes: In the extended entry are 15 or so paragraphs of top impressions I had while the event was winding down. (I still have notes on WPF/E sessions to transcribe.) This text was written in the style I usually use on this blog, but I'm not sure I stand behind the content (need to reflect), so I didn't do any edits on this first draft, not even adding links or changing "mucho" to "much". For what it's worth, here's the stuff I had most on my mind when sitting on a bench in the hall Wed aft. as people were leaving. I'm not yet sure of my schedule tomorrow... connectivity, sleep still intermittent... WPF/E, lunch, hallway meeting notes to come.

It's 11:45am Wednesday as I'm typing this, and was hoping to use this short break before lunch to transcribe some paper notes of yesterday's sessions. But in my sleep-deprived packing flurry this morning I appear to have packed them into my checkin luggage... gosh, I *hope* I packed them and didn't toss them into the hotel room's trashbin! So let me doing some early personal takeaways on what I learned at Microsoft's MIX06 conference, free-association, which you're welcome to read if you'll understand that I expect my views to mature as I have some to transcribe, reflect, and, uh, sleep.

My big goal in coming here was to learn more about how Microsoft would be integrating their prime mission of selling Vista and other big Microsoft software with the world's desire to not exclude potential audience members. Other Adobe staffers here were more focused on particular Expression tools or related technologies, but these folks were usually on Adobe product teams. Me, I'm more a generalist, concerned about the Adobe Engagement Platform and the needs of the world's creative professionals, so I was driven by learning more about how Microsoft plans to support those needs.

A major group of attendees here were longtime Microsoft customers who develop using Microsoft methodology, from VB developers who made the migration to VB.NET, to ASP.Net folks, corporate intranet people who develop only-in-IE internal sites, etc. (I'd wager that these folks were the bulk of the attendees who paid their own registration, travel, and lodging costs -- most of the comp'd attendees seemed to be Web influentials or Flash influentials.) I didn't have much interaction with these people. They seemed to get their money's worth, though -- they learned about what Microsoft plans for a still-upcoming generation of technology.

Another group which surprised me were Apple staffers... not as many as Adobe staffers, I think, but more than I would have expected. Some of these I guess were from the OS group, but there was also anticipation that other Expression creative tools would be launched here, such as for video-editing. Apple creates only-on-Macintosh creative tools, and Microsoft is now creating only-on-Vista creative tools, but I could see the Apple staff doing research on parallel offerings. Maybe the further pushback of Vista beyond 2006 and the restructuring of staff there to the OS affected scheduling of other creative releases... don't know for sure. Anyway, there were undercurrents of surprise at the lack of anticipated product announcements at this event.

For Microsoft's "rich vs reach" dilemma, the big news was how Microsoft was positioning "rich applications" as being available only on Vista, and their emphasis again on the WWW browser. A wrinkle was that the prior "Windows Presentation Framework Everywhere" (WPF/E) approach would add *some* richness to the WWW browser experience. This still seems at least a year away from availability to consumers, however... hard to predict the actual effects in the world, but at least we have a new version of guidance to follow.

I've seen consistent estimations of audience size which to me seemed over-optimistic. I'd have to do some research to compare the Microsoft predictions I've heard with what third-party analysts estimate Vista adoption will be. As a result, I expect that throughout 2006 we'll see online arguments that "Vista 'will' reach umpteen million consumers in X years", but for me, I guess I'll be typing a lot of "Ship it, then we'll see" replies. Dueling projections may be a theme up through the end of 2007 or so.

I wanted to learn more about why Microsoft didn't solve their "reach" problem by the most effective practical solution, compiling XAML to SWF to reach the bulk of the world's computers and other devices. Microsoft staffers I've spoken with have been all over the map on this... some stonewalling & evasiveness, some saying "yeah I wondered that too, we had discussions but"... Joe Steggman gave me the most centering reply in his WPF/E session Tuesday, where he explained that Microsoft wanted to control their stack, that they wanted their IML pseudo-code (or browserScript) to drive the clientside interactivity engines. Personally I feel it's a little sad that an (imho) ineffective approach was chosen, but I understand the dynamics better now.

A counterpoint to this was the consistent desires among MS staffers I spoke with that Adobe creative tools directly support Vista formats and technologies. I personally empathize with this... it has been The Macromedia Way to cooperate with competitors, to be a neutral layer above the various technologies the world adopts. But I know that the various old-Adobe creative tools now are doing mucho work on integrating with the Flash Platform, and this is the first and necessary step before adding OS-specific support... particularly as the OS delivery itself is still somewhere in the misty future. It's hard for me to lobby internally for XAML support when Microsoft in turn goes out of its way to avoid Not-Invented-Here deployed technologies. Other folks at Adobe will be in a better position to handle these business discussions, but here on the edge I was torn by wanting to support them yet realizing how difficult it would be to practically do so.

I was heavily impressed by the now-visible success of the Adobe-oriented design community in changing the entire way the world interacts with computers, as written previously. With Apple and Microsoft both buying into the real effectiveness of "but it's only eyecandy" visual approach. The text-supremacists who insist that all machine-mediated experiences must be decomposable to a stream of linear English text to be "valid" now have even less realworld support than before. Imagery, motion, audio, video, communications reach more people, more effectively, than text alone, and for Microsoft's support of this reality I am sincerely appreciative.

I'm also appreciative that Microsoft is supporting the rest of recent Macromedia emphases, such as declarative programming, the unification of designer & developer workflows, the use of vector descriptions and richer media, the persuasiveness of multimedia, the Beyond The Computer (BTC) reality, more. With a fresh start they're previewing some things in advance of current Adobe realities (we need to make it easier for Photoshop users and Dreamweaver users to work directly with programmers, for instance), but I'm pretty durn certain that Adobe workflows will offer a substantive advantage for the forseeable future. (Assuming we execute correctly, of course. ;-)

I was struck by the number of divergent workgroups within Microsoft. I knew this intellectually -- Macromedia staffing grew fifteen-fold during my tenure, and the Adobe merger tripled this to just under 5000 staffers, but Microsoft has over 50,000 employees, and their internal communication costs seem vastly more complex. During my younger days I had a persisten mistrust of the efficacy of large groups, largely based on observing governmental structures, but the past few years I've been more appreciative of how large groups can accomplish goals that smaller groups cannot, and I've been vitally interested in internal group dynamics among a wide range of workgroup sizes.

But I'm puzzled by how Microsoft internally sees the distinctions between the "Windows on computers" business units, the "Windows on home media centers" business units, the "Windows on game consoles" business units, the "Windows on pocket devices" business units. They all seem to be merging in technological approach, yet they are distinct stakeholders within the larger Microsoft organization. Adobe is structured more for engaging communication in general, and doesn't have similar vested internal interest groups. (Adobe has a mobile unit, and within that various ad-hoc settop units, but there's more of a free flow among these groups than what I perceive in the Microsoft approach.) I'm half-expecting to see some internal rupturing there over the next few years, as they start to deliver their next generation of base-level technologies, and Media Center and XBox and Windows Mobile collide with the computer-based operating system itself. Maybe they can pull it off, but it seems like a good bit of communication work and restructuring to do here, longterm.

At this event I was impressed by the "Only in Microsoft" approach, the Not-Invented-Here syndrome. My perception here is heavily colored by the lack of exploitation of Flash capabilities, as noted previously. A stronger appreciation of this choice is one of the main realizations I achieved at this event.

Another thing I learned was that I like the Microsoft people themselves. They're geeks, just like you and me (except a lot more of them are Business or Marketing or Administrative people, of course ;-). During the Adobe merger I was surprised at the quick bonding between Macromedia and Adobe staffers, and the same principle applies to the Microsoft folks... matter of fact, a whole lot of people have worked at more than one of these companies, they're the same people, there's a lot of common DNA.

Perhaps subjective, but, particularly on Tuesday, I felt a sense of unease, of concern among Microsoft staffers. I've been seeing evidence of significant shifts among Microsoft internal resources, with people on the Expression teams suddenly shifting to base Vista workgroups... I'm guessing that many of them already knew of the significant effect on perception by missing 2006 with Vista, and knew that the news would reach the public on Tuesday. Could be over-heavy mindreading on my part, admitted, but when I could scan the webnews last night it suddenly clicked why people I spoke with Tuesday seemed a bit more off-balance than I would have expected.

Time for lunch... more later.

Posted by John Dowdell at 11:50 PM

Adobe earnings summary

Adobe earnings summary: Seeking insight into Adobe status and expectations? Alexandru Costin of Interakt contributes a summary after listening to the quarterly Adobe analyst call. I've been in transit today, and appreciate this report -- most of the stuff in the newspapers is about stock markets. Dru's also got notes on the Q&A from the analysts to the Adobe execs. Source audio here. Mul≈£umesc!

Posted by John Dowdell at 11:27 PM

Trackspam solution

Trackspam solution: I'm logging this here to bring it to the attention of others in blogware work... Tom Muck shows a serverside automation which, if implemented by enough people, could have an effect on trackback spam. (I've been having to delete trackspam whenever I return from a break at the keyboard, and that's after the blogs.mm.com automated filters.) Tom writes of automating email to the offending domain owner: "Rather than submit to these parasites or remove trackback functionality, I added functionality that automatically checks every link in the trackback post, goes out to each linked site, reads the site content, and checks for a reference to the post being trackback linked. If there is no reference to the post, the trackback is not legitimate. In those cases, I check the whois and grab the information in put it into my database. At that point, I can parse the email addresses of the domain holders and send them an automated bill for their trackback spam and send out an automated email to whoever I think the spam should be reported to." We've also got their realworld address too. Seems like, if enough blog publishing systems have implementations to get a decent mass of blogs enacting it, that we could automate some feedback mechanism to the people responsible for accounts which pollute trackbacks...?

Posted by John Dowdell at 10:57 PM

March 21, 2006

The big winner?

The big winner? I'm at a break between sessions, here at Microsoft's MIX conference is Las Vegas, catching up on email and reading what people have to say. Something that I realized this morning, during the keynote on Windows for computers, Windows for home TV, and Windows for game consoles is that the people who have really triumphed through all this are... [drumroll, please].... the designers who have been creating interactive experiences with Director and Flash the last ten years. If you look at the new Microsoft interfaces, they all embrace the "engaging experiences" aesthetic pioneered by this renegade coding/design group in CD-ROM and then WWW development in recent past. Just as Photoshop designers have forever changed the imaging we expect to see, and just as PostScript users changed the very nature of static design, so have interaction designers of the past ten years changed the nature of operating system experiences in both Microsoft and Apple systems. (This makes sense, because Microsoft has been hiring many of the top designers out of the Flash community the past few years, but it's still a triumph.) Sure, the engineers at the new Adobe Systems successfully created the enabling technologies, but I think it's the designers who have really changed the way the game is played, the way consumers expect to interact with their electronic devices. You did it, you changed the rules, you forced the mainstream to comply. Now, well... now I guess we have to move onto the next round, huh...? ;-)

Posted by John Dowdell at 2:11 PM

Google Finance

Google Finance: Uses SWF for charting... this page is their NASDAQ chart. You can drag in the main chart area to load and chart more data, from different dates, without refreshing the page. This drag apparently passes a message to the browser engine so that it does a parallel XmlHttpRequest to fetch news headlines from your new date range. (I say "apparently" because I haven't dug through the various external .JS files to confirm.) Up on the top of the chart is a windowing tool to control the time-duration of the chart below, and the HTML news headlines change in response to this interaction as well. Incorporates the common "mouseover to see numeric values for a given sample" that I first saw in MXNA Reports, and later in Measure Map, recently acquired by Google... different duration control here, though. Blog commentary at Memeorandum varies but seems to compare it unfavorably to the established Yahoo Finance across their total sets of services, with some commentators calling the charting system "ajax widgets". Update: Folks who took the time to check the source markup showed that Flash Player 7 was the minimum audience requirement, so the browser/plugin intercommunication technique was "Flash JavaScript Integration Kit", which went plugin-to-browser via "javascript:" pseudo-URLs, and browser-to-plugin with the invisible DIV/FRAME technique, loading a hidden SWF which communicated to the visible SWF via Flash's localConnect ability.

Posted by John Dowdell at 6:12 AM

MS MIX06 top story

MS MIX06 top story: According to the blogger pool at Memeorandum, the most important news out of today's Las Vegas event was about a lunch, to which you were not invited. (I think Memeorandum's algorithm is good, but the sample set is sometimes unintentionally revealing.)

Posted by John Dowdell at 1:07 AM

March 20, 2006

WPF Notes I

WPF Notes I: This session I'll report a little differently, more with an expanded version of my raw paper notes than with any type of personal analysis... my mind is fading right now, and I don't really feel I have the full picture yet. There will be more sessions on Windows Presentation Framework later on during this conference. It was presented by Michael Wallent, a longtime contributor at Microsoft, and had one of the key items of interest for me in attending this conference: How will Microsoft balance the "works best in Vista" angle with the "we won't disenfranchise your audience" angle? In the extended entry....

My big takeaway: They will be making a browser plugin. There was mention of Firefox, Safari and Opera... mention made of older Windows systems and Macintosh too. I'm not sure of minimum versions of those browsers, and Linux support was a Fred Astaire & Ginger Rogers kind of thing. (I told you my mind was fading. ;-) Delivery date was not described, range of supported functionality was not described, download size is currently about 200K but is expected to increase.

(The Linux runtime problem is a hard one, though... see the essay from Player engineer Tinic Uro last summer for context.)

Caveat: For this report I'd encourage you even more to seek out corroborating info from others, because I still don't trust my understanding of the situation. More will be revealed on Tuesday and Wednesday.

-- There's a "reach vs rich" range between in-the-browser work, in Safari IE and FF, and beyond-the-browser work, in full Vista. (ie, "rich applications" are, by their definition, Vista applications.)

-- The session was about two-thirds presentation, one-third Q&A... cool, I appreciate that. Questions were slow in coming by the end, however.

-- Theme: "Unleash the power of your (Microsoft) PC."

-- I caught an initial emphasis on portability among PCs... there's the hardware-assisted Vista thing, and the weak-hardware-with-Vista thing, and the WPF-for-WinXP thing. At this point there was mention of scaling down in some way for non-Microsoft PCs (non-MSPCs, should that be the term?).

-- At this point in my notes I wondered about China, and Lenova, and places where Windows operating systems will not be purchased. I also wondered about India and the use of low-cost PCs and mobile use. I'm not convinced that "personal computer" is where the growth will be in the future. Bill Gates gets paid more than me, though, so I guess he must be right.... ;-)

-- There's a distinction drawn between fixed-format documents (Acrobat, eg) and flow-based docs (the HTML model).

-- Long demo of Microsoft Max, a photo collection management tool. The emphasis seemed to me to be on the development rather than the use of this project... "And each resizing pane of photos uses the exact same code, which I didn't have to write!" (They do have a nice way of animating drag'n'drop interactions here, where things move out of the way to let you insert an object... the little visual eyecandy is effective in helping the user figure out what's going on, I believe.)

-- Long demo of iBloks, a presentation tool for the LiveJournal-like crowd, where you could sequence music and photos to share with friends. This wasn't what I came to see, but I did learn that WPF offers high-level control over mapping of images into 3D space... if you've used quads in Lingo then you know how it's possible to individually set the corner coordinates of a rectangular image to give the impression of an image twisting around in space... in Lingo you have to calculate each desired coordinate yourself, though, and it seems like WPF handles this at a much higher level, leading to reduced development time. Similar effect, just faster to code.

-- Long demo of My Yahoo for Vista... prettier than their HTML version... in my notes I have "And our serverside APIs did not have to change to accommodate this new clientside presentation!" which, I thought, was sort of like the definition of a serverside API. There was mention of animation cues to alert the user that some data in the page has changed (think of the "yellow fade" routine in DHTML a year ago). But I also noticed that the URL in the browser did not change despite various different interface screens... we've really got to solve the problem of handling both sets of user expectations about what the browser's "Back" button "should" do.

-- Wallent promotes WPF as "an integrated platform for UI, documents and media". (Welcome to my world, Mike. ;-) Other key WPF points were "declarative programming" and "designer/developer integration".

-- There was a brief bit in the My Yahoo demo where Arik "changed the trust level" of the project through a menu item, then recompiled the Vista XAML as worldly HTML. There was audience applause but I was asking "Wait, if that project *could* be done as HTML, then why did you first do it as XAML? Did you drop some features during the recompile, or was this a deliberately simple project which didn't use Vista-only features, or what?" (I was asking myself, so I didn't really get an answer. ;-)

-- A demo for the Northface sporting stores... my notes at the time say "Yes, attractive flashy interfaces are good. Is this some kind of surprise?" The "flashy" stuff was something that looked like an animated GIF but was vectors rendered to pixels at runtime, and a photo of a jacket that you could spin around.

-- Then we got into the meat, WPF/E, the worldly "reach" vs the Vista "rich". There *is* a browser plugin (or will be), that turns a browser into more than just its base HTML/JS/CSS renderers. There was mention of JavaScript control over this engine. (Aside: I'm guessing this JS control uses the old ActiveX Scripting for IE/Win and the new NPRuntime API for Firefox, Safari and Opera, as "externalInterface" in Flash 8 did.)

-- I noted "devices not just a player" but I forget what that means.

-- There was a stack chart where the "WPF Runtime" is built atop a Platform Abstraction Layer at bottom, then the UI Rendering Core atop that, then the "Native WPF/E" atop that... atop the WPF Runtime box were a few other boxes which I didn't have time to copy down, but there's probably a graph on the web somewhere.

-- Michael described that you could control this plugin from the outside with JavaScript, but then also mentioned that you could control it through C# or VB.NET too, although I'm guessing that those latter two MS-only technologies will only be available in their Internet Explorer for Windows browser. (This is similar to how Netscape's LiveConnect could be addressed through JavaScript, so ActiveX Scripting was addressable by JavaScript too, although it could also be commanded by VBScript, and could only catch messages in VBScript... what I saw in the late 90s was that this multiple-language handling increased development costs so much that browser/plugin intercommunication was rarely used in practice.)

-- WPF projects can either consist of an instruction file and various media files, or everything can be packaged up into a single file, as you'd do with linked or imported assets in Shockwave or Flash.

-- There was something about the server writing either an OBJECT or EMBED tag depending on how the requesting browser identified itself, and something about a new MIME type which would be a test to see if that browser could understand the new Microsoft filetypes... my kneejerk was to think back to how IE/Win avoided MIME types in favor of identifying media types by filename extension, and the security problems this later caused through spoofed files. But this seems like an interesting approach to "graceful degradation", where the server gives different content depending on what it thinks a particular browser can understand.

-- My notes: "The WPF/E plugin -- 200k now, will grow in time". I had a recollection of the ChromeEffects plugin, in the LiquidMotion era. I don't know how big it will grow or what you get per kilobyte of user download. (One thing that puzzled me was that I think some video was shown -- it's hard to combine a general media/interactivity engine *and* a video codec in anything resembling that size, which made me wonder whether they were using "device video" to render a file, which again seems like it would get into a lot of useragent-testing. Don't know yet.)

-- The demo page had multiple plugin instances per page. One was a GIF-like anim sent as vectors, another was that video clip, another was scrolling through a photo series of a jacket via a DHTML control which communicated with the plugin.

-- There were quotes of eventual audience size, "sometime in 2007 or 2008", "multiple hundreds of millions", "sometime in 2007, if we're lucky, half-a-billion customers"... stats quotes are tricky, and I'd defer to source information with corroborating evidence for such projections.

Q&A section

(Q) "What of graceful degradation? We don't want to deal with multiple engines. How can we assure the User Experience?"
(A) There's a "Tiering API" so an app can rephrase itself. The server uses MIME types for routing. Mention of styling changes, possibly the key to their degradation handling.

(Q) "What distinguishes all of what you've been talking about from Flash? Do you feel the need to convince all these people you've flown out here to switch?" [audience intake of breath]
(A) [jd literal notes:] "2 solutions: WPF vs WPF/E, we're trying to do complete solution." [literal quote:] "I hope we provide a good competitive situation." [paraphrased quote:] "We're committed to a seamless solution." [jd note:] Nice moves there, Ginger, but let's run through that routine just one more time.... ;-)

(Q) "What of other Microsoft platforms, like MediaCenter and XBox?"
(A) [jd literal notes:] Keynote tomorrow on MediaCenter. Maybe two years finish. Xbox in negotiation.

(Q) "Can you get the WPF/E plugin into the Firefox default installation? What about Linux?"
(A) [jd summary:] Anyone with a plugin would be happy to get into the default Firefox installation, but the Firefox team has been really focused on keeping download size small, to boost adoption rates. Still, Microsoft has tons of money, as was shown by this event, so any surprise is possible. For Linux, I wrote down "There will be one, maybe we'll have it next year." Certain OS they must port their plugin to: Macintosh and Windows XP... I'm not sure about Win2K. Devices are on their own tricky manufacturing schedule.

(Q) "What about WPF/E and accessibility?"
(A) Mention made of Microsoft Active Accessibility. [jd: Still, Flash has supported MSAA for years, and this doesn't suffice towards satisfying those who wish richer experiences described as linear text streams... hard issue.]

(Q) At this point there was a lull, and I got up and did my "emperor's new clothes" routine: "You know, instead of making a new plugin, and porting it, and hoping consumers worldwide will adopt it, I'm wondering why you don't just do it in Flash? The Player is already out there in the world, doesn't this seem less risky?" (At this point I'm sure I made at least two or three of my Adobe partners throw their hands up in the air at my naivete, but heck, if they've got a technical problem, why not choose the most practical technical solution?)
(A) I couldn't really take notes on the reply, but what I wrote down a moment later was "We've got a different direction. We're a big believer in our own format". I didn't get the sense that there was really a direct answer to this... my new gut feeling is that they don't wish to "risk being held hostage" to technology from some other company... that "go it alone, not invented here" type of approach really colored my subsequent understanding of the whole "everywhere" approach of the Vista project.

(Q) "Will your format be normalized by a standards body?"
(A) There's a difference between de jure and de facto standards, and there will be a session tomorrow on just this very topic....

Posted by John Dowdell at 11:28 PM

Intro to Sparkle

Intro to Sparkle: The actual event name was... [rummaging through papers]... "Introducing Microsoft Tools For Professional Designers: An Overview of Microsoft Expression". I think "Expression" is the name of a line of tools, like "MX" was awhile back. This was actually about "Microsoft Expression Interactive Designer", the tool formerly-and-more-fetchingly known as "Sparkle", which descended from the Creature House Expressions tool, marketed at one point awhile back by Fractal Design or MetaCreations, and which I first knew for its innovative "skeletal strokes" demo at SIGGRAPH 1994. I walked out of the session thinking "Well, I've seen demos for Flex, and I've seen demos for Fireworks". (Yes, I'm King Of All Snarkdom these days, no need to remind me. ;-) More notes in the extended entry....

The Expression approach's key uniqueularity: a single XML format across all tools, for all users. Key unanswered question: what happens when all instructions for a multi-contributor project are contained within a single XML file? The approach used in multimedia and WWW development is copy by reference, where a designer can change a PNG unendingly so long as the markup compositor knows the resource's final address. Expression seems to use a copy by value approach, where a single file holds all resources. There seems to be a need for very capable version-control abilities here, which I suppose would be handled by another Microsoft offering. Still, a single live file which can be modified by both designers and developers seems like it would also have unique strengths; I'll need to think on this a bit more before I get a clearer idea of the whole picture.

Speaking of "designers and developers", this theme made regular appearances during various presentations today. This was a key idea behind the Macromedia Designer & Developer Center, first named "desdev", later named "devnet", introduced toward Feb 2002. Microsoft has traditionally been focused on a straight developer audience, though, so this adaption does seem a natural and necessary progression.

Most of the demo was a "now I'll give this stroke a yellow brush, now I'll make it 2-point size, whoops, now I'll undo and resize this over here, next I'll choose this context menu and....." There was some apparent use of realtime 3D rendering for a spaceship, but I wondered why this rendering was done on the client instead of pre-rendered during authoring... probably reduces transfer costs from server to client, but increases computational demands on the client, limiting the audience. One nice thing was that they could then animate between any two states of the object (in this case, different views of a spaceship), but I'm not sure whether this decrease in bandwidth costs would outweigh the need for increased clientside computational cycles. Risk: designers will need some experience to determine when they overload the computational resources of their audience's machines... it's easy to say "hey i can render in realtime" but harder to predict "this is how much i can ask them to render before performance becomes unacceptable".

I think Gates may have a conflict here. The top-level line is about user experience, but the toolset itself focuses on "user experience for those who have a new PC and who run on hardware-accelerated Vista". Audiences are diverse... not everyone invests in their hardware and system as frequently as computer professionals... the change from fullsized computers to mobile communication makes this even more pronounced. "Whose user experience?" is one of the questions that keeps running in my head after this day of sessions.

One of the ideas that came up during the timeline segment was an emphasis on how Sparkle marks events by time, rather than by frames. This is true, and has been an animation issue for a dozen years now... MacroMind Three-D offered the first commercial parameter-based keyframing, and Specular's Infini-D made a big deal of how it could easily change the number of frames-per-second at render time rather than at the start of design, although keys were set when any parameter of the object changed (position, rotation, shading, etc) rather than different keys set when any parameter of that object changed. Macromedia Extreme 3D was the first commercial tool I recall to quickly interconvert between frame-based animation and time-based animation. Adobe Premiere used a strict time-based approach, later adopted by AfterEffects, which added MM3D's parameter-based keying. I'm not sure there's really a winner either way here. One advantage of a frame-based approach is that it maps easily into a state-based approach, the "one-frame movie" or "four-frame button" or current Flex "state" approach. I don't have a conclusion; still open to persuasion.

In the Q&A, the mic was vacant at first, so I got up and asked "What are we supposed to call this, Microsoft Expression Interactive Designer? Wasn't 'Sparkle' a bit more catchy? What do you want us to call it?" The answer was along the lines of "Yes, call it MEID" or something like that. We'll see... I'm guessing a more sustainable name will eventually emerge.

Another questioner asked "Who is the actual audience for this work?" and the reply was along the lines of "Well, most designers have at least one PC for testing", which seemed to me to confuse the audience they were selling into (designers/developers) and the actual people who would be using these interfaces (consumers).

Another question I noted down was about mobile development, multiple screen sizes and CPU capability, the whole Beyond The Computer approach. I don't have notes on the reply.

Branden Hall sat down near me towards this part -- he was one of the many web luminaries here whose attendence costs were paid for by Microsoft -- and he asked me when Sparkle would ship. I'm not sure... I think I remember hearing that, because it was built atop Longhorn that it would require Longhorn/Avalon/Vista to ship before they could lock it down and ship... I'd spend more time searching a reference but I'm not sure whether things would change again by actual delivery time.

My take: Same as before... Microsoft is doing something quite ambitious and commendable with its new operating system, and to guard this investment they'll need to make sure talented designers and developers can create dedicated content for it, so dedicated des/dev tools are a natural. Vectors and editability and micro-refreshes and declarative programming and all these other techniques are good techniques, so it's natural there would be overlap with what other des/dev tools have already been accomplishing. At the same time Microsoft needs to counter the "only in Microsoft" constraint, so some type of concession towards univerality needs to be made. It's a tough problem.

The next session in this room was about "Quartz", the codename for the new Frontpage HTML editor whose full formal name I don't recall, but I bailed for a session on Windows Presentation Framework, which I'll hit in the next report....

Posted by John Dowdell at 9:05 PM

TAO party

TAO party: OT... I bailed after having too much Village People, "Celebrate Your Life!" and Rick James' "Superfreak" inserted into my ear. Considering the diversity of the crowd, I would have really appreciated some Lakshmi Shankar, Cantopop, or old Hungarian or Finnish music instead... could have induced me to stay. Some information would have been more human. I understand that commercial clubs need to pander, but still, c'mon, gimmeabreak here. The toilets were interesting, though, clear glass doors to look into the loo, but which turned opaque when you turned the lock. Good interface design, took advantage of a natural gesture. One of the many innovations never forseen by The Jetsons, a nice surprise....

Posted by John Dowdell at 8:55 PM

Monday lunch

Monday lunch: Apologies in advance for my name-munging here... I didn't take paper notes until later. I sat down at a table with Frank Spandy of Razorfish/AvenueA (sp?), and we both remarked on the conference tendency to hang around with people we already know. We were joined by a developer from Bang & Olufsen who had flown in from Denmark the day before (12-hour trip!)... a Microsoft staffer at the far side of the table whose name and conversation did not catch... Dan Short & Angela Buraglia (who recently joined lynda.com)... Eric Meyer, of CSS fame... two Adobe staffers from San Jose whom I had not met before and whose names I did not catch. Conversational topics in the extended entry....

Angela shocked me by bringing up the control aspects of "who decides whether a website has 'reputation'!?". I knew that this centralization of authority would be an issue, but discussion is picking up quicker than I had anticipated.

Angela also showed how a family site she had made with proper XHTML techniques was readily viewable in the browser of a Treo phone she had just purchased. We looked at other sites... the front adobe.com page took very long to load and the content then did not view correctly... the old macromedia.com frontpage was more functional, possibly due to the CSS and other work Eric Meyer had contributed on this project. The "new Adobe" website integration should happen towards late spring and I hope for improvement here... just a little nudge to my partners who are toiling to bring the next generation of the website along: it'd be great to check how it performs on something other than a full-sized computer workstation's browser, tia.

Eric and I had a long discussion about device-independence of WWW work. I've always been a little skeptical of the stance that "a website should have only one representation which reaches all users, regardless of their visual acuity, regardless of the audience's other special needs". (Globalization alone makes such a goal difficult.) Eric described how his cross-browser CSS work also made him wonder about the viability of a single-file approach to Beyond The Computer (BTC) work on mobiles, home systems (enhanced TVs), and other upcoming device form-factors. Besides the physical constraints of a small screen, there are also vital social use constraints to consider... someone who bothers to pull up a WWW site on a mobile phone is likely in transit, seeking a specific piece of information... their reading experience will be vastly different from someone sitting down at a computer doing their work, or relaxing on the couch pulling up web info while watching video.

It's not just the format, but it's the content itself which likely needs to be tailored to the social setting of the audience, I reckon. I've written a little before on container-dependent content... text that you'd be willing to read on a computer screen while sitting down would be different from that you'd be willing to read on a mobile... reading an essay on a book-like display would almost argue for an expansion of text content, where someone could relax back and give undivided attention to what a creator has to say.

I suspect this will be particularly true for video as well... a bigscreen movie experience is already different from the video that works well in a WWW browser... mobile video is looking like it will be even shorter and more pointed than what you would countenance in a WWW browser... the various Adobe teams are now doing a lot of work on integrating their video editors with Flash's web video capabilities, and I suspect that video, as well as text, will require changes to its very content to effectively engage the audience on the form-factor and social setting of the device they're using... lots to learn here over the coming few years, I expect.

Towards the end Eric and I started talking about how appropriate content would be routed to different devices which access a server. This conversation took place while the conference center's staff was clearing the lunchroom, but he made me wonder whether the device itself should have some responsibility in telling the server what type of content it would prefer. We're already starting to see this in personalized WWW aggregators, such as my.yahoo.com, where server memory lets people choose what types of content will appear in their personalized homepages. More work to do here, it looks like.

Oh, shoot.... It's 6:30 already and the party started a half-hour ago, and I've still got to get dressed and get over there... coming up as soon as I'm able are notes on the "Intro to Sparkle" session and Michael Wallent's session on "Windows Presentation Framework Everywhere", where he confirmed that Microsoft will be building a browser plugin to add User Experience value beyond what the browsers already offer. Being behind schedule all the time doesn't help my Incipient Burnout Syndrome, lemme tell ya.... ;-)

Posted by John Dowdell at 6:04 PM

Gates keynote

Gates keynote: He has drunk the "Experience Matters" Koolade. This is a benefit for all of us, in the long run. It appears that the way they are playing it is to offer two possibilities: (a) develop for Vista and take advantage of all the new features it offers; or (b) develop for WWW browsers for an audience larger than Vista machines. (I'm calling it "Vista machines" even though there's talk of some Vista-like support for that subset of Windows users who have upgraded to Windows XP over the last five years but whose hardware won't support the new OS, because I haven't seen solid-yet-concise info yet on the eventual feature differences between straight Vista and WPF-enhanced WinXP.) More follows in the extended entry here....

Nice touch: The pre-speech wall monitors mentioned that people could tag their photos and text with term "MIX06" so others can find it easier.

The obligatory start-off joke was "Usually we show a video making fun of me, but we decided this time to take it from the community... let's go to YouTube.com, see what turns up... 'Bill Gates Runs Like A Girl' etc... oh well, maybe we should make our own video next time." (YouTube uses the inclusive video capabilities of Adobe's Flash Player, but this was not mentioned. ;-)

The opening info was about "experiences through the browser" and "experiences beyond the browser". This is necessarily true -- if you take one characteristic of a set then some of these set members share that characteristic, and some do not. It's logically equivalent to saying "some projects have a blue color scheme, and some projects do not have a blue color scheme". Either something is in a browser or it is not; this is inarguable, by definition. But the distinction does not address the crucial characteristic of who the audience is for each of these experiences -- if I glossed him in realtime, it would be "use the WWW browser to reach a wider audience, and use Vista to reach a narrower audience". Adobe's game is to float above various choices in operating system brand, operating system version, browser brand and version. I find his choice of distinctions inarguable, but not as pertinent as other distinctions might be.

He next made a pitch for IE7 -- their upcoming browser is a prime focus of this event. He describes how it includes a number of updated security features ("anti-phishing" alerts, where there are presumably checks of the serving IP address against the putative domain, etc -- not sure how it would do against DNS poisoning). He mentions that there will be IE-compatibility services to check your current sites against their new browser, alongside mentions of recommendations on "how to take advantage of the great new features of IE7". I'm not yet sure how well separated these two distinct sets of recommendations will be presented -- these are two distinct authoring goals, so I'd hope they wouldn't be bundled together in their final recommendations for a site.

There was a line like "downloading a browser is the fastest, most accepted way to gain new functionality", which leaves out the faster adoption rates of universal browser extensions... I couldn't question him directly to make sure I understood his meaning correctly, but this line caught my ear.

Thinks RSS use will skyrocket. I've always had a problem with the term "RSS", which originally started as "Rich Site Summary", building off the concise Apple/Netscape "Resource Description Format" and some other acronyms for noticing when a web resource has changed content, then later being re-de-acronymized as "Really Simple Syndication" and being confused as "HTML without all the presentation details", with the emphasis by some on "full-text feeds" as the goal. For me, the various user-need sets of "RSS" have always been just a type of XML -- I'd like to see both concise notifications of changed content and alternate publishing formats, but suspect that this is toast with the confusion of the term over the past five years. Reminds me of what happened to email ten years ago, when AOL, Microsoft and others bloated ASCII email with HTML, overuse of attachments, images and font-styling, the rest. Instead of each format doing what each does best there's steady pressure to make each format have the features of all other formats. Makes me sigh, but I'm not sure what else I can do about that. Anyway, Gates had an early emphasis on "RSS" in this speech.

Next came a rap on the avoidance of full-page refresh in WWW browsers, the subset of the "Rich Internet Applications" story of 2002, constrained to the use of XmlHttpRequest and text-refresh independent of layout-refresh and localLogic-refresh. He refers to this as "rich", lauding "mashups" and other "Web 2.0" phenomena.

Says their "Atlas" libraries will work in "any modern browser". One stat I'm still hunting for is precisely how much of the world's computer-owning audience actually uses "any modern browser" -- seems a necessary stat for an "AJaX" evangelism, but under-discussed in current conversations, from what I've seen. (My "computer-owning" qualifier in there is necessary, because most of the rapidly-developing world will use lower-cost mobile devices than fullsized computers -- if mobiles do have WWW browsers they will be an additional set of environments which developers must test against; it's a tough row to hoe either way.)

He phrases the "Windows Presentation Framework" (WPF) as being for the Vista and Windows XP operating systems -- no mention of the "Windows Presentation Framework Everywhere" (WPF/E) announced a few conferences ago as a way to reach audiences who are using systems other than Microsoft's, or browsers other than Microsoft's. (Update: More info on WPF/E in later sessions.) There's a new-to-me mention of "Windows Presentation Framework Embedded", and I'm not sure what its acronym or usage might be.

The CTO of MySpace.com had a segment... towards the end they showed a "beyond the browser" (BTB) "gadget" in the Vista sidebar which enabled persistence across pageviews or browser sessions. There was also a mention of some type of WWW re-layout, reminding me of how Yahoo and Google offer some types of WWW pages whose format a visitor can customize.

There was a quote about (heavy paraphrase here) "'Atlas' libraries are more than just another Ajax framework, but are instead a way to develop better and stronger". Gates said Atlas will be tuned for ASP.NET but can work with other server environments.

A speaker from the BBC noted how they have seen rapidly-rising use of "rich media" such as video and interactive pieces. With the investment they make in production they have a definite need for digital-rights management, where a piece of content can be viewed freely for a limited period and by subscription after that, or can be viewed freely in certain geographic regions (such as the UK where the BBC still gets tax revenue), but requires payment in other regions. I definitely agree that content producers should control their bits -- Adobe's LiveCycle Policy Server is already here for institutional control of documents, but "somebody stole my website" and "somebody stole my blog" and "somebody hotlinked my video" and the rest are still outstanding problems.

During the demos I noticed that both Windows and Macintosh operating systems are using more attractive, "flashy" visual interfaces than five years ago... a lot of the design & interaction sensibilities pioneered by people developing in Director and Flash over the last ten years have gone mainstream... ten years from now I expect we'll see more OS-level communication abilities (like Breeze today), cross-device layout abilities (like Acrobat), some of the more advanced visual capabilities (like Flash 8). By that time the Macromedia/Adobe evolutions will be even further along, but it does help when single-engine innovations (Player, Reader) are mainstreamed by the operating systems. Frontrunners just need to run faster, that's all. ;-)

Tim O'Reilly then came on for an interview with Gates. I didn't take heavy notes on these... got the sense he had a set of questions, and when he didn't get an on-point answer he'd do a followup question, then move on to the next question in the list. (One of these questions was about how "experience matters" follows the Macromedia emphasis of the last five years, but Gates was careful to mention neither Macromedia nor Adobe by name.)

One topic discussed here that I would have liked to have clarified with Mr. Gates was his emphasis on "reputation of websites". I agree that it would be great to know how long a site has been established, what types of references it have. I came away with the feeling that he wants to provide the universal and centralized source of the "reputation" of others... I would like to know whether individuals can choose who they trust to make recommendations about the reputations of others, or whether the authoritative advice would be centralized within Microsoft.

Great Gates quote (in paraphrase): "We can no longer be device-centric; we must be user-centric." He mentions how any new phone you purchase should be able to easily migrate your old phone's data; how logging onto a friend's computer should let you pull up some of your own computer's settings. This is a great goal, but I'm uncertain how much buy-in to Microsoft you'd have to do to achieve this under their plan, where the data lives, how much it would be decentralized and free-choice and how much it would be tied into the Microsoft system. It's a tough problem, and if they can figure out a way to do it that would be great, but I'm not sure how comfortable I would be using it... Google is another company which is trying to amass great amounts of data about its audience... I strongly suspect that the security concerns which were obvious to careful observers in 1995 will be followed by "who owns my data" issues over the next five years... we've already started seeing some recognition of tying "free email" into websearch history and cross-site advertising tracking... "privacy is the new security" is already starting to pop into mainstream awareness. I like his goals; I'm just not sure of the method he proposes. I like how he's focusing on audience needs and the user experience, however.

At the end, Gates made mention of how they let development of their browser slip five years ago, but that they'll be adopting a more frequent update schedule... he mentioned the evolutionary rate of Microsoft Messenger, which has had updates about three times a year.

I missed much of the Q&A (which I appreciate that they attempted), but after seeing The Marc Canter Show take first shot at the mic, I took off to hit a lull in the restroom lines.

I took paper notes during the session, hence my rough paraphrasing of quotes above. I typed it up during the followup session by the head of the Internet Explorer team out in the corridor near a power outlet, after hearing the opening where mention was made of the falloff in changes to their browser since 2001 ("crickets chirping"). Later on will be a session on new things in IE, and I hope to read other writers' accounts of this first IE7 session in blogland.

Posted by John Dowdell at 5:42 PM

Me at MIX06

Me at MIX06: I'm in Las Vegas this week, at the Microsoft MIX 2006 conference where they're announcing their plans for their next stage of work. I've been taking notes on the sessions I've attended and will be posting them here. Caveats: Even more than usual, I'm speaking as myself, as one person who works with a larger group of people, and my views are not necessarily representative of those of Adobe staffers, or the Adobe organization as a whole. I'm also reporting, after some thought, publicly rather than internally to staff, because: my main work is public-facing anyway; I'm not in any internal planning groups and don't usually have "secrets" per se; and because I'm hoping to collect opinions from others & corrections/expansions from speakers and other stakeholders. And as a personal caveat, I've been working through some symptoms of burnout recently (been running full-tilt for almost a year, since the Adobe acquisition announcement last April 18, and am trying to schedule a vacation to recharge)... anyway, I've been blogging less lately because I've been worried that I might speak too, ah, bluntly about the whole webtech/blogosphere scene. I've got the initial Gates keynote written up already, and need to transfer three sets of paper notes to electrons before hitting the get-together party tonight. Try the Technorati link above to find writings by those bloggers Technorati aggregates, and I'll have a bunch more entries at this weblog over the next little while....

Posted by John Dowdell at 5:26 PM

March 15, 2006

Flash hits Memeorandum

Flash hits Memeorandum: But it isn't about being the most terrifyingly rapid adoption of any piece of software in the entire history of the internet... it's about the ActiveX-locking security issue that hit the news yesterday. Go figure, huh? ;-)

Posted by John Dowdell at 1:15 PM

Logging Player issues

Logging Player issues: Could you help me with something, please? This week there's a bunch of Player changes, from the Sony announcement to the security update to the MacTel Player... there's bound to be a couple of scenarios that still need cleanup, like this Washington Post procedure for using Microsoft's ActiveX uninstaller. If, during your webly travels today, you see an actionable item from anyone then a note to the Player team at the wishlist would be great, or use the comments here to alert the crew if the problem isn't clear or needs staff addressing. Thanks for forwarding any difficulties you may see... I expect the rest of this week to be a little quieter than the past 36 hours..... ;-)

Posted by John Dowdell at 1:08 PM

MacTel Player

MacTel Player: This was just posted by Emmy, but I'm duplicating it for those who don't drink from the full MXNA firehose... the new Intel-based Macintosh computers now have a v8.0 Flash Player. The full identifier is v8.0.27.0, compared to the v8.0.23.0 preview which was in Apple's original shipment. It includes yesterday's version-locking changes. There's an additional MacTel Player FAQ to complement the general Adobe MacTel FAQ. (My apologies to branding police if "MacTel" is not acceptable, but "Apple Macintosh OS X for Intel-based computers" is longer to type.... ;-) More stuff being ported to more environments as we speak.... ;-)

Posted by John Dowdell at 1:01 PM

Director OSen

Director OSen: I'm guessing that "OSen" is the plural of "OS"... at South by Southwest, Cordell Ratzlaff told how he did mockups and testing of Apple's OS X in Macromedia Director, complementing previous reports of how early Microsoft Vista was also done in Director. Hey, Linux! ya gotta catch up here...! ;-)

Posted by John Dowdell at 11:40 AM

March 14, 2006

A healthy agnosticism

A healthy agnosticism: Three recent stories show how it's still attractive to believe whatever we read on the net... some bloggers in China temporarily closed shop and the commercial press ran stories without checking source evidence... a 15-year-old got Google News to run a phony press release about the company hiring him... various bloggers believe the recent spate of "winer retiring, scoble overwhelmed" posts, not realizing that for the last few months the majority of their blog entries have been created by a screenscraping algorithm. It's not cost-effective to crosscheck everything we read, but there's a lot of tragic misinfo out there, and staying skeptical about what we're told still seems prudent....

Posted by John Dowdell at 3:55 PM

Unicode & characters

Unicode & characters: This is a little off-topic, but it covers a subject in depth which is only alluded to elsewhere. Japan, Beijing, Taiwan all use multi-stroke characters, but the characters and their meanings may differ across languages, and have differed in various regions across time. This has added difficulties for encoding in web pages via the Unicode approach. It's a long essay, with background on different approaches, timelines, some of the reasons for some of the solutions, more. [Additional blogsearch terms: japanese, kanji, hanzi, traditional, simplified, BIG5 ]

Posted by John Dowdell at 3:11 PM

Enterprise requirements

Enterprise requirements: Richard Ziade sums up the practical angle behind the whole controversy over last week's James Gosling quote about how "php or ruby don't compete with java". Rich mentions the "nobody got fired for buying IBM" line, where the internal dynamics within a large group can hold as much sway as the external realities. But there's also the important angle of initial development costs being only part of the total costs of a system: "Within the enterprise arena, building is just the beginning of an application's life span. Once released into the wild, maintenance, upkeep, updates dominate both time and money. Large organizations need the peace of mind of knowing that there is a large player behind their solutions; that their people are not only competent but also replacable with others (compare replacing a .Net developer with a Ruby developer); and that many of their tools and libraries are not their own but rather products that have been proven elsewhere. Agile development has its merits, but agile maintenance dominates the enterprise work day." He also adds the regulatory requirements and the effects they have, before closing out with a hope that both ad-hoc and premeditated development choices should have important roles in the work of groups of varied sizes.

Posted by John Dowdell at 1:07 PM

QT codecs by version

QT codecs by version: Great chart of which version of QuickTime included which audio and video decompression routines. Anyone know of a similar list for the Microsoft video architecture? This is really important info for these larger, multi-codec architectures. For Flash, it was the Sorenson video codec in v6 and the On2 video codec in v8... MP3 came in v3 (I think it was), and there's Nelly-Moser for spoken voice, a screen capture codec in there too... the main things to remember are Sorenson in v6 and On2 in v8. The NPD consumer audit tests QuickTime viewability on one of the original QuickTime 3.0 codecs. [via Martin Sammtleben]

Posted by John Dowdell at 12:50 PM

Players v8.0.24, v7.0.63

Players v8.0.24, v7.0.63: New Player security change today, with two potential effects: uninstallation now requires the Macromedia Flash Player uninstaller; and plug-in switchers need a slight change to procedure to test content in older engines. The 8.0.24 version is recommended for all operating systems supporting an 8.0x Player; the 7.0.63 version is for older Mac and Win, and Linux and Solaris (8.5 for Linux is coming soon). Please let me know in comments if you see any questions, concerns, clarifications needed, thanks.

Posted by John Dowdell at 11:49 AM

March 13, 2006

Wider CANVAS

Wider CANVAS: Apple's Safari browser had a CANVAS tag, subsequently adopted by Mozilla Firefox, offering simple drawing mechanisms. Here Paul Colton implements this drawing markup in SWF, so that people in older Firefox or Safari, as well as other browsers, can see such instructions. (Yes, if you already know Flash work then you could make a universal drawing more directly, but for those who wish to use a "standards first" approach this new implementation can help make their work more universal.) Great stuff! (although, don't look too hard at that toucan done in DIVs, it'll hurt the brain to think of the algorithm involved.... ;-) More general info on CANVAS is at the Yahoo Groups board.

Posted by John Dowdell at 2:50 PM

Lots of links

Lots of links: Boombox sneakers and houseware telepresence... eBooks, Ajax, John Denver, Visual Basic, lots more links that stayed open in my browser over the weekend, in the extended entry.

If you're travelling light you may not have a good pocket for an MP3 Player, so why not put it in your shoe? Might as well put some small sneaker speakers in there too. Me, I'd probably record some munchkin voices saying "Hey, you big galoot, watch where you're walking, you almost squashed us!", but then, each of us has our own little oddities.....

People made fun of these Lovers' Cups last week, but I think there's a real angle in simple household objects which naturally inform you of distant events... the single example may not hold, but I think the general principle will.

Slashdot had a rework of current attitudes on eBooks... I've scanned it a few times but can't summarize patterns... part of me wonders about the future for longform text in general, but now that reading devices are reaching a friendlier form factor I've got to believe this will take off sooner or later.

Internet hunger strike: "Guillermo Farinas, a 41-year-old psychologist, went on a hunger strike on Jan. 31 to press Cuba's Communist authorities to respect his right to freedom of information and allow him Internet access, which is controlled by the government." Castro replies that the reason is limited bandwidth with their satellite relays. His condition is deteriorating, updates here.

Burritobot collects reviews of San Francisco taquerias. Meanwhile, CNET bought Chowhound... lots of great behind-the-scenes info in this interview.

There's a lengthy essay here comparing Ajax Frameworks for ASP.NET... I've made two passes through it but don't feel I can explain the concept of "indirect Ajax programming" (best guess is that it's "you never type 'XmlHttpRequest()' yourself", but I suspect there's an additional qualifier hidden within the text)... it's a lengthy piece of work, which I respect, but the browser dependencies section still just deals with browser brandnames, rather than also their version and OS cofactors, much less how the JavaScript libraries support visitors in non-compliant browsers.

Slashdot argues over Visual Basic history/use... VB made forms for early Windows apps, and then got over-complexified, and even had a backwards-compatibility chasm... in some ways Flex reminds me of the original strengths of Visual Basic, being approachable and fast, although having a wider audience and being more savvy of remote services.

Simple brainpower boosts -- do something different. Now that the consensus is that adult brains can indeed grow new cells, techniques like these can spur cell growth in general, and I guess we're hoping that this growth can then be steered in profitable directions....

This "Adobe mobile" article got syndicated a bit last week, but there's one line in there I particularly like: "Flash does for mobile devices and content creators what it did for computers running on various operating systems. It provides a neutral platform for displaying rich media content." All of these Adobe engagement technologies, from PostScript printers to video-editing to web browsers to network applications, they're all neutral to the OS differences (MS vs Apple) and the service differences (Google vs Yahoo).

Kevin Kelly put together an annotated catalog of different news-discovery services, such as Digg, Newsvine, del.icio.us and more.

Jon Udell writes: "Why can't the standard description and the standard implementation be the same thing?" It is, when you don't start with the file format before the implementation (Flash, Acrobat, MacOS, etc). But I think he may have a qualifier in there "for technologies which have multiple implementations", which would make it more like "How can you have a single implementation for things which have multiple implementations?", or something like that. If so, maybe one trick is to stay a few years behind on using new features of the various implementations... it took a few years to browsers to render HTML 2.0/3.2 the same, then a few more years to get most of the older CSS requirements in compliance with each other... staying a few years behind the curve is one proven way to get similar performance from multiple clientside implementations.

Lots of pretty money origami I found while musing on the high hype level of a Microsoft product last week.

Bruce Tognazzini dissects the airplane interface that turned a Rocky Mountain High into a Monterey Bay Low.

Posted by John Dowdell at 1:16 PM

XHR support %?

XHR support %? The link goes to a Google search on "How many browsers support AJaX?" That XmlHttpRequest was introduced in Microsoft Windows browsers in the late 90s, but it wasn't until Firefox added it that live data requests became chic. Pages like the Wikipedia entry describe which browsers support it, in either its MS-style or its Firefox-style JavaScript requests. But what percentage of the web audience uses browsers which fulfill standard XmlHttpRequest calls? It's an important question, one that you have to answer before figuring out your support options for visitors in noncompliant browsers, but I don't recall anyone measuring such things directly. The NPD Flash audit measures how many consumers can immediately view certain content in their current browser... do you know of any sites, even with a specialist audience, which make stats for how many of their visitors have browsers which can grab new text without dumping their current layout? Have you seen any data on audience capabiity, rather than just "which browsers have it"? Thanks in advance for any tips in comments.

Posted by John Dowdell at 1:00 PM

FAB comment

FAB comment: I got this link from David Mendels, about last week's Flex/Ajax Bridge... Richard Monson-Haefl has a strong background in Apache and Java, and he says that these bridge routines, for easy communication between Flex 2.0 and NPAPI or Microsoft browsers, are "the single most important advancement in Ajax this year". Lots more key quotes in here, observations on declaring interfaces via MXML from a Java server background, the feature differences between Flex and JavaScript, the "too many JS libraries" problem, more. My takeaway is that, if you're developing for delivery to a hypertext browser, then there's a good range of technology available to you... it's more natural to look at "Flash *and* JavaScript" than "Flash *or* JavaScript". This may be a good bookmark if you need to convince someone with a Java background of their actual options in interface design.

Posted by John Dowdell at 12:46 PM

March 10, 2006

MS vs Apple

MS vs Apple: Paul Thurrott writes of the upcoming Vista marketing push: "I want you to mull over that 400 million figure for a bit. 400 million PCs. Running Windows Vista. Within 24 months. That's the business Microsoft 'competes' in. It's a completely different world from the 10 million or so people that use OS X. And that, as they say, is that." Microsoft anticipates an audience of 400 million people in 2 years, and Thurrott is impressed. Now, if only we had timely press releases on Player stats, I could cite you source material showing twice that audience (actual audience, not anticipated audience) in a quarter of the time for Flash Player 8, but as we don't, I can't. :( Still, when you're looking for predictable capabilities on Other Peoples Machines, it's pretty clear what types of platforms offer developers the most rapid evolution....

Posted by John Dowdell at 3:15 PM

Goowy plug

Goowy plug: Michael Arrington writes, on the addition of messaging and storage: "Goowy is turning into a lot more than just another ajax/flash home page - its a full on desktop platform that is shaping up to be the best competitor to Microsoft's Live.com."

Posted by John Dowdell at 2:41 PM

XMP Toolkit on Labs

XMP Toolkit on Labs: I just noticed this, and anticipate that there will be better-informed comment from others later on this, but, eh, I type fast. ;-) "XMP" is Adobe's Extensible Metadata Platform, and the Toolkit provides way to include custom authoring info in JPEG, PSD, TIFF, AVI, , WAV, MPEG, MP3, MOV. This metadata can then be used within various authoring tools, Adobe Bridge, Lightroom, more. Examples include tagging a photograph with keywords, versioning or contact info on a text layout, etc. The XMP technology is used within other standards, such as Creative Commons licensing. The Mac version of this Labs toolkit is a Universal Binary, for both Motorola and Intel Macs. Sounds interesting to me, and I'd appreciate hearing any thoughts you have on it, thanks.

Posted by John Dowdell at 12:16 PM

Google de-ad-ificiation

Google de-ad-ification: Interesting business debate, here and elsewhere... Google reworks WWW content for display on mobile devices, stripping out site ads in the process. Some say publishers should be happy their content is seen on mobile (even if they didn't develop for that form-factor), but others ask why they should be happy if it doesn't support the publishers' business model. Some ask who gave Google the authority to change someone else's content, although this is similar to what is done by individuals with Greasemonkey and ad-blockers. Some ask whether Google will someday insert its own ads into the mobile content, or whether Google will one day remove non-ad content too (see the China debates). Me, I'm generally hesitant of any deal which doesn't first solicit the consent of all parties to the deal, but there are business issues here I hadn't considered before... interesting discussion.

Posted by John Dowdell at 10:43 AM

Video: nice vs nasty

Video: nice vs nasty: At PBS.org, Mark Glaser is tabulating which video services accept a wide range of visitors, and which require a particular OS or browser before accepting a visitor. In practice, this seems to be coming down to WMV sites vs FLV sites, although there's a Real/QT mention or two in there. Can you add to either this "nice" list, or to his "nasty" list? He doesn't mention Flash much by name here, so hardsell "why don't you mention flash!?" may not be appropriate, but if you could add to his database in his desired format then it may benefit all of us in the long run, thanks. (Hmm, I just realized I don't hear much about MPG video on such sites, and I'm not sure why... some sites may feel they need rights-management on their content (pushing to MS or Real), while others want predictable playback and interface integration (pushing to Flash), but do you have thoughts on current use of MPG video in the new set of video services?)

Posted by John Dowdell at 9:45 AM

March 9, 2006

Ajax considered harmful

Ajax considered harmful: Some at Slashdot used to bash Flash as being improper content within a WWW browser. Recently I've seen some take a similar stance with advanced JavaScript work. This thread from last weekend, titled "Where is the Real Ajax/Flex Revolution Happening?", has a range of attitudes... "Do not use [XmlHttpRequest] to replace the normal HTML request/response page-to-page flow"... "The killer app will be the day when we finally get over this serious brain damage of trying to do everything via HTML over HTTP"... "If you're running a real application inside a web browser and not just a web site, what sense does the back button really make?"... "How about using C to write internet apps, and ditch the web?"... "I've been viewing the web for 10 years, all I want from a website is information and I want it fast. Web documents have no place being applications and javascript and flash have no place in documents. Why do people not understand this?" Lots of different viewpoints -- seems like many are reconsidering or refining their prior positions, and some are flat-out retrenching. ;-) There's also a side-thread here on whether it's proper for an opensource advocate to use uneditable services built on commodity technologies like Gmail or Flickr. One of my favorite comments in this thread: "The internet hasn't been about straight data reading for a long long time. Almost every website out there now is dynamically generated with data customised and tailored to each visitor. You are reading one right now, if you had a user you could manipulate the comments to only display the ones you want, or even the stories. You can submit and share your ideas. It's so much more than just reading a document. Slashdot itself is a web application."

Posted by John Dowdell at 12:24 PM

March 8, 2006

Hype factor feedback?

Hype factor feedback? Soliciting impressions on two articles here... the link above goes to an Engadget review of the heavily-teased MS Origami codename (turns out to be a 7" tablet WinXP variant with nominal battery life)... there's another article this afternoon called "Poor Web 2.0 fools" which talks about legit, customer-focused projects which don't get the funding that buzzword-laden projects do. You and I are sort of outside the mainstream of the highly-popularized weblogs, the "Web 2.0 when can i flip?" scene, but I'd be interested if you have any advice for Adobe staff on your reactions when reading these pieces, thanks in advance.

Posted by John Dowdell at 5:07 PM

Vista adoption

Vista adoption: Logging this here for later reference: "Microsoft says it expects more than 400 million PCs to be running Vista within 24 months of the launch." That seems aggressive... Firefox hit a hundred million downloads in one year, Flash 8 Player hit a hundred million its first month, WinXP Service Pack 2 had 220 million downloads in its first 15 months. Last November eWeek had some speculation on how hardware upgrade rates may affect OS migration.

Posted by John Dowdell at 2:34 PM

Ozzie, clipboard

Ozzie, clipboard: Twenty-nine paragraphs in: "Simply stated, I'd like to extend the clipboard user model to the web." A bit before that there was the concept of websites as silos, just like desktop applications before you could transfer data through the clipboard, but that's where I sort of lose things... a website is more a presentation of a set of services than it is the services themselves, so I'm not sure how you'd copy and paste between websites... I'm guessing he's talking more of a new authoring metaphor for requesting and rendering varied web services in a browser window. Or maybe being able to snag some section of (any? some?) website for reuse elsewhere. There's 25M of "screencasts" available, which may make the idea clearer. So what's my point here? I had seen many weblog references yesterday to this article, and couldn't quite make out what they were referring to, but last night I finally got time to read the original and still don't feel I can accurately summarize the key idea, saving others the time of reading.

Posted by John Dowdell at 8:21 AM

Flex flame

Flex flame: This is pretty cool... there's been a lot of praise for this way of quickly creating predictable applications, and the counter side has been missing. Rick Smith provides an essay on why Flex is "ahead of its time" -- requires familiarity with XML, JavaScript, and CSS -- Java-based Eclipse environment isn't zippy -- thinks browsers' scripts are as fast to develop and test against -- he had some problem with his first database call -- closes out with a general "avoid flash" line. The comments put various points in perspective. It's a negative review, but I think this is a strength, considering the particular negatives provided and the followup response in comments. I hope future Flex work evolves to satisfy Rick's needs, but in the meantime, please take advantage of this account of the downsides of Flex, examine the arguments and comments, see how they stack up for you.

Posted by John Dowdell at 7:59 AM

March 7, 2006

Flex/Ajax Bridge

Flex/Ajax Bridge: This will likely get blogged heavily the next few hours, but I wanted to slip in some environmental context on it... this way of controlling Flex interactivity from the browser's JavaScript (and vice-versa) is obviously as dependent on the browser as on the plugin. The "limitations" section says the alpha was tested in Firefox 1.5 (on unstated platform) and IE6.0sp2. The intercommunication method is called "externalInterface" in Flash 8, which I believe is based on this 2004 press release from Mozilla, Opera, Sun, Apple, and Adobe, as well as adding the prior ActiveX Scripting for Microsoft's browser on Windows. I don't know of any conformance testing on these browsers... Brad Neuberg ran into performance problems awhile ago when trying to pass large amounts of data through this simple messaging interface, for instance. I don't know of any problems with this implementation, but as with anything that involves browser functionality, it's good to stresstest the work on the range of environments your audience might choose.

Posted by John Dowdell at 5:51 PM

Flex libraries comparison

Flex libraries comparison: Late last week Ryan Stewart looked at the new ActionScript 3.0 libraries available on Labs, with an emphasis on what types of financial returns each might offer for your development work. He concludes that the RSS handlings may offer the biggest returns today.l In comments, Abdul Qabiz adds a quick OPML parser. ("OPML" is "an xml format for hierarchical outlines" (although xml is a hierarchical format itself), and in practice seems used most for lists of weblogs.)

Posted by John Dowdell at 5:43 PM

"What happened to Adobe?"

What happened to Adobe? Sorry for cluttering the blog/aggregators, but there's no commenting available for this article at Computer Arts magazine, and there's a chance the writer will read this... Jason, is it the red "Adobe (formerly Macromedia)" logo at macromedia.com that's got you concerned here, or am I missing some other change to the site which has affected you? (The initial new boxes were halfy-halfy Adobe/Macromedia labels, showing both sets of tools in their prior identifications... by next generation there likely won't be the concern that some haven't gotten the news on the merger.)

Posted by John Dowdell at 5:32 PM

Moz money

Moz money: Odd post, from a Mozilla board member... there's apparently a perceived need to address certain financial questions, but the reply doesn't seem to answer where the money comes from, how much, and what it buys. One of the interesting things about recent browser business is that donations are made in labor as well as cash. It'd be great to get more transparency in the cui bono of many of the volunteer movements.

Posted by John Dowdell at 5:27 PM

Hedlund tips

Hedlund tips: Great list of startup tips from Marc Hedlund at the eTech conference... lots of people are starting their own businesses now, and his quick bits seem a lot more appropriate to this current financial/technical cycle than other lists.

Posted by John Dowdell at 5:23 PM

Amazing Origami Photos!!

Amazing Origami Photos!! I'm just catching up -- been in jury duty much of last week -- and I've been seeing a whole bunch of links on Memeorandum, interspersed among the "Fox Interactive buying Google!" posts, so somehow I just couldn't resist.... ;-)

Posted by John Dowdell at 5:21 PM

March 4, 2006

AP vs Reuters

AP vs Reuters: Mark Glaser writes of video platform strategies chosen by Associated Press and Reuters. The former uses Windows Media Player and requires Internet Explorer; the latter uses Brightcove's service with Flash. The AP network requires both a minimum version of WMP and a minimum version of IE, which only a subset of Windows or IE users will be able to install. Lengthy comments ensue, with the clear consensus emerging towards audience inclusiveness and low audience costs in viewing. Says Michael Bazeley of the San Jose Mercury News: "I can't fathom why any online news pub would want to alienate so many users, especially when cross-platform Flash video is so mature and widely available, and when the video is generally available at so many other sources, such as Yahoo and CBSNews.com. I can't believe we're still foisting platform issues on our users."

Posted by John Dowdell at 1:36 PM

Nack transcript

Nack transcript: I'm bumping this up, in case you don't see Weblogs, Inc blogs in your view in the aggregators -- it's a lengthy text transcript of an interview with Photoshop Product Manager John Nack. Lots of good stuff here, starting with his LiveMotion history, going through product integration and extensibility possibilities, Flex from a creative-tools point-of-view, Apple porting, Adobe/Macromedia integration, more. Lots of good stuff, but I particularly liked this line: "I think that each company, for good reasons, when they were separate was kind of off on its own, doing it's own thing, and didn't have a lot of access to some shared technology. We'd all try to work together, but there's only so much you could do. And so now I really feel like, when I was a kid you'd get a new set of legos, and you'd bust that open, and you'd be like, oh man, now I've got a horse, and an arch, and these chairs, and like I could just build anything with that. And I really feel like that with the technology."

Posted by John Dowdell at 12:27 PM

March 3, 2006

The Big DRM Mistake

The Big DRM Mistake: That's the title of an essay by Scott Granneman at SecurityFocus. He immediately preordered a set of New Yorker magazines on DVD, yet later found they used client software not available on his Linux computer. He then lambastes other digital rights-management implementations. What's the big DRM mistake? In my opinion, it's thinking that DRM is something "out there". You want rights-management of your own digital work, what you produce, what you generate, your websites, your text, your images, your photos, even info about who you are and what you've done. If there's a database entry somewhere about your activity, then most people feel they have a right to that information and how it can be used. They generated it. If someone puts photos of you on their website, most people would want to stop their unauthorized use of your media. You can call it privacy, but it's also a rights-management issue. You have digital rights. Other people have digital rights too. We haven't figured things out fully here yet, sure. And there are tons of bad implementations, things which don't actually suit their creator because they didn't quite suit their audience. But the big DRM mistake, in my opinion, is in only looking at early commercial tools to manage those digital rights, and judging the entire concept of rights-management on that. You'll want your data to be protected from what you regard as abuse. Other people will too. We've got to figure out better, more mutually-agreeable ways for people to keep stuff private, or expose to only certain people, or expose for only certain purposes. Please don't argue against DRM in general when talking about the unfriendly way someone else chose to protect their privacy.

Posted by John Dowdell at 7:22 AM

March 2, 2006

March to Olympics

March to Olympics: I didn't watch the Winter Games, but many people did: "From 10 to 26 February 2006, the Olympic Movement's web site www.olympic.org attracted 5,002,736 visits. Approximately 32,323,294 page views were recorded in only 16 days. This historic report shows a 100% increase from the previous highs recorded just after the Athens 2004 Olympic Summer Games." Five million visitors, twice that of the last Games, in two weeks. That's great, a significant achievement for the folks behind the website. Now, five million visitors is also what Flash Player 8 gained each day durings its early distribution, and I'm still hearing quotes of 4-5M completed installs each day now, six months after initial public release. The top sporting event, a passionate global audience, continual TV coverage, newspaper articles and schedules -- and the site doubles its prior audience, a clear success -- yet it still attracts in a fortnight only what Flash Player attracts each day. Top under-reported story of the year.

Posted by John Dowdell at 7:39 PM

PDAs abandoned

PDAs abandoned: Hewlett-Packard is quoted at ZDNET: "The traditional pen-based PDA market will evaporate within the next four years without significant product innovation, according to Hewlett-Packard (HP). The company will therefore continue to focus the majority of its handheld efforts on converged smart phone devices, relegating its traditional PDAs to the entry-level consumer and SMB markets. At its 'magical mobility launch' event in Hong Kong this week, HP's Vice-President for Consumer Products and Mobile Business Group in the Asia-Pacific region, Chin-Teik SEE, told CNET.com.au that 'the pen-based [handheld market] is shrinking at a rate of 30 percent year-on-year.'" I knew that PDAs weren't growing as fast as mobiles, but I didn't know their sales were shrinking.

Posted by John Dowdell at 1:29 PM

InnerHTML opinions

InnerHTML opinions: I didn't know that this JavaScript function attracted such strong opinions -- apparently, in at least some browsers, replacing some text changes the document's object model. I picked this up from a discussion on Evolt... see thread index for navigation... Matt Warden supplied the link. The "innerHTML" JavaScript was introduced by Microsoft, then adopted by other browsers... I do not see it listed in the current ECMAScript specification (1.8M PDF).

Posted by John Dowdell at 1:13 PM

March 1, 2006

FlashForward photos

FlashForward photos: The link goes to the Flickr tag... they're beating out WebDU photos, although there's a lot of straight tourist shots in the FForward group. If you're in conference mode, then here's the FlashForward search term on MXNA, Technorati, and on IceRocket, each with links the others haven't indexed.

Posted by John Dowdell at 4:42 PM

Extending Flex

Extending Flex: New stuff up on Labs earlier today... a bunch of open libraries to make additional tasks simpler in Flex 2... CoreLib provides encryption, date parsing and other common services... FlexUnit provides unit testing a la JUnit... there's a library for easy access to common RSS functions... also specialized libraries for using Flickr, Mappr, Odeo and YouTube web services. You could handroll all this yourself, but these folks are building functionality atop the Flex Framework, makes it easier to achieve your goals.

Posted by John Dowdell at 4:27 PM

UE over features

UE over features: Andreas Pfeiffer writes at ACM "Why Features Don't Matter -- the new laws of digital experience." He argues that keeping a clean, clear understandable path through a smaller feature set is more valuable to people than having tons of features they have to spend tons of time to learn. Includes a ten-point list. Almost a manifesto for those focused on creating engaging experiences.

Posted by John Dowdell at 3:57 PM

Quick links

Quick links: Stuff found while seeking something else... exercise grows neurons... hidden passages in your house... more, in the extended entry.

Exercise triggers brain growth by releasing brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF), which spurs growth of new brain cells. We used to think humans didn't grow brain cells, but that's because we examined the brains of primates locked up in cages who lacked both exercise and novel stimulation. Use it or lose it, bigtime.

HiddenPassageway.com supplies a range of clandestine solutions for your living needs... site in SWF UI.

Press release of a study about how people still prefer to watch video on their home system in the living room -- the sitback experience -- and that this tendency even *increases* among those who have grown up with computers.

Hints from Mena Trott about where their blogging software/service is going... more media types, more customization for readers, more emphasis on the user experience.

Adam Green covers some of the sociology behind Memeorandum.com, and proposes a test to confirm his hypothesis of linking patterns.

Slashdot talks of wall paint which blocks mobile transmissions, a new book about "AJaX" (skeptical replies, with a request for offline work), and a viewpoint on how search engines encourage garbage when combined with an advertising program (see Wall Street Journal).

A design contest cosponsored by Adobe.

Some debate about the role of corporate investment in opensource projects, as well as speculation about how some are being purchased.

Greg Costikyan muses about anti-theft mechanisms on a game he is distributing via CD.

Molly Holzschlag described how some are whiners, some are lonely, and some crave understanding rules that others do not... more via Paul Boag (who also has a good definition of "web standards", it's basically HTML for layout, CSS for styling, and JS for interactivity, so you don't need to junk GIF for PNG -- main goal is the normal separation of data from presentation).

Geoff Stearns has been logging anecdotes about the user experience and design experience of the new Internet Explorer version.

Matt Haughey missed the obvious title of "iPad".... ;-)

Dave Shea has tips on public speaking, particularly for a webtech crowd.

Posted by John Dowdell at 3:41 PM

Massively Multiplayer Pong

Massively Multiplayer Pong: Simple idea, but I haven't seen it before... as people visit a site they're added to one of two teams, and the ad hoc group's mouse positions are weighted to discover what the team does. Effective visualization of "voting" along the edges. Appears to be a new site, got Digg and other citations last week.

Posted by John Dowdell at 2:46 PM

MLB RIA

MLB RIA: The new-mown grass, the crack of the bat, the hotdog vendor's cry, and the clicks on the little Flash applet that gives you the rundown on what's happening around the teams in Major League Baseball. Spring training games are starting this week, and it looks like MLB.com has already rolled out part of their new interface. I'm pretty sure this navigation is new, even though most of it is currently last year's data... the UI exposes a whole ton of info, but never too much at one time, it's a nice hierarchical presentation. I wonder how the intergame interfaces will be handled this year.... (Games are available on mlb.com web-radio, and the SF Giants schedule starts tomorrow on broadcast AM-radio.)

Posted by John Dowdell at 2:13 PM

Valleywag's Google Gals

Valleywag's Google Gals: I'm not sure of this... the gossip blog runs a beauty contest, which is fine by me if all the candidates consent... in this case, though, it looks like they're accepting third-party nominations with no mention that they've checked with the people whose pictures they're running. Working at a tech company doesn't automatically make you a public figure, and it looks like many of these photos were pulled out of context from some other public record. I'd rest easier if I knew that each participant agreed to this use of their personality to drive revenue on a Gawker property....

Posted by John Dowdell at 8:17 AM

Recursive critters

Recursive critters: Novelty link here... a hardware company is releasing a computer whose case is in the shape of a seven-inch-tall plastic penguin. It contains a single-board computer called "Fox". So the penguin contains a fox, which runs Linux, which gives you another penguin. Then I guess you can run Firefox on the computer, which gives you a fox within a penguin within a fox within a penguin. Then, if you call up a page which has a picture of Arctic birds, then... okay, I'll stop now, but you get the idea. ;-)

Posted by John Dowdell at 8:11 AM

IE ActiveX change

IE ActiveX change: Ziff-Davis reports that Microsoft has pushed their changed browser live: "The update is now available to the general public as an optional download via Windows Update and Microsoft's Download Centre Web site." I'm not sure what sort of consumer adoption such an option in Windows Update would provoke. ActiveX content displays as before, but requires a click into the screen area in order to activate for interactivity. The old Macromedia materials have been updated on the Adobe site for this new, less onerous implementation. A quick check of Microsoft blogs doesn't reveal additional context. If you've got any questions, concerns or other thoughts, it'd be great to collect them in the comments here so other Adobe staffers can hear them at a single address, thanks.
Update: [Additional blogsearch terms: eolas, patent, activex, Active Content]

Posted by John Dowdell at 7:35 AM

Apollo quote

Apollo quote: Steve Mack covers the FlashForward keynote for StreamingMedia.com. "Things got really interesting, though, when Ed Rowe, a senior Adobe engineer, talked about the Apollo project. He explained that Adobe sees the browser as limiting; because it was designed for documents, the browser 'chrome' (the browser itself) is always in the way. You always have to be online, and there is limited ability to work with the local environment. Apollo is all about creating an environment -- based on Flash, HTML, and PDF -- that can do everything a browser can do and more." Later he worries about "evading the browser experience", but I'm not sure that's mandated by natural law -- Flash Video removed the chrome that surrounded the Real, Apple and Microsoft video players and returned control to the developer -- then again some people like chrome, so there's room for all tastes. ;-) More notes on the keynote from Jen deHaan, with the keynote session here.

Posted by John Dowdell at 7:26 AM