No Boundaries

I must admit that I’m getting more and more exasperated with the Apple v Adobe war that has been raging for about a half of a year now. I’m sure that I don’t have any idea as to the direction that the Internet may be taking in the near future and I’m equally sure that no-one else does either. I think that the original scheme was that the internet would become a set of pipes which delivered expensive curated content to a few walled-gardens where those loyal to the particular hotel-keep would consume in contented oblivion while shelling out a considerable sum on a monthly basis for devices, connections, apps, emags and eshows, bumpers and all other necessary appurtenances. Beyond the walled gardens would be a virus-ridden, porn-infested, aesthetically-unappealing hell that best be left alone by any of any common sense. The internet would be third-world in character, as if crafted by the likes of Joan Didion or Somerset Maugham.

Google and it’s Android have busted this all wide open, sending Palm into the arms of HP and everybody else back to the drawing board. Long live liberation.

This would be good and nice, were it true, but it is complicated by Apple’s success in widely distributing both the iPad and the iPhone, the failure to launch, thus far, of all but a few Android devices which can hope to rival Apple’s creations, and Adobe’s failure to fully grasp the true condition that it’s condition is in.

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One of Dozens of Several Hundred Foot Lamoille Canyon Waterfalls

This Post and accompanying gallery addition were intended to include a fairly comprehensive shoot of  two important examples of the sky-island aspect of saline environments: Great Basin National Park and Lamoille Canyon in the Ruby Mountains. Both are isolated high-elevation alpine ecosystems in Central Eastern Nevada.

Things often don’t go as projected, so I can only provide a few good images from what was a largely botched expedition. Fortunately, I can blame almost everything on the weird weather that we’ve been having this year. One of the problems with a winter that extends into June is that, eventually, it has to warm up, and when it does, Summer temperatures ensue without regard for those absent Spring months which have fallen by the wayside, discarded by mother nature. Then months of snow melt are compressed into days or weeks and havoc reigns at elevation.

The general concept of the sky-island is an easy one to explain. Millions of years ago the rocks of the great basin were pulled apart resulting in what is called basin-and-range topography: long north-south oriented high-elevation ridges separated by similarly oriented flat valleys. Thousands of years ago, when everywhere was cool and wet, all of this terrain was covered with either forest or alpine tundra above the forest. As global warming progressed, long before human utilization of fossil fuels, things heated up and dried out. The valleys became desert and the ranges became isolated, forested ecosystems. These small mountainous regions are similar because they share their beginnings in a unified whole and have had a similar environmental history, but all are also somewhat different because they have been isolated from one another, by the intervening desert, for some time.

If you are interested in a more involved and informed explanation please consider “The Sagebrush Ocean: A Natural History of the Great Basin” by Stephen Trimble or “The Desert’s Past: A Natural Prehistory of the Great Basin” by Donald K. Grayson. These are the best books on the subject. The first is more of an extremely-well curated photography exposition and fluid narrative  intended for layman readers while the second is a scientific treatise valuable to those of us willing to put up with large amounts of dry text in order to find answers to the perpetually recurrent question: “I wonder how they figured that out?”

The thing that most people miss when considering the mountains of the great basin is that these are, although limited in aerial extent, serious kick-ass mountains. The elevation of Wheeler Peak at the tippy-top of Great Basin National Park is 13,063 ft — exceeding the tallest peaks in Idaho, Arizona and Montana and just a bit shy of the top spots in Utah, Wyoming and Nevada (in the Sierra Nevada). When you toss in the associated facts that the great-basin high points are often little used and visited, haven’t anything resembling cell-phone service, are largely lacking in navigable roads to the top-parts (or lower-middle-parts even), have lousy trail systems, and are often only accessed by traveling dozens and dozens of miles on dirt, these can range from daunting to downright intimidating.

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Here we are again. Sorry. It is a hot topic that has already warn thin to those who are less intrigued by all things digital. I just have a few thoughts about it, which I must spew, and then I will leave it be until the next thing happens. I’m tempted to promise that I will drop the subject entirely. But I cannot. Like a hardened viewer of Lost or the Celebrity Apprentice, I have no free will in the matter any longer and must only follow the “story” as it unwinds.

Since my last post on Flash and the Ipad a few things have come up. First I’ve spent a fair amount of time working in the Adobe CS5 environment and am prepared to declare it a success, if not a riotous success. The changes from CS4 to CS5 are substantial compared with those from CS3 to CS4. Second, I’ve spent several hours in the Adobe developer week online seminars which mainly pertained to all matters of Flash, Flex and, in my case PHP.  Third, and most importantly, I’ve watched the Google IO developer conference both via the two keynote addresses on YouTube and through zeitgeist monitoring of the phrase Android in the twittisphere. All of these lead me to believe that Flash is off-the-mat and in a much stronger position than I had formerly thought.

Regarding CS5, there are major improvements in every program and the new Flash Builder would be an enormous success if it weren’t for the Apple debacle and the inability of many other devices to handle the bulky files for which Flex is famous. Also the InDesign features which enable Flash handling of interactive InDesign documents work. This is a big deal because it opens the web, or at least the portion of the web which is open to Flash, to a myriad of print designers. The feature was promised in CS4 and was bungled severely. Flash Professional/Flash Builder integration is also happening. Though I’ve encountered a few serious glitches in the hand-off between programs. This is probably me just stumbling about without an appropriate reference book.

Regarding the Adobe developer week seminars, I left with a sense of the power of the Flash Professional IDE in particular for the development of mobile applications.  The oft-repeated statement that Flash is a non-starter for mobile devices because it is dependent on the mouse-over property is patently false. The opposite is, in fact, now true, where Flash is a much better platform for programing hand gestures and so forth than are other approaches. The only potential barrier to this is the possibility of Apple litigation — Apple recently patented a large number of hand gestures used on mobile devices and the Adobe methods for programatically implementing these were developed with the iPhone in mind. I left the seminars generally joyous but disappointed in two major areas: one was that a rumored feature for copying Flash files as HTML5 for pasting into Dreamweaver isn’t present.  The second is that PHP support remains poor, or at least confusing, particularly in the case of AMF. I found myself chasing the same 2.0 version of AMFPHP that didn’t exist a while ago and doesn’t appear to exist still today.

I watched the two Google keynotes with a growing sense of horror — like watching a huge, all powerful Oprah capable of devastating everything in it’s path, but, because of general benevolence, not doing so. These are, without question, the smartest guys and gals in the room. I could go into a lengthy outline of what they are working on for Android, their alternative to the Apple OS for mobile devices, but it would be better to direct the reader to both keynotes on YouTube ( the second being the more significant). The thing that I find most shocking about Google is the amount of progress that they have made in only a year, and the breadth of areas in which they have made progress.

The big take-aways, in my opinion, beyond the simple one that Google is really very scary, is that Android will become a dominant player in the mobile space, that it runs Flash extremely well, and that Flash will almost certainly be the dominant development environment for both sites and apps optimized for Android. The second Google keynote concluded with a confab of CEO’s (Google, Adobe, Intel, Logitech, Sony, BestBuy and DishTV). They collectively ridiculed Apple’s closed-garden approach and laid out plans for  Android-driven Google TV and the coming interplay between web, tv and mobile Android environments. Given Apple’s current litigation with HTC and Nokia, the battle lines in the mobile wars are now drawn: Apple versus pretty much everyone else with the exception of a Switzerland in Microsoft.

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Pepper: The Official Photography Project Dog

It has been a miserable spring here in the mountains of Utah. Very similar to the Cubs season this year, the weather has reached 500 (the statistical midpoint between a good year and a bad one) numerous times only to collapse into an abhorrent free-fall requiring a good sense of humor.

This unfortunate spring has been made all the worse by the fact that my children were attending different high schools and their vacations did not coincide. So the photography project should evolve into an almost year-long thing in this instance. Hopefully anyway.  This year, in particular, I’m looking forward to my kids’ release from academia more so than are my kids.

Right now I’m fleshing out my new site with photography and illustration galleries that have been long promised but not delivered. Something more important invariably pops up. I’m giving it a good go now so I should be posting quite a bit of the imagery that has been laying about my desktop for a while.

These should include some studio food and spirits and portrait work (separate projects), Vancouver photography from last November, Saline Environments project work as it crops up, and some more resort HDRI.  That’s all I can think of at the moment, but there are probably more bunches of unprocessed photos in hiding here and there on the occasional hard-drive.

I’ll also be posting the periodic babble regarding the state of the digital world, films and so forth. So I should be hitting the blog a bit more than I have lately over the next month or so.

I’m switching over to a Cannon 7D as my main camera and am tempted to include a bit of video here and there as well.

The Saline Environments Project, thus far, has brought Kate and I out on four short trips. One to Stansbury Island and the Saltair area on the southern shore of the Great Salt Lake, two to Antelope Island (an island on the southeast side of the lake populated with, ironically, bison) and a very early Spring trip across the Utah West Desert on Route 80 to the Bonneville Salt Flats ( in the vicinity of Wendover Nevada), which were, at the time, covered with water. It is a pleasure doing a project that has so many pieces so close to home.

I vividly remember my first trip to Death Valley National Park about five or six years ago. It was intended as a three-day excursion from a longer trip in Las Vegas. We drove well into the night, camped and, on waking, took a short drive in the middle, lowest elevation parts of the park, only to realize that we had gone so far and had ended up in what is, essentially, the Great Salt Lake (hotter, drier version). We do intend to make it back there as part of this project, but largely as a matter of completeness. It is, after all, the capital of the terrestrial-brine world.

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It’s been a while.  A few small projects have jumped up here and there and I’ve been busy redoing my own site. Please excuse the mess. I’m at a stage now where I like having it both up and under construction at the same time. It may be a while before I get around to finishing things up completely (separate style sheet for the iPad). I have a lot of galleries to tend to and will be in fairly substantial trouble if I get busy with other things — having put stuff up while only partially complete.

Much has happened in the  feud, war, imbroglio or whatever between Apple and Adobe since my last post.  I hesitate to use the word amazing, but it does seem appropriate. This morning NPR mentioned that the Feds are getting involved. It would be good, I think, for a few enlightening rays of sunshine to find some way into the story. That may be what the Federal government can provide. On the other hand I hate to see things come down to Federal investigations and the lawsuits that often ensue thereafter.

Since my last post, the Wall Street Journal has reported that modifications to the Apple OS, made by Apple, are likely responsible for many of the problems that Apple users are encountering with Flash; Apple, in an out-of-nowhere unilateral swipe has excluded Flash developers from the iPhone/iPad platform via language in the developer’s agreement; Google has responded by jumping right into bed with all of the spurned Flash developers (May 20th should be an exciting day as the Flash – Android marriage is formally announced); Apple has patented pretty much every conceivable hand gesture; Steve Jobs penned a really long letter about Flash; Microsoft has canned the Courier; HP has dropped the Slate and picked up Palm; Adobe’s top Flash evangelist has used the “screw” word in formal reference to Apple; Adobe has released CS5; and now rumors of the Federal inquiry into Apple. Wow. These are exciting times. I’m thinking that Adobe  has the upper hand at present, but it all is starting to look like a lengthy prize fight where the lead changes every other round and both combatants leave in worse shape than they began.

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