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.

It is easy, by examining the various agendas of all involved, to speculate as to why these things are happening. Apple has a large and loyal following of the secular religious variety (hardly a murmur made when told to just hold it differently) and the marketing support provided by the old-school media on Apple’s behalf has been unprecedented. CNBC’s coverage was more or less a continuous Apple commercial for around a solid month or two. For them, and those like them, the walled-garden model constitutes a lifeline to the olden days.

The last two items which received similar attention from CNBC, that I can recall, were the war in Iraq and universal home ownership. On a purely intuitive basis this doesn’t bode well for Apple over the long haul .

The Android platform is fundamentally flawed in that it can be taken, messed with, and distributed willy-nilly by anyone who wants to use it. It therefore becomes, at least in part, the dominion of the half-baked and half-cocked.

And Adobe’s wish to build out a rigid, expensive, complex ecosystem of interdependent tools has crashed severely against the rocky shoreline of a large number of open source solutions that penetrate Adobe’s self-perception of impenetrability left, right and center.

With all of this excitement behind the scenes, the Internet is foundering and getting downright boring. WordPress here, WordPress there, Worpress is everywhere and it is obvious and tired. Advertising and design firms are flopping all over the place. For example, a quick review of a local Utah site containing links to advertising firms reveals that around half  have let their sites go by the wayside and another twenty or thirty percent have not done much of anything to maintain what is left of their online presence from headier days. It could be argued that this is attributable to the economy but I think there is more to it than that. People just haven’t a clue. There is no direction to the Internet. The only vehicles that can reach across the various platforms are canned creations brought to us by Joomla, WordPress, Drupal, etc., and these are becoming so abundant that their sameness is casting a dreary pall. It also appears, from a cursory review of Twitter, that a new WordPress redirect virus is afoot about every other day.

A case in point of the current state of the debacle is Adobe’s pitch for using the export of InDesign files to Flash for modification and packaging for viewing of magazines on tablet devices. An example issue that they’ve distributed is absolutely beautiful and establishes the workflow and form factor as something that should be rapidly adopted for online delivery by magazines large and small. Except for the minor problem that the only tablet device that is in use by anyone at this time is specifically built such that Flash can’t be viewed on it. This is made worse in recalling that this export utility was originally promised by Adobe to be part of it’s CS4 release around two years ago. The print designer has now been screwed twice: first by Adobe in failing to release the utility when it could have been used, and now by Apple for refusing to use it now that it exists.

It is fairly clear at this point that Apple could easily facilitate the use of Flash on its devices and Adobe could easily facilitate the use of it’s Flash authoring tools for creation of HTML5. Neither appears willing to budge, and, I think, at their own detriment.

Now that I’ve gone and gotten myself all in a tizzy, let me say that much of this is good. Apple’s hegemony over the high-end mobile device market is rapidly fading into oblivion, as is Adobe’s hegemony over the sophisticated web-content production market. We should all take a deep breath and wait, and watch. I’m really becoming interested in a lot of the complex html5/javascript work which remains in it’s infancy but is popping up on Twitter more and more. In another pleasant development, via Twitter, now that the iPad has been available in Europe for a month or so, many grandmother’s on that continent appear to be receiving the items as second-hand gifts.

In the meantime I’m spending a lot of time with Adobe’s video editing and enhancing products (After Effects, Premier Pro and Soundbooth), playing with DSLR video techniques, and building my skill-set. All the while thinking: “Can’t we all just get along”.  Someday soon, someday soon….

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.

I once had three simultaneous flat tires on a valley road somewhere around a hundred or so miles from pavement  in the middle parts of nowhere in Nevada (bit of a pickle). Our last trip also provided it’s share of set-backs and debacles. Kate broke her finger in an errant car-door incident on the first night, a long way from civilization. Most everywhere we went we encountered the unfortunate result of the immediate temporal juxtaposition of winter and summer resulting in snow/mush-packed trails, overflowing streams, a partial midnight campground evacuation, a full campground closure due to a mud/debris flow (same campground), and general mayhem and yuck. And we capped everything off with a lengthy episode involving finding treatment for said broken finger in the small, somewhat odd and historic mining-boomlet of Elko.

On the other hand, in a normally dry place we encountered water flowing abundantly from nature’s every orifice and left two days early with a large number of great basin waterfall photographs (somewhat rare indeed). Because Elko is the business end of one the world’s largest gold centers, I have a good excuse to be in the area often, so we’ll have to catch up with the rest of the sky islands photography later (another trip in August is already planned).

Great Basin National Park is now one of my favorite parks. It is small and the parts accessible to the regular traveler are even smaller. Mention of bristlecone pines, a major feature of the park, was all the rage at Salt Lake City cocktail parties around ten or fifteen years ago when the park was brand-spanking new.  These are some of the oldest individual trees on the planet. But fads fade and I have heard little said of the park in the last five years.

It is special for a couple of reasons. It isn’t well visited, so is free of the parading clots of hikers characteristic of most summertime National Park trails. And, it does have a good paved road which accesses a very high basin just below the highest peaks of the range. One of the most striking features of sky-island ranges is that there is a rapid progression of ecosystems as one moves upward in elevation. This is due to both the steepness of the ranges and the dramatic variability in precipitation with the valleys being extremely dry and the summits being extremely wet. So, in the twelve miles of the park road, it is possible to access greater ecological variety than is available in vast areas of the eastern and mid-western United States. For someone fascinated with ecological systems, this is a wonderful thing.

The great tragedy that I now associate with the park is that, on a six mile hike with a steep 2,500 foot vertical climb (up and then back down again), Kate left me in her long-legged, teenage dust. This is especially significant because the last time I hiked in the park, it was with her on my backpack. Age happens. Sad but true.

Lamoille Canyon is a small, stunning place in the Ruby Mountains outside of Elko. It offers topography similar to the Cottonwood canyons above Salt Lake City, and Glacier National Park, and the high-thin waterfalls of Yosemite. All of this probably should go without mention on the interweb because it is one of those places which almost no-one knows exists. It is very small, so even a minor uptick in visitation could be tragic. At the time we were there a massive melting was underway and several-hundred-foot waterfalls were to be found at something like quarter-mile intervals on both sides of the canyon road. The downside of this was that all of these waterfalls collected along the narrow canyon bottom resulting in  big campground mess in the middle parts of the canyon and flooding in the town of Lamoille at the place where the canyon empties into the valley.

I could, and perhaps should, get into, at length, the campground goings on: an ice dam breaching, mud/debris-flows, a bridge shifted on its foundation, the river flowing over roads and through campsites next to occupied sites, and a middle of the night evacuation. But all of that was rendered water-under-the-bridge when the Forest Service arrived and shut the whole place down resulting in our early departure.

This edition of our sky-island photography can be visited by clicking on the above image. There are a large number of macro-shots in this group. Forgive me, I’m fond of flowers. Several panoramas were created using Photoshop CS5.  Any HDRI imagery was done using Photomatrix prior to processing of the tone-mapped image in Camera RAW and Photoshop. Also there are several shots from Elko which occupies the valley below the Ruby mountains and is fairly characteristic of a central Nevada town. It is known as an economic center for the Carlin trend gold mining district, all things cowboy (including a cowboy poetry festival) and Basque food and culture. It’s also a good place to visit the doctor if need presents itself, and if you can find his office.

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.

This all establishes Flash as a viable if not dominant approach to building sites and apps which will be largely functional and easily translatable across almost all computers (macs and low-powered net-books will likely prove to continue to be a bit squirrelly), Android phones and tablets, and Google TV. It is my suspicion that the purchase of Palm by HP is with access to the Flash development community in mind.

Also, it appears clear that HTML5 and CSS3 are coming soon to a browser near you. Google’s overwhelming support was the theme of their first Keynote and it included reference to a new Google open-source video codec, a new open-source font library, and the contemporaneous distribution of a new set of HTML5 and CSS3 extensions for Dreamweaver by Adobe. All of this is very good indeed, but should be the topic of an altogether different post. I think I’m going to be loving both Flash and HTML5/CSS3/jQuery for a long time to come.

As I learn more about mobile platforms I think that ease of development and freedom of access will play huge roles in the future of the availability of applications on the various platforms. Recently I’ve realized that not only is Flash non-functional on the iPad but a fair number of jQuery plugins won’t run on it as well. The iPad could easily become the new IE6: an albeit successful, afterthought platform for which developers direct minimal attention as a frustrating requirement of one difficult company, with crossed fingers and a willingness to compromise on quality.  That, in turn, could control who wins the battle for the mobile consumer.

All of these arguments are largely mute anyway, Android is obviously going to win.

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.

Please do forgive the large number of photographs of junk. It turns out that Kate is extremely fond of photographing abstractions built of  junk. So I must photograph considerable junk abstractions as well. The saline deserts of the American west are first class places for finding photogenic junk. So be forewarned.

All of the images were processed in Camera Raw and Photoshop CS5. I personally still find the Photomatrix tools superior to the new CS5 HDRI techniques. So in cases where HDRI processing was utilized, it was done with Photomatrix before Camera Raw. About half of the images were not shot as HDRI. There are several blended panoramas using Photoshop methods. These were processed, flattened and saved as jpeg’s before Camera Raw manipulation.  A few new CS5 features were used extensively. Content-aware fill used around the edges of panoramic shots works particularly well. New edge-detection techniques are very similar to a plug-in edge detection filter which was present in CS3 and removed from CS4. One thing I absolutely love about the new Photoshop is the zoom and pan technology. It’s a small but important thing, speeding up my work flow considerably.

A funny thing happened with the much-ballyhooed content-aware fill feature. In an image with several bison standing in a field I tried removing one of the bison because it was partially obscured by a large feeder or some other piece of metallic junk. When I removed both the bison and the junk, only a bison remained. This left me flabbergasted for a short moment because for all the world it appeared as though Photoshop had removed the junk and revealed the bison standing behind the junk.  This would have been, to say the least, special. I then realized that it had found another bison with a back end similar to the removed bison (bison back-ends are generally of a similar form), warped the second bison to match the general shape of the back-half of the removed bison, duplicated the second bison, and put him just where the first bison had been. I got rid of the second fellow because it just didn’t seem right.

The first of, hopefully, five galleries on the Saline Environments of the great basin can be visited by clicking the image above.

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.

My guess remains that Microsoft’s acceptance of HTML5, or not, is extremely important. Also how well Flash runs on Android matters enormously. If it runs well, Google could walk away with a majority share of a huge market that they casually stumbled upon. The largest LinkedIn group of Flash developers is around 8,000 strong. The total membership of all of the Flash and Flex development groups is around 45,000. By whatever measure, there are a lot of independent developers just being handed over to Google and whichever platforms accept Flash. Google’s Android is reported to be approaching 50,000 apps by the speculated May-20th wedding. Quite the dowry. Who knows what will happen next. This is all a lot of fun to watch — back to the boxing metaphor.

Meanwhile, I’ve begun wrestling with Drupal. I’m also becoming immersed in CS5. Oh so much fun. Illustrator is, once again, the champion. The Dreamweaver introspection and Photoshop content-aware features appear to work well. I’ll leave the details and thoughts on the rest of the suite for another post.

This new year finds us in heady and important days for the late-middle parts of a rather nasty recession. Apple has, perhaps, forced an enormous change in the way we consume our, well, everything; a new iteration of Adobe’s Creative Suite is about to appear as if from nowhere; and, at least where I live, Spring has suffered an enormous setback. A whole passel of nasty storms, over a five-day period, has dumped 30 to 50 inches of fresh whiteness all over the Wasatch Mountains at the close of what had been a snow-depleted Winter. This results in a temporary suspension of belief in the concept of Spring which can only be relieved with the onset of televised baseball from distant lands.

The assault on Flash by Apple and the belief that this will result in a resurgence of an economically-viable old media in modified form is the really big story: a thing that may make a difference in the way people go about their lives five-years hence.  Whether this will all pan out remains to be seen. The success of the “magical device” and pending tablets of similar functionality is undeniable. That this will resuscitate old media is a much dicier question. The answer is probably no and this last hopeful emergence is a bit of a sad ghost-dance. It would be a very good thing if everyone who watches kittens-flushing-toilets on YouTube suddenly switched to reading lengthy articles, full of thought, complicated sentence structure and good design, on their portable devices. Unfortunately this great hope for a new world order relies on a certain sensibility on the part of the public which has, long ago, left the building. Free is difficult to beat as well. If the accumulators of others work could just disappear before those who actually do the work which is accumulated, that would be a small step in the right direction.

I’ve been spending much time on coming up to speed with advanced CSS and a couple of javasript libraries: mainly jQuery.  This is invariably a good thing for me (hiatus’s where I go away, with a big pile of books, and learn a bunch of new stuff). I always come back smiling and thankful for having spent the time on something new (the butterfly or snake having shed it’s skin: either). I’m about to emerge and have two overwhelming thoughts to share.  This is remarkable: AS3 implemented via Flex and javascript implemented via  jQuery are almost exactly the same thing. The big difference is that the later is vastly limited by varied implementation on varied user agents and devices. How can one be the embodiment of fetid disaster and the other a form of pending world salvation? The other thought is this: it all comes down to Microsoft. If they play along and implement CSS3 and HTML5 nice-nice, things will go swimmingly. If not, not.

That the valid-code-open-source crowd would so exuberantly cheer the placement of the sole avenue of progress of the interwebs into the hands of those who provided IE6 to the world is simply amazing. This at the same time when jQuery plugins designed for the singular purpose of crashing IE browsers are all the rage on Twitter.

Many developers, I think, are a little happy about the state of world technological affairs because it could mean that everything above a basement level application will have to be done three or more times such that it will run on all the requisite platforms within more than one walled garden (we can count on both Apple and Microsoft putting up walls thus far). I wonder if there is a public ready to support all of the development.  As the first events of the great depression unfolded, there was a world movement to wall off national economies. Protectionism only caused the collective world economy to completely loose momentum and collapse.  We’ll have to wait and see what this new corporate protectionism does for the internet as a whole.

And coming in from left field: Adobe is about to announce a new version of their Creative Suite. This concept has been met, from what I can discern, with a large amount of angst-filled shudders and screams.  Not a good thing. Part of me shares this sense of impending frustration. But another part of me, the child within, is absolutely giddy.  Using the Creative Suite is and will continue to be one of my all-time favorite things. Imagine the world without it. Hopefully Adobe will be moving forward in great big strides. Existential crises can have that effect and the company’s last offerings have had the unfortunate tendency to take as much away as provide anew.

Very little has been said about what to expect. Advances in Flash and Flash-builder, which appear to be the strongest part of the offering, will squarely bump up against Apple’s stated aim of destroying Flash. Changes to Photoshop, which have been shown to the world, look very cool. I’m personally hoping, strenuously, for big changes to Dreamweaver (with better off-the-shelf CMS integration and easy sharing of fxg across all of the various tools). Illustrator always quietly marches forward. And InDesign could become a substantial web presence, if Apple and the new-old media have their way anyway. As a part of my recent endeavors I’ve spent a small amount of time with Fireworks and would love to see something more come out of that. Most everything the program does can be replicated with Photoshop and Illustrator, but it is very nice to have it all in one spot, and seamless integration with Dreamweaver would be great.

Let’s go CUBS. Oh yes, I almost forgot: Hooray for the Google.

The Big Fella

Today’s the big day. I just love the Oscars. This, because I love the movies and am drawn to thought-provoking film; over-represented in the Oscars. Let me preface by saying that I haven’t seen either of the two films which are going to sweep the whole shabang. These being: Precious and The Hurt Locker. The first deals with the subject of incest which is a topic that I just don’t want to visit. I’m sure it is a splendid film that I would benefit from seeing. But it’s just not my cup of tea. Not a place where I’d enjoy spending any time. The second deals with men who deal with explosives, and I’ve spent a fair amount of my life as a professional dealing with explosives, and this is a place that, for personal emotional reasons, I don’t want to revisit.

So, having said all that, here’s my take on this evening’s proceedings:

• Best Picture: District 9,
• Best Actor: Colin Firth,
• Best Supporting Actor: Matt Damon,
• Best Actress: Meryl Streep,
• Best Supporting Actress: Maggie Gyllenhaal,
• Best Animated Feature: Up,
• Best Art Direction: Avatar,
• Cinematography: Avatar,
• Best Directing: Avatar,
• Best Documentary Feature: The Cove,
• Best Writing: District 9,
• Best Original Screenplay: A Serious Man.

All of that goes out the window, of course, because some combination of Precious and The Hurt Locker is likely to steal the show.

There are a few gross oversights, I think, in the omission of the films Sunshine Cleaning (entirely) and Julia & Juliet (from most categories).  I would have tossed nominations to Sunshine Cleaning for best picture, writing, supporting actress and supporting actor, and Julia & Juliet should have gotten nods for best picture, writing, directing and supporting actor.   I would have gone with Sunshine for taking best writing and Stanley Tucci for best supporting actor (in J&J). He is brilliant in this picture and out-shows even Meryl streep, who is a tad overdone (pun intended). There are also a whole passel of documentaries that I think should have received greater consideration, as a lover of that particular genre.

I give District 9 more credit than it is due because I think it a courageous film, in unusual ways and on many levels. I’m curious with the inclusion of Blind Side and Inglorious Basterds in some of the categories.

When viewed through the prism of the Oscars, this past year in film was perhaps a bit of let-down. There are many good films but nothing outstanding. Avatar complicates this because it is absolutely brilliant when considered technically and fairly mediocre when considered otherwise. This is another year and, with tomorrow, we can all look forward again.

I’ve been toying with social media more and more, after a seminar associated with Sundance last month. Facebook is certainly very complicated, not from a usability standpoint but from one of social coordination (for lack of a better term). I have several Facebook accounts. One is old by Facebook standards and involves  high school friends because I use a nickname as my Facebook name. This one is fun. As teenagers we hung out in a city park and got into various levels of trouble together. There was an aspect of family present in our group of those years, which I’m not sure if contemporary kids enjoy. Then we dissipated out into the wide world and only recently have rejoined on Facebook. One-by-one new stragglers arrive and it has become a quite-vital ongoing reunion.

Another account is brand-spanking new and involves a mix of new and old friends, professional acquaintances and others whom I don’t know well. I find myself stumbling about a bit on this one and am seeing mild premonitions of the decline of the form.  The fact that the platform looks forward to marketing as the thing that will provide the main source of revenue is problematic. I’m thinking that Facebook can work only passively for marketing and will resist, as a matter of the form, any overt manipulation in that regard. But I’m a poor candidate for doing a lot with Facebook as I’m the solitary sort who would rather spend time with a good book, or a good program. I also learned that another fellow with my same name and academic background had previously friended one of my old college chums.

My other accounts are all strange ones where I’ve begun and stopped and lost a password or never really started at all. It is impossible to actually close a Facebook account. So they live on as me without my participation. My favorite one of these is an account I started a while ago and inactivated. I do have the password for this one and occasionally log on by accident and re-activate the account. I close it immediately, but those friends involved in it, an odd sorting I must say, are surely all reintroduced to one another for a short period every time. What is one to do?

I’m beginning to become a fan of Twitter. A while back a friend told me that Twitter is cool and I, of course, failed to heed his advice. It is cool for several reasons. It provides an excellent way to measure collective cultural opinions and thoughts. It is good for following sources of work-related information. I’m currently learning jQuery and have a running search available via Twitter. Every hour or so I’m passively provided a new good idea or two. It is also a great way to actively get answers to simple work-related questions that would take hours of mad googling in the dark to resolve otherwise. And it is a great way to channel thoughts into other social media. A post in Twitter can be directed to LinkedIn and Facebook as well. Whoopee. I still see it as being potentially dangerous as a marketing tool. Perhaps enough so as to be avoided for that purpose. Things can get very unexpectedly out of hand.

I remain convinced that, among the social gang-of-four (MySpace is already no longer of much relevance), LinkedIn will prove to be the ever-shining star. Over the last couple of weeks, related to my recent social media pursuits, I’ve found myself explaining social media, as best as I can, to four people who I would categorize as disinclined. People over thirty who aren’t in marketing, “creative”, or youth-oriented professions tend toward aversion to social media.  They remember and attempt to hold onto a lost value, privacy.

Fortunately, there are some 90 million (I’m quoting an article which I recently accessed via Facebook here) professionals marketing themselves as available to assist with one’s Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and MySpace needs. An alternative is to find a neighborhood tenth-grader willing to assist. This could get sketchy though.  And, if there are any more examples of social media run amok: along the recent lines of Toyota, Kevin Smith or Apple, the concept of social media as the next-best-thing in marketing platforms may quickly dissolve.  So the disinclined may not need to give further attention to the matter. I’m monitoring carefully and planning on adding to the collective babble with a “Social Media for the Disinclined” post should my less-and-less dubious outlook prove wrong.

thesixtyone

All good things must come to an end, such is the case with this year’s Sundance Film Festival. I need to get back to doing other things. So it is with only a little further ado that I say goodbye to this year’s fest.

I had wanted to spend some time on: The Company Men, Wasteland and Freedom Riders (all good), and 3 Backyards (incomprehensible). Hopefully, I’ll get to them later in the year. On a kind note, my personal experience this time around was just absolutely fantastic. They have a new festival director and this may have been the cause, or it might have been a change in the general tone of film, or maybe I’m just getting better at the flick-picking. Almost all of the films I saw this year, documentary and dramatic, were hopeful and forward-looking, rather than the now slightly out-of-vogue 60-minutes style of nasty finger pointing. My wise mother has told me that America was that way (people looking for a cure rather than a cause) during the depression as well.

It began with an unfortunate mix of the first festival weekend (this is always a little crazy), a national snowboarding championship event, and a succession of the first real blizzards of the season. Things got funky.  Then everything opened up.  I’m enjoying Sundance much more now that the economy has slid and the hype (foregoing word should be capitalized, placed in a 30-point font and colored fluorescent pink) has died way-way down. All but one of the films I saw was either entirely sold out or close to it.

I started off with the tweet-seminar which was of greater value than I first gave it credit for, having allowed the concepts to sink in.  I also attended a “3D in film” workshop, which was excellent. It was kind of funny to watch many of the extraordinarily-attractive streaming out of the room when the filmmakers on the dais began discussing physics at length. We are entering an era where funny glasses will be necessary at almost every movie. That isn’t good. Avatar has established a direction, and everyone is going to be following it for a while. Avatar is only a meager beginning to something better and rather awesome when you think about it.

This is the first go-round where I can say that I didn’t see a bad film. A couple of the highlights included: being introduced to the audience (in the re-screening of the classic film Metropolitan) as the person who was sitting in the seat of Roger Ebert when the film was first screened in the early 90′s. Beforehand the director asked me to stand on cue. Everyone turned around, smiling, and then looked confused, thinking: “that isn’t Roger Ebert”.

The premier of Animal Kingdom was special for me. Just to be there when something important happens. Writer/director David Michod is certainly going places and that was the moment when he hit the big time. The film offered one of the two lines which I would choose as the best of the fest. Jacki Weaver, who plays the matriarch of the despicable brood: “I’m just having trouble finding my positive spin.” She was offered three new projects during the Q&A.

My other selection for a great moment in one of the films was in Freedom Riders. Robert Kennedy speaking on behalf of the Federal Government to the rest of the world in 1961:

“There’s no question that in the next thirty or forty years, a Negro can also achieve the same position that my brother has as President of the the United States….”

Moving on. I visited thesixtyone yesterday. It is a music site to which I’ve linked from my site for around a year now.  The direct sale of music without a large corporate gatekeeper is an appealing concept and thesixtyone implements it well. Anyone can upload songs and play-priority is selected by collective listener input. Once there, you can choose various moods of music or follow a series of songs which are picked by an algorithm using both song-ratings and the perceived taste of the listener.  The cool thing about yesterday’s visit is that the site has been completely redesigned using javascript very well.  It’s still bumpy with counter-intuitive features that take some figuring out. Still a work in progress. If you find yourself there, you could well be looking at, for better or worse, the future of the well-styled  internet for the next while. The Facebook Connect feature is particularly smooth. Audio delivery is in Flash.

The site brings up a couple of thoughts. The first is how dramatically design can  impact the experience of the user.  The site previously had a newspaper style layout and was much less enjoyable.  The second is that high resolution album art is back. All illustrators can collectively jump up and down in glee. Just get out there and find some bands to work with and make something powerful together.

Peace.

My personal opinion about what happened is:  Apple, having opposing lines of business: selling gizmos and selling stuff that runs on gizmos, crossed something of a rubicon.  They were faced with either marketing their device with an obvious and important feature missing or giving up the ability to control and monetize all sorts of things that run on the device.

Apple chose a bold and aggressive path.  They targeted Flash as very bad for almost anything (or Adobe as lazy at any rate) and themselves as providers of a forward-looking salve to the badness in having excluded it. Once that sort of argument is made, retreat isn’t likely. None of this is good for Adobe, but I think, in many ways, it has turned out worse for Apple.

Fresh from a Sundance seminar on social-network marketing, I quickly installed my Tweetdeck when I first heard of the missing Flash content. With the search terms Flash and Ipad, I monitored, every now and then, as the tweetstream unfolded. This proceeded and has outlasted any conventional media coverage and, to me, was just incredible in both sheer volume and the varied directions of the content.

The tweets took three general forms:

The disappointed were those who had been over-hyped and were saddened to see the device was less magical than they had thought it would be.  These tweets contained lists of items that they wanted to see on the device,  almost always including Flash.  These were prominent early, diminished rapidly from that maxima, and have continued to roll in steadily.

The Flash-defenders tended to focus almost exclusively on the absence of Flash, Apple’s motivations in having excluding it, and how useless they feel the device would be without it. Their overall theme was the blue lego block/tile which is present when Flash or other plugin content can’t be shown. These were fairly constant for the first week but have dissipated dramatically in the last couple of days.

The HTML5 fanboys were those who dislike Adobe and Flash very much. The depth of the animosity is surprising. These tweets contained both glee and malice in equal measure.

Early on, the tenor of these evolved from a  general sense that “Adobe is evil” and “Adobe’s comeuppance is glorious” (paraphrasing there) to the well-spun reason for the Flash exclusion: that it is buggy and crashes browsers. Most unfortunately for Apple, the computers  mentioned as crashing were overwhelmingly mac’s. I can’t remember seeing a single mention of a PC crash.  In a tangential evolutionary path, tweets listed other software (word etc.) that crashes mac’s and offered thanks to Apple for excluding those. These are somewhat diminished from elevated early levels, but in the last day have shifted away from citing performance problems on mac’s.

A quick note on how Twitter works is important here. I was monitoring for the two search terms: Flash and Ipad. Tweets are often sent within small networks and re-tweeted (or restated and sent again) by those who receive them.  So a single popular tweet can be magnified, by a factor in the thousands or hundred’s-of-thousands probably, in a view of all of the tweets that mention certain terms.

My take-away from all of this is that: two years ago, a public relations or marketing strategy could be thought-out and implemented using pundits, journalists, celebrity endorsement, advertising in all sorts of media, product placement etc.  If, for any reason, the strategy took a wrong turn, all of these could be managed.

Twitter and other forms of social media are very different. If a message (Flash is buggy)  takes a wrong turn (my mac is constantly crashing), the wrong message can avalanche and there is no control.

Recently there have been many examples of the positive use of social media in marketing and political campaigns.  There is a less happy lesson in all of this. The tweetage of the disappointed were unfortunate for Apple but could have been repaired with addition of this and that to the device before release. The push-back from the Flash crowd was probably expected and could be explained as the disappointment of those left behind. But the unanticipated tweet-roar that mac’s are constantly crashing, from the Apple faithful, may have done some real damage to the brand.

I did an extremely small amount of research, googling four of the mac-crash-afflicted, and determined that they are probably of the very young demographic.  So, from my entirely unscientific exploration, Flash appears likely to crash your browser if you are using a mac, and extremely likely to crash your browser if you are using a mac and looking forward to your sixteenth birthday.

Speaking very generally, the possible magnification of an opinion, misconception, or whatever in Twitter due to rabid retweeting by those who share a particular prejudice is more than a little scary. On the other hand, it is a wonderful check on conventional media.

Perhaps social media should be considered more of a biological system: only marginally predictable over time and capable of becoming out-of-control. Politicians and corporations will surely look at it with greater caution going forward.

Time to shut down my personal TweetDeck. The contraption may be the greatest distraction of all time, including the television.

The current status of the debate, per my little tweetdeck, is: “Flash is terribly buggy and an historical web practice already” vs” the internet will consist of vast holes filled with blue lego icons if Flash is excluded”.

Quietly, yesterday, Communications Arts selected a webpick of the day (26000 Vodka) that puts almost all four trillion of these tweet-rants, on both sides, to rest. The concept is degradation.  This, simply put, is: knowing that not everything can be supported on every platform, a developer can present the lowest common denominator technology first, determine if a more sophisticated technology is supported (either by asking the user to choose or directly evaluating which technologies are supported on the device), and then make use of the highest level of technology that will work or that the user finds most comfortable.

In the majority of cases, it’s not all that more difficult to build a site that will provide the best experience that the current technology can provide (using Flash, Silverlight or whatever) , and degrade to something that will offer a less vibrant and innovative, though stable, experience on devices which don’t support those technologies.

So neither the “Flash is dead”, nor the “myriad of lego boxes” arguments have merit. A lesser tier of content will make it’s way to the Ipad via the web.  The App Store will be the source of any sophisticated stuff which runs on the device, and this will be entirely preselected by Apple. Hulu likely will never be welcome.

This will be a good thing for Flash beyond the Ipad controversy because currently many netbooks and other gizmos are not well suited for running large Flash applications.

Beyond this relatively simple and elegant solution, here are a few of my thoughts:

The Ipad will not be going away. It will start off slowly but will improve with new versions and will become an important platform whose design requirements must be met. I also think it is a really cool device that does have a place in the world and will open a whole new realm of print design for the internet. I don’t want an Iphone, but I might be interested in a third generation Ipad. Unless, of course, a competing version arrives in the interim which will support Flash, allow multitasking, has a USB port and isn’t tethered to AT&T.

Flash is good.  It can do many things that can’t be approached by other technologies (although Silverlight may surprise us all in the long run). People tend to think of Flash in terms of video and annoying lame ads because that is where it is most commonly recognized as being present. It is more ubiquitous and powerful than most imagine.

Flash’s strengths are in the realms of science, art, gaming, involved-branded-experience and video. It is also constantly changing (although it has been purposefully hampered in this evolution by Adobe, for business reasons that aren’t clear) and will be much more a year from now than it is today.  So comparison of what will (possibly) be done with other technologies in a year or so with what Flash can do today is not a reasonable argument. Flash is a moving target. And now that a fire has been set beneath our good friends at Adobe, I strongly suspect that Flash is off to the races like nobody’s business.

The web has progressed from brochure types of sites to dynamic sites and now is moving into a new realm of applications. These can be purchased, advertising-supported, or branded-experience-driven. Flash is currently the best product, and has the best potential going forward, for building really complex applications, including, soon, those that are delivered through the Apple App Store.

Flash CS5 will allow for export of an xml DOM file of the base flash file with media folders. Someone may build applications that can convert these, with a little fidgeting and know-how, into less sophisticated HTML5, HTML4 or other Ipad-supported technologies. It might even be Adobe. In other words the various Flash development tools may soon generate all types of Ipad compatible files in addition to files which require the Flash player to run. One stop development.

Apple fans are tweeting at an alarming rate, a dozen (up to maybe fifty) tweets per minute (for days and days now), that Flash is buggy, causes constant crashing, doesn’t even run well on their mac’s.  Recently the tweets of this variety have begun adding other software (Microsoft word etc) to the list of things that make Apple products constantly crash and thanking Apple for excluding those products as well. The ultimate tweet along this tweet-jectory will be that mac’s run nothing other than Apple software without crashing and it is all somebody else’ fault. This is not a good thing for Apple.

From the PC user’s perspective, where the Flash player and Word etc. run just fine, the Apple products appear to be a bit of a weak sister. My personal experience has been that once you start building very large (enormous)  files, with any of the Adobe products (photoshop, illustrator, indesign etc.), you are much better off running on a PC. But I’ll never tell that to an Apple fan, never.

Annoying Flash-based ads will simply switch to another delivery vehicle. Look forward to annoying HTML5-based ads or backward to annoying animated gif ads. They are annoying by design. Flash is merely the delivery tool of the day. The loss of the annoying ad market will be the best thing that ever happened for Flash. Once they are in HTML nothing can be used to make them go away.

HTML5 will prove to be just as processor-intensive and misused as is Flash, may be a very long time coming to all available browsers, and will likely be implemented differently, piecemeal and at different rates for every piece, on all of them.

It took me a long time to understand what all of the Ipad name fuss was about, and I live in a household with three women. I think that in a year the image that pops up in everyone’s mind when they hear the word Ipad will be the Ipad.

The Apple Ipad/App Store business strategy is brilliant in many ways, but may severely backfire. Probably the main reason for Apple’s insistence on keeping Flash from their device is two-fold.  Both are related to Apple’s App Store. If Flash, or a USB port and a lot of storage for that matter, were available, the App Store apps would be lost amidst a gazillion competing apps that could be run directly on the internet or be installed independent of the App Store.

The App Store provides Apple both thirty percent of all developer revenue and a nice clean neighborhood of apps wherein Ipad users can be confident that any bad, nasty, buggy, pornographic, racist, sexist or otherwise distasteful apps have been filtered from the selection by the good people at Apple. It is a neighborhood with good reliable zoning. You can buy-in with confidence that a strip club won’t open up next door.

There are a few problems with all of this.

It establishes Apple as the world’s top censor of the internet. If you want anything above the lower tier functionality of HTML/CSS and Javascript to run on the Ipad you will have to use something that has been packaged for — and distributed through — the App Store.  Chinese and Iranian governmental censors won’t be able hold a candle to the volume of material from which the Ipad user has been protected. Such is the cost of a good clean neighborhood.

It monetizes the existing work of many others. In order to access the Ipad, many existing web-based applications will have to retrofit. This could involve recoding in a way where they can still run on the web and be accessed by the Ipad. However, at this time, an alternative coding technology for many of these is not available, so they will have to go through the App Store and pay Apple thirty percent of their existing revenue stream for that privilege. It is conceivable that applications will have two prices where the Apple price is thirty percent more than the PC price.

Flash is an artform used daily by millions both to earn a living, and more importantly as a vital form of self-expression. To attempt to destroy an artform as a way to protect the bottom line is just terribly wrong.

Hey, it just occurred to me.  The Superbowl is coming up.  Somebody needs to throw another hammer into a another insensate corporate monolith.