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.

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….