No Boundaries

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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Here we go. The calendar has rolled around again to the beginning of yet another baseball season. It is the all-too-often-way-too-brief period when those of us, who are faithful to the mighty Chicago Cubs, can truly believe that all will go well and that this year is, indeed, the year of Cubby Blue and not the Cubby blues. Those who can’t comprehend should contemplate Camus’ “The Myth of Sisyphus”. He understood what it is to be a Cub’s fan: that there is an absurd pleasure in the act of rolling of the rock to the top of the hill, only to somehow find it at the bottom again, and begin the process anew. As a child of sunny summer places, he knew that: if you are under the open afternoon sky and it is summer and you are alive, things can’t really be all that bad.

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.

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A flawed film that changes everything.

OOh OOh I am so excited.  I’ve lost some of my love for the concept of winter. We all fall prey to this moment at some point in life and my time came a while back.  So I could gladly toss my last shovel-full of driveway fluff  (although for some reason or another fluff is in extremely short supply in Park City this year). I’ve also never been much for the holidays. So the one thing that makes winter for me these days is the Sundance film festival and it is just around the corner.  I’ve lucked out again and landed a very high spot in the local’s ticket lottery, allowing me my choice of flicks.  And, there is to be a nice digital presence (seminars on the making of movie marketing with social networks and the new internet) which I intend to check out.  Fourteen films and as many seminars as I can get into should keep my mind whirling.  Which, of course, is my favorite condition of the human condition.

I’m especially interested in Howl (Ginsberg deserves more credit for his influence on everything that came after), Freedom Riders (my journalist parents were part of that whole scene), and films covering John Lennon as a pup and Jean-Michel Basquiat as … (well, you know).  My eldest daughter is forcing me to attend a 3D flick about toads that take over Australia.  Her taste in films is of notorious ill repute.

Since my last post I’ve seen Avatar in 3D and think that everyone who enjoys cinema owes James Cameron a good deal of thanks.  I’m not a Cameron fan per se, having seen only one of the Terminator movies and not having seen Titanic.  On many levels Avatar is bad film.  The plot is tired and clearly directed at reconsideration of American involvement in Iraq.  I have been against that particular war from the get-go, but think the standard progressive take on it (that we did it for the oil)  is almost as lame as the standard conservative take (that we did it because Sadam was a bad bad man and we are a moral country). The answer can be found in a quick gander at the French conflict in Algeria in the early sixties I suspect.  But that is a bit off topic.  Also the aliens are aesthetically lacking.  Many have compared them to smurfs, I think gumby is a better match.

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I’ve run into the same post on a half-dozen blogs recently.  It varies a little from place to place, but this is the gist of it:  ” I just wanted to let you know.  FLASH IS BAD.  IT KILLS LOTS OF PUPPIES.  That’s why we don’t do it anymore.  Ever.  Talk to us and we will save you.”  Please insert any derogatory and relatively baseless comment you wish for that above.  Self-serving Flash-bashing is afoot upon the land.  Flash now rivals Elvis Presley’s hips as something that should never be seen by the children.

My favorite so far was a post on Smashing Magazine which reported the results of a survey of designer portfolio sites and concluded that only a small fraction use Flash.  Way way down at the bottom it went on to say that the sites of designers who use motion (aka Flash) were excluded from the survey.  Something of a head-scratcher.

The hyperbole appears to be inversely correlative with the economy.

The thing most often cited in the “Flash is dangerous” posts is search engine optimization.  This is not a problem without many solutions.  It reminds me of a realtor telling a home-owner to mow over the three-acre rose garden because it can’t be seen from the front of the house.  Curb appeal and search engine optimization run in the same circles.

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Kevin Spacey in Shrink holds up well in a mixed up plot/world.

I had revelatory experience the other night.  Watching Letterman (I’m one of those who’ve fled NBC ;  I just don’t get the other fellow), I noted Kevin Spacey bringing up the subject of Jack Lemmon.  As a kid I loved Lemmon. “Save the Tiger” was one of my favorite flicks at fourteen. Strange but true. His portrayal of complexly mixed-up guys in dramas, lost somewhere in the vast triangular space between what is expected of them as American men, what is human nature, and what is morally appropriate, as opposed to the goofball repartee for which he is more widely appreciated, is what I found so marvelous.  He mastered the conflicted American male best until Spacey came along.  I’ve done a quick search looking for anything re: “Save the Tiger” (a quick trip down memory lane, for which the interweb is so lovely) and had a bit of a triple-take when I saw the 1973 poster.  The graphic of Lemmon standing in a solid gray suit is every bit of the Spacey of today.

Spacey is arguably, also, one of the  foremost masters of the craft of his era, in the same form as Lemmon, and now the connection is made.  Spacey is a follower of Lemmon (in the pre-Twitter sense) and, considering the work of both, he’s modeled most of his best work after the best work of Lemmon.

The subject of his Letterman appearance was “Shrink”, the premier of which I attended at this year’s Sundance.  The film left me feeling mixed.  Spacey’s performance was solid as it usually is, as was most of the rest of ensemble cast.  Spacey plays a potted-out (in the marijuana sense), emotionally ravaged knit-wit pretending to be of service to several other knit-wits of various neurotic Southern-Californian stripe.  This goes along until a real person enters the doctor’s suite and then he must confront what it is to be human again.  The concept is lovely but the script falls short, being more than slightly contrived.  I still would see it though, solely for the performances. Continue reading