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.

Continue reading

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.

Continue reading

I need to both: wrap-up Sundance while I can still remember all of  it, and post my Vancouver images from last November. But I’m currently enthralled, although less and less every day, with the above-titled phenomena.  And I mean phenomena in the scientific sense of the term. I think business schools will be studying exactly what happened over the last week-and-a-half  for a long time to come.  My focus has shifted from the merits of Flash, which was the core of the debate, to Twitter, social marketing campaigns and how everything is very different these days.

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:

Continue reading

The second thing which just came up last week was the newly interminable issue of Flash vs the Ipad. This rhetorical phenomena has caused me to download tweetdeck and even tweet, if only a morsel or five. Six maybe. Seven. But I intend to put away the tweetdeck as soon as everything dies down. It is moments like these when the twittery is most hyperbolic. I think both sides are a bit full of it on this one.

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:

Continue reading