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April 30, 2006

mm.com, 1995-2006

mm.com, 1995-2006: The Internet Archive here only goes back to late 1996, but the first day of business at www.macromedia.com was at the Netscape 2.0 announcement, June 5 1995. The crew was two people at that time, Victoria Dawson and Christine McCarthy, later joined by Natalie Zee, Ardith Ibanez, and a whole lot of good folks over the years. The fifteen Pagerank 10 sites have shrunk by one tonight.

Posted by John Dowdell at 07:33 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

Canton on trademarks

Canton on trademarks: Satori Canton has contributed a lot to the opensource community using Flash Platform, but here I fear he sets up a needless opposition, in assuming incoming "nutz-kicking" because an indy project had received a request to not dilute Adobe trademarks. The request came in the process of publicizing Geoff Stearn's SWFObject on the Adobe site itself (!), and the author, Geoff Stearns, noted last week that things seems resolved now. Like me, though, Geoff would still like some additional general guidance from Adobe Legal on which friendly usages risk the ability to protect each trademark. (SWFObject itself is a JavaScript library to dynamically write plugin markup in HTML, with benefits in both WWW validation and ActiveX changes.) I think over the next ten years we'll learn a lot more about how different types of groups can work together, whether ad-hoc or structured, without polarization. But it seems like this particular case is actually okay now...?

Posted by John Dowdell at 12:41 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

April 29, 2006

Firefox Flicks

Firefox Flicks: I picked this news up in the aggregators, then spent some time studying the site. The recent "make a viral video for Firefox" contest has chosen winners. The web video gallery is snappy, fun to use, but lacks global top-level navigation. The delivery format is QuickTime, which seems rare on new sites these days -- although Flash is most popular, I sort of expected to see some type of .MPG extension on this contest, and let each visitor open it in whatever viewer they have. The video markup is the standard OBJECT/EMBED, no external .JS write, and the OBJECT is in MS-style with the "classid" renderer request. Searching around a little more, I see a series of debates at Firefox principal Asa Dotzler's blog... the "anything but flash" voice collides with the "de facto standard" viewpoint. With a wider search there are newer arguments, like "for these outreach videos make people download my new favorite opensource codec & player". Another link went to openquicktime.org, which seems to be oriented towards reading existing QT files in otherwise-unsupported operating systems, but there's a mix of licenses of the library and then for the codecs, and I'm not sure of their situation yet. Final observation on the FirefoxFlicks.com site... the theme graphic at lower-right focuses on "Want a better Web experience?"... they see their key as providing a better UE... focus is on the person using the interface, not just the person creating the interface... I like this approach too.

Posted by John Dowdell at 08:25 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

April 28, 2006

Craigslist data strategy

Craigslist data strategy: Tim O'Reilly notes down a conversation with one of the 19 people responsible for the high-traffic site craigslist.com. The site triples its data and visitors each year... I've seen few other stories on how the people who implement this site deal with its success.

Posted by John Dowdell at 08:11 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

JS costs

JS costs: Got big JavaScript libraries? Force the visitor's computer to retain these forever. "If you have developed an AJAX based web application you would know how many JavaScript files are required per webpage. If you use the prototype or dojo toolkit library you would know how big those JavaScript files can turn out to be... A website like digg takes up more than a minute to load on my dialup connection even though the main page is no more than a 27-32 KB. The real time is taken up by the JavaScript files... [this technique] sets the expiry of the JavaScript to years and not days. Once the JavaScript file is downloaded it is never downloaded again, of course unless you force it by removing the file in the cache." For versioning, they recommend renaming the .JS files and storing them alongside the older versions you can't remove. Obvious question: What happens to your computer when a thousand sites all do this...?

Posted by JohnDowdell at 04:03 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

Browser chess

Browser chess: Richard MacManus points to a two-move-deep chess engine in JavaScript, and of how "it succeeds in extending the boundaries of what a browser can do." I'd leave a comment there (my first move was somehow king's pawn to queen 4?), but ZDNet requires Yet Another Password, so I couldn't. Lots of these have been around for years, with master challenges streamed live worldwide, and some of these efforts actually have "rich" interfaces too. A universally-deployed browser extension, which works across browser brands and browser versions, may not be JavaScript and DIVs, but I still think it's part of the world's everyday WWW browser experience....

Posted by JohnDowdell at 03:39 PM | Comments (5) | TrackBack

Can MS go neutral?

Can MS go neutral? Last month I tried to figure out how Microsoft would balance its "works best in windows" business mandate with satisfying the total audience, not all of whom buy into a Microsoft environment. Here, Michael Arrington notes: "Live.com Shopping launched today, and all I see is a big message saying they don't support Firefox. It doesn't work with Safari or Opera either. The entire Mac audience has been shut out of Live Shopping." The Microsoft website describes it as: "...the beta launch of Microsoft's Web 2.0 shopping experience, featuring one of the world's largest product catalogs, user-created content and an easier-to-use interface built on 100% AJAX technology." The actions still differ from the talk. The Expression Team Blog has been pretty quiet recently too... I'm going to start tracking it again once they actually ship something here.

Posted by JohnDowdell at 01:20 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

Video user-experience

Video user-experience: Jason Kottke has a novel observation here, on how BitTorrent use seems to have faded once the new Flash-based sites like YouTube and Google Video came online: "Compare [Flash video] with how you typically watch a video with BT. First you download a torrent file, then open that file up in your BT client (which you need to have previously downloaded and installed), then the file downloads, and finally you open that file in a media player, generally QuickTime, Windows Media Player, or some other player that needs to be downloaded and installed...and hopefully you have the right versions and codecs for the video in question. And that's just the viewing side of things...publishing videos via BT was even more difficult, particularly for non-technical folks." In a followup post he points to a Slate article with similar observations: "To watch television online, I shouldn't have to install extra video software, figure out my bandwidth setting (100K? 300K?), and sign up for an account with the player's maker... The guys behind YouTube hit the sweet spot... The secret to success is to make everything one-button easy, then get out of the way."

Posted by JohnDowdell at 01:02 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

Site funk

Site funk: The Macromedia weblog server underwent some emergency repairs the past few days, and Mike Chambers has info at the above link. There's also a lot of URL-merging going on with the adobe.com and macromedia.com domains these days, as we saw when Adobe Labs was temporarily unavailable earlier this week. Anyway, there's still some system-changing going on under the hood here, my apologies in advance if we kick up some dust over the next few days, but I anticipate much smoother sailing soon.

Posted by JohnDowdell at 11:53 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Cringely on Apple, Adobe

Cringely on Apple, Adobe: I'm linking this here because the PBS pundit has high readership, and so it will likely be a topic in various discussions for awhile: "Steve wants Windows applications to run like crazy on his hybrid platform but to look like crap. In his heart of hearts, he'd still like to beat Microsoft on the merits, not just by leveraging some clever loophole. So he needs the top ISVs who are currently writing for OS X to continue writing for OS X, and that especially means Adobe. There's only one way to make that happen for sure, and that's for Apple to buy Adobe." Some readers are already tying this story into yesterday's Ubillos/Aperture rumors. A conversational hook grows a life of its own....

Posted by JohnDowdell at 10:48 AM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

April 27, 2006

SWF/PHP lab

SWF/PHP lab: Chris O'Shea is investigating SWF capabilities in v2.7 of Sony PSP. He has made some SWF examples and tests, but has not upgraded his own firmware yet. [via PSPCulture]

Posted by John Dowdell at 11:04 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

Viewing Flash on PSP

Viewing Flash on PSP: My weblog is read by lots of Flash developers, but this entry is written particularly for people trying to view WWW sites with Adobe Flash content on Sony PSP devices. The new v2.7 firmware upgrade includes an Adobe Flash Player specially tailored for this gaming console. But many of the sites on the World Wide Web use Flash files which were developed and tested for fullsized computers, and so not every website will play the same on both big box and little box. In the extended entry here I'm starting up a little FAQ for viewing Flash websites on the Sony PSP. I hope the content developers who regularly read this blog can help add to the tips, and with luck we'll be able to get a final FAQ in a better location for the PSP-owning public before too long. Let's go...!

It's great that Sony is now distributing an Adobe Flash Player in their firmware upgrade to their entire audience... developers will now have a predictable capability to test against for this device.

But most of the people using a PSP will likely go out to various sites on the World Wide Web, and see files that do not play as well as they do on the desktop computer. There are reasons for this, let's list some of them here:

That's the bad news -- visiting random websites may not render Flash content well. But on the good side we've now got a predictable rendering engine in universal deployment on the Sony PSP, so starting now we'll be able to develop content deliberately optimized for this new device.

(Compare what's already done in the mobile world, with the Adobe Flash Lite rendering engine... the key difference between Mobile Flash and PSP Flash is that the former has content optimized for mobile hardware, while the Sony PSP is trying to view WWW sites which were optimized for full-sized computers.)


FAQ (in the "Favorite Anticipated Questions" deacronymization, because it's hard for me to guess the most frequent questions today.... ;-)

(Q) I heard some other people made a Flash player, maybe that will work better?
(A) Speaking personally, I'm seeing a lot more companies advertising "Flash support", but this usually means that they can import a SWF file and render some parts of it. Sometimes these claims are grandiose; rarely is there any technical info to back it up. In this case, Sony has deployed an actual Adobe Flash Player to their entire customer base, so the issue of alternative renderers is moot.

(Q) Will Adobe be improving the Flash Player on Sony PSP?
(A) I don't know, but I sure hope so... one of the major goals right now is for Adobe to provide predictable media and interactivity capabilities across the range of the world's devices... to not interfere with each device's basic nature but to provide a media layer that designers and developers can rely upon to render their work. Adobe works with Sony in many areas, and I'd like to see further work continue myself. Haven't seen any public announcements yet, though.

(Q) What can I do if a favorite site won't play?
(A) I'm not sure on this one yet... there is talk on PSP sites about ways to play content out of the browser, but I can't evaluate this conversation yet. I'd like to beef up this section of the FAQ; any tips?

(Q) The PSP has some games which play great, so why is this one Flash game so sucky?
(A) You're right, the PSP is capable of very high performance. But the best games are designed and tested for that device, take advantage of its strengths, minimize its weaknesses. Most Flash content we see right now has been designed for a totally different class of machine, so some examples will likely look really bad on a different device. But now that we've got the Flash Player engine on the PSP we can test against this device during development... there's a lot of really creative Flash professionals out there, and now they've got the keys to the highway. Future's looking good.


Some general references (and my apologies in advance for not crediting these links!):

ExtremeTech's PSP Media Guide March 2005. Primer on memory sticks, handling digital photographs, MPEG-4, etc.

Geek.com explains how the CPU speed in the PSP is throttled down for better battery life.

Web Design for Sony PSP, Oct 05, focuses on getting WWW content to render better in this browser.

Sony PSP Web Design Primer, Jan 06, offers a readable introduction to the display capabilities of the device.

Developing Web Sites and Applications for Sony PSP has some technical details I haven't seen elsewhere.

PSPUpdates links to a technique for playing Flash files outside of the browser. I have not investigated this, and do not yet have any useful context of my own to offer.

Comment policy: I'm really concerned about making this particular weblog entry useful for PSP owners who may not know much about Flash, and so I'll be fairly ruthless in culling out issues better discussed elsewhere. I'll also be revising my body text throughout the week, so this document will be in major flux for awhile.

Got more advice on viewing Flash-enhanced WWW sites in the Sony PSP? I'd appreciate 'em in comments here, thanks!

First written: 5pm PDT, Thu Apr 27 2006
Last update: 8pm PDT, Thu 0427 [PSPUpdates.com link, text edits]

Posted by JohnDowdell at 05:06 PM | Comments (23) | TrackBack

Adobe trademark use

Adobe trademark use: Just a reminder here, and I'm not intending to spook anyone, but if you're currently involved in naming a product, website, magazine or other group endeavor, then it would be a good thing to get on the good side of these Adobe trademark guidelines beforehand. Why? To take legal remedies against phishers and other scammers the company has to show that it is applying the same guidlines generally -- that it is not singling out a work just because it's called "discountAdobe.com" or "Flash++ Player" or whatever -- so there are definitely cases where Good People may get a contact from Adobe Legal on a naming issue. They have a feedback form here so you can check particulars, if you wish. (Don't bother asking questions in my blog here, 'cause I'm really not qualified to answer, but the experts do have a contact route in this link.) I know poor Geoff Stearns had to do some scrambling recently, when his "FlashObject" code was in discussion to be highlighted on the Adobe site, and I'd hate to see any other contributor be put into a similar situation in the future... checking these trademark guidelines ahead of time can definitely help, thanks!

Posted by JohnDowdell at 02:10 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

PSP speculation

PSP speculation: I've been trying to address this on several weblogs without luck, so am elevating it here... Oregan Networks code was not involved with Sony delivering Adobe Flash Player in all PSP updates. I have seen Oregan's press releases which describe how their 500K media engine now includes some SWF7 support, but I have not succeeded in finding actual documentation on which parts they render, which they don't... all I've seen are press releases, that's all I've got. Sony and Adobe cooperate in a great variety of ways, and one recent way was customizing the general Flash Lite engine to this gaming console. Rephrased, all updated Sony PSPs do carry the canonical Adobe rendering engine. That said, last night I realized we may well run a public perception problem the next month with Flash/PSP, because consumers have been given no guidance on which WWW content will perform well on that device. (There's not much application memory... video can be purged as it's played, but sprite-based animations (StrongBad, eg) need to keep graphic symbols in memory for reuse... lots of PC-style SWFs consume more RAM than the PSP offers.) Even in the comments to that Oregan speculation you can see this: "not very many thangs work on flash player 6"... consumer expectations have not been accurately set.

Posted by John Dowdell at 07:21 AM | Comments (9) | TrackBack

April 26, 2006

Bott on IE

Bott on IE: MS-centric indy Ed Bott raises questions about the adoption rate of Internet Explorer 7: "I'll need to see a year's worth of security bulletins before I'm ready to accept the idea that this time it really is different and IE7 is genuinely safe enough to recommend without reservation to friends and family members. 'Good enough' isn't good enough for Microsoft in the case of IE7. On issues of security in particular, they're going to have to earn back trust from a generation that's been burned pretty badly by security flaws in Windows and IE. That will take time, and there's no guarantee of success." On a similar theme, Paul Thurrott was heavily linked last week on his critique of latest Vista user-experience. I can't venture useful opinions myself... best I've got is that predictions don't always match results.

Posted by John Dowdell at 08:44 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Neutrality's other shoe

Neutrality's other shoe: Declan McCullagh at CNET provides the missing context on last weekend's surge of conversation on (US-centric) "network neutrality". Apparently there was a particular House Committee meeting, with 60 votes, that needed swaying. There was also apparently a "34 page bill" at the heart of the issue, which sounds like it might possibly have been readable, had it been linked anywhere within all that evangelism. Key quote: "Net neutrality is 'still not clearly defined,' Barton said. 'It's kind of like pornography: You know it when you see it.'" My efforts last weekend to understand the issue here; my takeaway, after seeing how so many were influenced so strongly with so little: fear.

Posted by John Dowdell at 08:11 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

Google feedback

Google feedback: Very rare... a search engine vendor provides some feedback to sites which are penalized in their secret ranking algorithms. I wish there were a "Skip Intro" on his text... key lines include: "The way that we've been tackling better communication over the last few months is by testing a program where we try to email some penalized sites that we believe are legitimate" and "Just to repeat: not every site with a penalty will receive confirmation and the offer of a reinclusion request." I don't know if this offer is restricted to those which use Google's Sitemaps service. It looks like Google's "Advice for Webmasters" mini-site has changed too, but there's a lot of "click and wait" interactions, it's hard to tell what content changed here. May be a false alarm, but there may actually be valuable, practical info hidden within all this stuff....

Posted by John Dowdell at 07:58 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

Lots of links

Lots of links: I've been blogging light last few days, from password and server difficulties, but I've accumulated a lot of open browser windows of interesting stuff... that Commodore 64 emulation in Flash 9 particularly sounds intriguing, just so long as we don't get chased by giant hamsters while doing so....

USA Today carries a story about "CEOs say how you treat a waiter can predict a lot about character"... lots of real human stuff here.

WIRED describes new VR games which let people play against their pets... sensors on your body control effectors to manipulate some bait which a mouse pursues, chasing you throughout an artificial environment.

If you haven't seen the ClickTV interface, it's worth a look... allows time-based commenting on a common video stream.

Brent Simmons details common-sense tips to getting a feature request implemented. He's actually talking about how to put a good user-experience on some text you're crafting.

ValleyWag exposes Google's fondness for Toto Washlets.

Ryan Stewart points to Google's use of Flash in a Sony promotion for a movie via a puzzle contest.

Some Firefox users are getting slammed for holier-than-thou attitudes.

Dave Carabetta reviews his new Adobe-branded leather computer bag. (I haven't seen this yet myself... been using a Filson bag the last two years and the investment has been worth it. The leather one looks nice, though.)

The "GuGe" rebranding of Google in China ("谷歌", if your browser renders it) has its own theme song Flash presentation.

Cool-looking credit-card-sized flash-memory drive from Taiwan is in the news today... 16G, USB 2.0, Mac/Win.

Ever wonder what ActionScript Hero looks like beneath that mask...?

Director Web, the site which innovated tons'o'stuff like plugin detection, browser/plugin intercommunication, conference blogging and more, is now in maintainence mode, being kept live but not being updated. Alan Levine made massive contributions here, as well as the content from all the writers... thanks!

Datadriving is hunting for unlocked webservices... this example is on finding and using mapping data. (Just like screenscraping, unauthorized use of someone else's content can break really easy once they wise up you're not being straight with them... better to set up a relationship, get something solid.)

A blog from DoubleClick's DART Motif group, for rich-media advertising.

Looks like a new set of Windows Mobile delays as well.

Rob Enderle writes on Linux on the desktop, why OS/2 failed, the perils of zealotry, more, in "Why Linux May Never Be a True Desktop OS".

Michael Arrington of TechCrunch busts some WebEx astroturfing -- staffers making comments without owning up to having a stake in the issue. (Stakes can be financial investments, or are often personal commitments or associations to The Cause... ya gotta be clean, and make your argument based on the facts.) (And in fairness, I haven't seen the IP addresses myself, but I accept Michael's word in this matter.) Related: JBoss astroturf.

Everybody Hates Google, according to BusinessWeek. (But I bet they all work with Google too.... ;-)

San Francisco meetup this Thursday with Meebo messaging, UserPlane rich-messaging, and Second Life.

Microsoft has a Michael Wallent video which talks about the latest predictions on Windows Presentation Framework, but I haven't invested the time in watching him talk. (Ryan Stewart has some reaction.)

Matt Cutt offers a good example of how carefully staffers at search engine vendors need to speak when talking about the hidden mechanisms they use to rank sites.

Spread Firefox notes that Google's "About" page advertises Firefox/GoogleToolbar, along with the other projects which Google more clearly owns.

Interviews with Julieanne Kost, Photoshop advisor, and Jeremy Allaire on Brightcove video.

Roger Johannsen continues to spread misinfo about HTML supremacy... PDF can tap into text-to-speech readers and its archiving format is an ISO Standard, just like some of the HTML variants are.

FC64 is a Commodore 64 emulator writeen in Flash 9... more info from Claus Wahlers and Darron Schall... I was excited to read this the other day, even though I haven't seen it yet, the idea is so audacious.... ;-)

Posted by JohnDowdell at 02:03 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

April 25, 2006

Odd mobile bundle

Odd mobile bundle: A new Nokia phone, with video camera, now includes Adobe Premiere Elements for your PC. I guess there's precedent in some of the photo-editing bundles, but it still seems odd to me this morning that a mobile phone would include desktop video-editing software. Makes sense, just a little "huh?" moment for me here. (btw, I'm still on light blogging time, as I try to replace an ex-cookie'd password on my main day machine.)

Posted by John Dowdell at 08:08 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

April 24, 2006

What's "Network Neutrality"?

What's "Network Neutrality"? I'm in the same position as Kevin Drum here: "I've been trying to understand this whole 'net neutrality' thing and I've failed utterly. I just can't figure out the underlying issues." I've scanned the comments to his post and find scads of ad-hominem verbiage, but no mention of a specific bill, specific action. On Friday I received MoveOn.org chainmail about a new SaveTheInternet.com site, which fried my brain with its US-centric non-sequitur opener: "Congress is pushing a law that would abandon the Internet's First Amendment...." The Wikipedia entry mentions "By late 2005, network neutrality provisions were included in several Congressional draft bills..." but that's its only direct reference, with the bulk of the text being about correct philosophy. MyDueDiligence.com has a concise summary, but it's mostly about "those evil other people over there" and likewise doesn't link to specific US legislation. Earlier today Om Malik asked "Save The Internet. Why? And For Whom?" but didn't seem to answer "from what?' in there for me... his writing was characterized as "ignorant" anyway. The closest I've come to understanding this so far that it is an abstract principle which is being used to amass popular support for some unnamed legislation. My general feeling is, that when I see a whole bunch of people talking about something without being able to actually tell what it is, then I get a bit apprehensive. The persuaders may be right, or may not... I just still can't tell what, specifically, they're talking about. I get the sense that certain providers want to offer premium services, which sounds okay, but those concerned seem to think that certain sites will be inaccessible or something, and I can't trace back and reconcile these two understandings. Do you have a good, concise, clear and specific link I should look at to understand this better? Thanks.

Posted by John Dowdell at 10:42 PM | Comments (10) | TrackBack

MS on Flash ubiquity

MS on Flash ubiquity: Funny. Earlier this year, when the consumer Player audits were first published, I heard that some Microsoft staff had objected that these figures were impossible -- that Adobe could not actually be receiving 5,000,000 post-install pings each day, that NPD/MediaMetrix did not actually find that half of all consumers tested could immediately view Flash 8 content, just three months after Player 8's release. Now Microsoft's lawyers in the European Union bundling case are proclaiming those same stats themselves: "Microsoft also cited the use of Macromedia Flash 8, which it said was installed on more than half of all European and U.S. computers connected to the Internet, with 80 percent projected by the end of this year." There's a second reported quote found by ActionScript Hero: "[Flash] has a bigger market share than both Microsoft's Media Player and QuickTime." Consumers adopt small invisible commitments like plugins faster than big visible commitments like browser upgrades, and much much faster than committing to new operating systems -- a predictable capability on the majority of consumer machines gives you a bigger audience, more quickly, than big browsers or operating systems can. I'll add my auditing caveats in the comments, but I still think this is the top under-reported story of 2005.

Posted by John Dowdell at 08:17 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

April 21, 2006

Wikipedia Flash?

Wikipedia Flash? Sorry for the light blogging today. (I, uh, forgot my auto-remembered password on one machine and couldn't access the blog during the day. ;-) But I just happened to check the Wikipedia entry on "Macromedia Flash" and saw that it has had lots of material entered on Local Shared Objects (that forgotten "Flash cookies" story from last year), old security issues, more. There's also a lot of dumb vandalism like "FuturePecoraro Animator". I've traced back the edit history but it seems like most of the damage was done awhile back. What do you think we should do? Chalk it up as a dysfunctional social scene, incur it as another ongoing set of opportunity costs, what? Opinions appreciated, thanks.

Posted by John Dowdell at 09:38 PM | Comments (12) | TrackBack

Adobe acquires Macromedia

Adobe acquires Macromedia: Hey, we missed this earlier this week... it was April 18 2005 that the announcement was made. (For what it's worth, the next stage of website integration should be occurring within the next few weeks... that's the only bit of relevant info I've got right now... I'm trying to catch up on other news here, but was shocked that the anniversary passed last Tuesday without mention.)

Posted by John Dowdell at 10:43 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

April 20, 2006

Odd Ajax reporting

Odd Ajax reporting: I pulled up this article titled "Georgia maps future with Ajax" via a news search on "adobe", and was puzzled by how they thought that tiling and panning IMGs was connected with asynchronoux text requests via XmlHttpRequest, when I sort of lost it at this line: "While Ajax represents the future, GDOT still has developers working in ColdFusion from Adobe Systems Inc. Despite its almost senior citizen status as a scripting language, Chambers says, 'It's a great RAD (Rapid Application Development) tool.'" ColdFusion works on the server. It makes it easy to create full HTML documents, handle database requests, do lots of other types of serverside work. It can deliver to a JavaScript client just as easily as to other clients... ColdFusion doesn't care how you handle your local interactivity. For a better understanding of current online mapping services, try Frank Gruber's analysis at TechCrunch: "Overall, Yahoo Maps was by far the best application tested. Its fast Flash interface, multipoint directions, live traffic information, and easy send-to-mobile feature make it the hands down winner. It also features the most robust API options." A "rich internet application" is something that works across both the server and the client... it's hard to directly compare clientside JavaScript techniques (whether literal AJaX or literary Ajax) with any scripting or declaration done on the server... it's also hard to compare a CF database for disbursing static PDFs with an interactive display in a browser. Strange article, I wish they didn't require membership to engage in comments there....

Posted by John Dowdell at 01:12 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

Server load links?

Server load links? Now that JavaScript developers can request text directly from the server without reloading their whole page, they're starting to wonder how to structure an application so as to keep a sane total server load, particularly as the audience increases in size. (See James Governor, Tim Bray, Memeorandum.) We've dealt with this "total server load" issue for years with RIAs, and particularly with media servers and communication servers, but I'm drawing a blank on best resources to point the JavaScript folks toward... what links would you recommend to someone studying how often to poll the server? What info do you see that would help clear up this "Cost of AJaX" conversation...?

Posted by John Dowdell at 08:30 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

April 19, 2006

FCC DRM quote

FCC DRM quote: Am I missing something here? Earlier today TechLiberation.com wrote that a new US Federal Communications Commissioner spoke somewhere, and the blog author had a pretty reasonable live-and-let-live take on the general subject. But the comments seemed to get into heavy mind-reading about what the commissioner said, and then the item was picked up by usually-reasonable blogs like TechDirt, which currently has over a hundred comments, mostly abusive. But what did she say? I found no transcripts in news or at FCC... the whole thing really feels like a two-minute hate, so I'd like to be proven wrong... can you tell what the person actually said? (Why do I care? Because I know that lots of Adobe's customers prefer to protect the things they create from unauthorized use... I wouldn't want to see the same mass reaction unleashed on people who try to protect their SWF, or on ColdFusion passwords for databases or such.) I want to understand the objections but I'm drawing a blank here... am I missing a link to some objectionable FCC speech somewhere...?

Posted by John Dowdell at 04:44 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

Google preprocessor

Google preprocessor: See your website as Google repurposes it for their mobile delivery. Ads and sidebars appear to be stripped... see Om Malik's blog as an example of one with significant changes. [via Michael Sippey]

Posted by John Dowdell at 03:58 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Linux snobs

Linux snobs: The people I know who run Linux aren't like this... guess I have insufficient evidence on which to judge the author's contention that the main barrier to widespread Linux adoption is the current Linux userbase. I'm mostly getting this article into this weblog's database, so I can find it later. The main principles of netiquette seem like they'd handle this issue, for Linux as in other spheres. The author's conclusion: "So the point of all this is to say, although most people don't choose technology based on personality, often personality can influence important decisions such as business expenditures."

Posted by John Dowdell at 03:19 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

New ActiveX templates for Flash publishing

New ActiveX templates for Flash publishing: If you're using the Macromedia Flash authoring environment, then these two new publishing templates will make it easy to automatically generate markup which doesn't show that little "click to activate" tooltip on first rollover in a current Internet Explorer browser.

Posted by John Dowdell at 03:09 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

Cross-browser support

Cross-browser support: The Microsoft JavaScript kit named "Atlas" is getting ding'd for its ability to work in various browsers... the reporting site is not coming up for me now, but this Ars Technica article has a functional summary. The Ars Technica piece also points to an Atlas engineer, who discusses the architecture and why they decided to extend the Firefox and Safari browsers to more closely resemble Internet Explorer.

Posted by John Dowdell at 03:00 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Creators' rights in PDF

Creators' rights in PDF: Duane Nickull responds to yesterday's "circumvent PDF DRM" conversation with an essay on different ways to protect content in Acrobat files. Summary: Any PDF reader may disrespect the copy/edit permission bits in an unencrypted PDF; you can rule out variant renderers by encrypting the file and requiring a password for reading (with encryption algorithms increasing in complexity with later versions of Adobe Reader); you can also have the document maintain a relationship with your rights-management server for ongoing control of the document (available as standalone or service). I'm not sure of Duane's offer of a cash prize for decrypting a document, however; infected machines can be gang'd together to break even strong encryption. It's hard to absolutely protect some of your information, but it's quite practical to make the cost prohibitively high for others to access your data without your permission.

Posted by John Dowdell at 01:52 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Fake iPod guide

Fake iPod guide: Some think that the design work of others should be liberated... at least for the liberators' own purposes. Here's a quick guide to some of the discrepancies in the current round of counterfeit pocket music devices.

Posted by John Dowdell at 01:36 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

CNNMoney on MS

CNNMoney on MS: Interesting article, if you track Microsoft... it's an account of changes over the last year, and the ascendancy of Ray Ozzie. I'm assuming the article is sponsored by Microsoft in some way because of the initial setting -- a secret emergency executive meeting last June, where the reporter does not advise readers how he came by this information -- I read the rest of the article with a little skepticism about how I was being programmed. But at least it would be a good illustration of what they'd like you to think. Themes include: Ozzie very capable; MS frustrated at stock price and mindshare; Vista to "webbify everything". Key quote, from Dan'l Lewin: "When you have really strong leaders, even smart people can become dependent and stop acting smart." There's also a good bit later about looking at technical problems through customers' eyes, not just through developers' hands. Undocumented surprise: "Microsoft is planning to use its server farms to offer anyone huge amounts of online storage of digital data."

Posted by John Dowdell at 12:50 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Minnesota open docs

Minnesota open docs: Techweb has an article, but no comments/feedback mechanism, so I'm amending their advice here. The article is about Minnesota state government and document formats... key quote: "In conducting a theoretical search of the Minnesota state Web site, Nesbitt observed that most of the results 'come back as either HTML, PDF, or MS Word. The problem is that the latter two formats are owned by entities that could go out of business, charge significantly, make unannounced changes, sue others for creating similar technologies, act as a monopoly, or abort a product offering altogether. In those instances, there is very little the State could do about it.'" There is unique growth from Adobe in advanced features of PDF, but for basic document storage across long periods of time and tech changes you might as well use ISO Standard 19005, the archiving profile of Adobe's Portable Document Format. They have already considered such issues when devising this subset.

Posted by John Dowdell at 12:27 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

April 18, 2006

Clone problems

Clone problems: I'm linking back to Andreas Bovens' "Circumvent PDF DRM" article from earlier today, because the comments have accumulated a variety of observations from people trying to render advanced PDF documents in non-Adobe PDF renderers. (Google's "View as HTML" converter is one such engine; GhostScript, Apple Preview, FoxIt are others.) I think the ISO Standard PDF/A profile will eventually end up being the baseline for compatibility, but "PDF" now also offers many experiences which are more than mere text layout -- non-Adobe engines aren't so much "clones" as "renderers of some-but-not-all PDF content". Distressingly, some of the comments talk about hacking into documents the creators wished private; on the happy side, Cory Doctorow of BoingBoing had an accurate and concise description of the story. PDF and SWF are easy for anyone to write, but because they both now offer creators a very great range of abilities, alternate renderers seem like they'll always tend to converge at the low end of the total fidelity scale.

Posted by John Dowdell at 08:18 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Mobile vs desktop

Mobile vs desktop: The headline is of a sort that you have probably read before: "Mobile Phones Could Soon Rival the PC As World's Dominant Internet Platform". The relative growth rates have certainly shown cheap devices overtaking expensive devices for awhile now. But I realized something while reading this line: "Globally, just over one-fourth (28%) of mobile phone owners worldwide have browsed the Internet on a wireless handset, up slightly from 25% at the end 2004." Problem? The web is not the net. "Browsing websites" is only one subset of network activities, and there's a certain HTML-centrism in seeing "browsing websites" as the way to use a mobile. Browsing among hyperlinked World Wide Web documents is great, but it isn't the only way to use devices to access the rest of the world. Your device can work in the background for you, to retrieve desired data as it becomes available... the server should be able to treat you as a unique audience member, not just another cog in a mass-market audience... trying to shoehorn mobile development into what HTML/CSS/JS developers are already comfortable with doesn't seem like it would hold up well in the long run. The web is not the net; viewing HTML documents is only one of the things we should be able to do on smarter pocket devices.

Posted by John Dowdell at 02:38 PM | Comments (5) | TrackBack

Online PDF protection

Online PDF protection: Speaking of Adobe LiveCycle Policy Server, I think that's the technology used in yesterday's beta announcement from Lori DeFurio, even though the term "policy server" does not appear in the FAQ itself. Lori has the most concise text on what's happening here: "Behind the scenes we're hosting a cluster of Adobe LiveCycle Policy Server and Security Server nodes. When you want to protect or revoke access to the PDF you are creating, the service will set the PDF security settings to match your policy. The settings can changed dynamically for all copies, even after you have distributed them." It's often true that "information wants to be free", but it's also often true that "people own their own words"... sometimes you don't want your digital bits repurposed by others, and so some type of ongoing serverside relationship with the document can help influence the distribution of sensitive data.

Posted by John Dowdell at 02:15 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

"PDF DRM"

"PDF DRM": This set of articles hit Memeorandum earlier today, but I held off in reply in order to check whether anyone on the Acrobat team had anything on it. Apparently the author was able to copy/paste text in an Adobe Acrobat PDF file, even though the permissions had been set for this as a read-only document, by using Google's "View as HTML" translation. The problem is in the term "DRM" -- it's not just one thing. Here the author intends it as "change the permission bits for copy/edits"... in other senses it could mean "accept a password for local decryption" (the SWF8 docs are an example of such local control, here using a license agreement rather than a password as the opening key)... but in other senses it's the whole serverside rights-management of Adobe LiveCycle Policy Server, where the document calls home to your server to determine who has which privileges on which documents at which times. The author's title of "Circumvent PDF DRM... with Gmail!" is a little loose logically -- just as with "Protect from Import" in a SWF file, alternate renderers may ignore permission bits set within a file. Sending a password or other sensitive data within a file is not as protected as relying on a live relationship between the file and your server, a lock-and-key arrangement.

Posted by John Dowdell at 02:10 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

April 16, 2006

Windows interconnectedness

Windows interconnectedness: At ZDNet, Richard Stiennon displays the paths of direct system requests on a Linux server running Apache, and on a Windows Server running IIS. The second is visibly more complex than the first. I'm not sure his subsequent conclusions about overall security are always necessarily correct, but the visual display of each system is certainly arresting.

Posted by John Dowdell at 03:11 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

April 14, 2006

Lots of links

Lots of links: I've kept lots of webpages open this week, but don't have sufficient original content of my own to prompt a top-level entry... if you're looking for interesting reading this weekend, then try some of the articles in the extended entry here....

Houston Business Journal has a story on how video and motion can be more accessible than text... it's not a scientific survey, more anecdotal, and written by Paul Jerome of 917Media, who presumably has a stake in rich-media interfaces... interesting video presentation at their site, check out how the shadow follows the speaker's motion yet doesn't follow the curvature of the sportscar... you know what's going on here, right...? ;-)

Two aggregation lists at 3spots.blogspot.com... Digg-style apps and Flash or JavaScript entrypages.

I don't watch "South Park", but I appreciate the way that the creators skewered self-destructive censorship this week... they showed a whole bunch of stuff which would offend lots and lots of different people. But their sponsor corporation, Comedy Central, balked at displaying innocuous drawings of a certain historical figure they've aired before, who has been drawn without riots throughout history, and who is currently portrayed in much less flattering light by those who scream the loudest against others. This whole "cartoon jihad" thing is a crock from top to bottom, and I appreciate how exquisitely Parker & Stone laid bare such murderous hypocrisy.

BBC carries a study on different social effects of increased mobile connectivity... I'm not sure there's anything shockingly new here, but it's an ongoing task to see how we humans will adapt to these new abilities.

"The World's Best Video Websites" may be a bit overstated, but it's a goodsized list of various types of recommendations.

More Flash clones appear... I'm not certain I should call them "clones", because most of these groups try to render parts of the SWF files they find instead of actually replicating full Adobe functionality, but "clones" is still the best word I currently have to describe them. In Oregan's case, their website still seems bare of technical detail... impossible to tell what they actually succeed in reading... if you ever get any functional reality from such firms then I'd be interested in hearing, thanks. When I check with the mobile teams they say such variant engines don't actually turn up in partners' business discussions, so the risks of realworld forking are low, but it may be something you get questioned on by your own clients and colleagues, should they happen to read the press releases.

"Web Design for the Sony PSP" was published last autumn, but still offers a comprehensive list of browser concerns on the console device.

Lots of conversation this week about Vista hardware requirements... it'll be hard to tell what type of hardware is actually needed for satisfactory performance until they actually ship. More on possible requirements at CNET.

David West writes at Web Pro New about the inclusion of source files in webwork contracts, from the perspective of the client rather than the designer or developer.

Info on how new .EU domains were subverted by a gap in the registration process.

Nitesh Dhanjani has thoughts on Ajax security... nothing new here, but a good look at current perceptions of the subject, from a JavaScript point of view, which hasn't had to deal with problems like behind-the-firewall data requests before.

Cl1P.net is a site where you can copy/paste text across machines.

Jen Larkin has news on a Flex User Group in the San Francisco Bay Area... I've seen other posts this week about similar groups in other areas but unfortunately don't have the links handy, so please add in comments if you wish.

Steve Pavlina has a great essay on "10 Stupid Mistakes of the Newly Self-Employed"... great reality checks for single-person or small-group businesses.

At informit.com, James Gonzalez offers new web designers an intro to Flash audio control.

I'm not sure of all the content in this Finnish map, but I like the overall look of that they have accomplished.

Last ActionScript Hero has a great entry on a MathML app... it's not a public application, but I like hearing about work done in such hard yet meaningful areas.

Bill Burnham has an essay on "persistent search"... I think he's envisioning this as a serverside service, though, where someone else notifies you if they find new items on your desired search term... for privacy & decentralization reasons, I'm leaning more towards clientside agents, such as the "headless agents" which provided notifications if their recurring server requests turned up new info.

Posted by John Dowdell at 01:54 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

PS/MacTel benchmarks

PS/MacTel benchmarks: Rob Morgan compares the timing of a few Photoshop and AfterEffects operations on a desktop Mac, a notebook Mac, and (under Rosetta emulation) one of the new Intel-based Macintosh computers. (I don't think he included the newer "running WinXP on Macintosh" scenario.) I'm linking it here because it got some blog attention earlier today... as you'd expect, a fast desktop outperformed notebook emulation. But the part that really caught my eye was the op/ed at the end: "We all need to start bugging Adobe to get UB versions of Photoshop and After Effects finished for the Intel Macs... How do you speed up Adobe's updates? I know it's not an easy transition to Universal Binaries. However, if the UB versions are not a priority at Adobe, you may be able to help change that by posting your opinion on Adobe's discussion groups." No, that won't help... it would be more useful to first listen to what Adobe execs have been publicly advising since last year, before the MacTel shipped, and the background given by engineers since then... the new hardware requires a new development environment, and the port of the workflow which would enable the port of the code has been scheduled for the first full release of the larger mature applications.... last summer this was publicly estimated to take place around the turn of the coming year. Flooding the forums won't change this. (See also my own personal experience with early adoption of new hardware... I'm sympathetic, but it's hard when asked to listen to those who won't listen in turn.)

Posted by John Dowdell at 01:49 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

April 13, 2006

Udell, data, PDF

Udell, data, PDF: I'm not sure I understand the article, but I think Jon Udell may have been presented with some arbitrary PDF files and wanted to extract some-but-not-all of the text in there. It can be hard to impose order on an unstructured document. It's straightforward to incorporate external XML data with PDF files or to save an entire PDF as XML, and if you're creating a structured PDF then you can take any user-entered form data out into concise XML, but from what I read in Jon's article, I'm not sure whether any of these may apply to the document which was presented to him. Here's an entry point to the Acrobat XML information.

Posted by John Dowdell at 05:08 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

Web feature use survey

Web feature use survey: Richard MacManus links to a Security Space survey on which web features are used on 1.3 million websites surveyed. Richard also collates similar reports from this group over three prior years. I'm not sure of the methodology... the survey says that over a third of websites polled use no GIFs, and almost half use no JPG... I'm not sure how they chose which sites to survey. They saw SWF used on one of every eight sites they checked. Without methodology, though, I'm not sure what I'm looking at here... can't tell if they parse JavaScript to find dynamic tags, for instance. (NB: This is titled a "Technology Penetration Report", but the penetration they measured is that among websites rather than among consumer audiences.)

Posted by John Dowdell at 03:49 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

April 12, 2006

Web network effects

Web network effects: Harvard Business School discusses an analysis of early Netscape/Explorer dynamics by Pai-Ling Yen: "Did Microsoft win because its Internet Explorer was the technologically superior product to Netscape Navigator, or was Microsoft just more successful at the distribution end by convincing most PC companies, some argue by anticompetitive tactics, to include IE on every PC shipped in the late 1990s? Researchers line up on both sides of the argument." Here's the part which caught my eye, right after the conclusion that distribution issues may be twice as important as technical issues: "[A] window of opportunity exists for a second mover to challenge a first mover in this setting early on when the new technology has not yet diffused through the entire population -- the second mover can try to influence new users rather than get the small install