JD on EP

March 24, 2008

Anti-Ajax FUD

Anti-Ajax FUD: There's a very strange article at ComputerWorld today, which describes a pay-to-read report from Forrester Research. The strangeness starts at the intro [paraphrased]: "Ajax can be slow, so Forrester recommends AIR or Silverlight". The Adobe Integrated Runtime is not an in-browser technology, and the shipping version of Microsoft's Silverlight browser plugin relies on the browser's JavaScript for any interactivity... the recommendation makes zero sense. An anecdote says the initial rendering time was slower for an Ajax rewrite of a Visual Basic app, but Visual Basic lives on the local machine, while Ajax is transferred from a centralized machine... hard to compare the two. You can have both local and remote validation of user inputs... different needs. The Tamarin efficiencies in logic-processing are already available on 95% of consumer machines, within the Adobe Flash Player... works reliably the same regardless of browser brand, browser version, or common operating system details. The article makes me want to read the original Forrester report, to learn directly what the authors might have tried to say. Silverlight shouldn't be mentioned in this article at all (at least until Microsoft ships a full 1.0!), and Flex development (with SWF delivery) would be a more appropriate parallel to Ajax than AIR. The article disparages JavaScript-based apps, but for unsound reasons.

Posted by JohnDowdell at 01:08 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

March 20, 2008

The Web, pre-Web

The Web, pre-Web: Andy Baio did a great thing here: "Lately, I've started collecting old VHS tapes about the Internet from the early- to mid-1990s. While most of these are pretty corny -- think Gabe and Max's Internet Thing -- they also inadvertently captured pieces of the web that don't exist anywhere else. The Internet Archive's earliest snapshots were in late 1996, so anything before that is extremely sparse. The videos, silly as they are, still represent valuable documentation of the early web. I spent most of the day yesterday working on a workflow to digitize VHS tapes, settling on VCR to MiniDV camera my Macbook Pro with Firewire. These tapes are pretty worn, so the quality's not great, but that almost adds to their charm...." Lots of the early Web has disappeared, so we all owe Andy a debt of thanks for capturing what was found of it on videotapes.... ;-)

Posted by JohnDowdell at 02:36 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

March 19, 2008

Adobe Developer Week

Adobe Developer Week: This has gotten some attention in weblogs, but may have gotten buried in the rush of non-news... starting next Monday there will be twenty online classes, which will be recorded and available for subsequent viewing. I don't know group size, standby lists, or differences between live participation and recorded viewing.

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February 22, 2008

MS, developers, experiences

MS, developers, experiences: Sometimes the pioneers explore a new frontier, and then others really develop its popularity. Sometimes. Macromedia may have pioneered the ideas of cross-platform distribution of richer, more interactive experiences, but Microsoft has always had a strong presence within corporate intranets and other closed environments -- that's a lot of developer power! It's a good thing overall that your local IT desk has the capability to use color, motion and sound... beats having them making text interfaces with funny buttons, or having them demand you change your browser to do your business. It's a good and necessary thing to bring the trailing edge along. I've been reading a lot more of these threads, and thinking about how things sometimes turn out, after reading some of these articles on the web today.... ;-)

Posted by JohnDowdell at 02:21 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

February 21, 2008

SF meet tonight

SF meet tonight: I haven't seen this in the aggregators yet today... if you're in San Francisco then there's a meeting: "The San Flashcisco user group aims to promote understandings of Flash Platform technologies within and around the San Francisco area with emphasis on learning, fun and networking." (nb: I do call it "Frisco" on occasion, but I'm still a little uneasy with "Flashcisco".... ;-)

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February 19, 2008

Binary vs text

Binary vs text: Joel Spolsky looks at the recent documentation for Microsoft Office native file formats, and asks "Why are the Microsoft Office file formats so complicated?" Fortunately he answers the question -- these binary file formats grew up with use of the tools, and had to solve an ongoing series of problems, and weren't designed for direct manipulation by others. Plausible, useful perspective here. Towards the end he outlines ways to solve problems by using the current functionality of the tools themselves, rather than writing new code to digest the old formats. This doesn't explain why the more recent XML formats for Microsoft Office are so remarkably complex, however... an XML format seems like it should be able to be implemented by others, particularly if it is proposed as a common standard. Efficient binary formats have different priorities than open text formats... different types of beasts.

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January 26, 2008

QuickTime 7.4

QuickTime 7.4: In case you hadn't seen the news, you might want to hold off on updating QuickTime for a bit, in two specific situations: exporting QuickTime from Adobe Premiere Pro or After Effects; or inspecting system calls with the UNIX-based DTrace on your Mac. The QT7.4 update adds Apple iStore functionality, as announced at Macworld Expo, so adoption rates are likely pretty significant. The issue arose in the Adobe Discussion Forums last week, and staffer Michael Coleman had an advisory up Monday morning. But no chance to try to address it in After Effects 8.02 update, published Tuesday. (I don't know much about DTrace; discussion here.) This is a showstopper issue for videographers, and even though Apple rarely gives guidance, I suspect it's on a fast-track for a fix. Anyway, if you know friends who do video work, or who rely on DTrace, then making sure they know of QT7.4 could help them, thanks.

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October 07, 2007

Some bumps

Some bumps: Tinic Uro helped me understand the Hydra initiative... Narciso Jaramillo made Thermo a lot clearer for me. (I'm also happy about the ambient computing being done by Fernando Florez, and agree with Dan Florio on the serendipity of conference connections.)

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October 05, 2007

Hello, I Must Be Going

Hello, I Must Be Going: There won't be much happening on this weblog the next few weeks, because I'll be spending time in China instead of San Francisco. Adobe is one of the few companies to have a sabbatical policy, and I'm grandfather'd in on a lengthier Macromedia-style sabbatical. I'll be three weeks in Beijing, two in Shanghai, mostly to see how people are coping with the sudden changes and the new technologies. In my own life exposure to technical change has been gradual and incremental, but in these two cities the meeting has been abrupt, the results vibrant. I want to learn how other people see the new digital realities -- they'll predict how we'll all deal with the ever-accelerating change. I'll have computer and camera, but am unsure of connectivity and workflow... more likely to be on Twitter and my personal blog. Zai jian, ya'll! [I'm updating the publishing date on this item to keep it on the top of the stack... originally appeared on Oct 5.]

Posted by JohnDowdell at 06:52 AM | Comments (5) | TrackBack

September 25, 2007

Uninstalling iHacks

Uninstalling iHacks: Erica Sadun of The Unofficial Apple Weblog has the best summary I've seen yet of what we know about reversing the various iPhone unlock hacks circulated last month. Good to read, but no rush to action: "If you haven't tried relocking yet, do yourself a favor and just wait until we figure out why some relocks are going wrong." Apple's situation seems to be that they're not in a position to test and reverse the various hacks themselves... the Apple updaters are designed and tested upon an Apple configuration, not a hybrid. Who bears the responsibility for an uninstaller...?

Posted by JohnDowdell at 07:51 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

September 06, 2007

"Apple Screwed Me!!"

"Apple Screwed Me!!" No info here, I'm just ranting at the ranters, and Twitter's down. Techmeme's top circle-link today is about people angry that they bought an iPhone after the first rush, but before the first pricedrop. It's just $200, and just your ego to have the newest/fastest... the two should be able to be reconciled somehow. I can't raise much sympathy for someone complaining about not getting the best deal on a minor luxury item -- realistically, you're far more harmed by centralization of the money supply and deflation of its value; there's lots more important stuff to be concerned about. I'm glad Russell Beattie is writing again, but I disagree with this: "Happily screwing the early adopters and rewarding the laggards is something only Apple can do with a smile, no?" Apple didn't screw you; you made your own decision, based on the best info of the time -- the $200 may be less important than your self-image as a shopper. God forbid you should get into a Three Card Monte game or something.... ;-)
Update: Apple responds, with an offer to split-the-difference. I'm amazed; that's like a 30-hour turnaround to recognize, strategize, and implement a response!

Posted by JohnDowdell at 08:22 AM | Comments (6) | TrackBack

September 04, 2007

iCar designs

iCar designs: Tom Spring of PCWorld has a nice collection of links here: "With reports Apple and Volkswagen are in cahoots to build an iCar who can resist pondering what an iCar might look like. Lucky for me there is no shortage of imaginative Apple designers -- with apparently time to burn -- dreaming what an iCar might look like. This is what I found...." Nothing profound, but some nice eye-candy here.

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August 17, 2007

Gear on the go

Gear on the go: Awesome collection of photos and text at Lifehacker, showing how various people pack for computing on the go. Most of these are daybag contents, but there are two travel vest descriptions as well. I don't see any mentions of utility belts yet, but Lifehacker is accepting submissions for another week. How do you go, when you're on the go...?

Posted by JohnDowdell at 09:14 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

August 14, 2007

Game manuals

Game manuals: Seems to be a very useful resource, if you need to check how someone else actually handled a problem years ago: "If you were saying to yourself 'Now, where can I browse over 1,700 arcade manuals in PDF format?', your prayers were just answered. This is over three gigabytes of manuals, schematics, and general information about arcade machines, scanned in by an anonymous army of dedicated people, and going back up to 30 years...." [via Jason Scott, via Andy Baio]

Posted by JohnDowdell at 03:32 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Text in motion

Text in motion: CSS leader Dave Shea links to a baker's half-dozen YouTube videos which specialize in English text moving in correspondence to narration. I was struck by how effective the text animation was, even though it was a video which passed through the YouTube publishing process (which can often introduce recompression issues or re-keying of framerates). There is smooth and graceful animation here, even though it may not be running at a hundred frames a second. The key is the use of classic animation principles... timing, anticipation, followthrough, arcs, easing, squash/stretch... there's a way to make things come alive, but it requires more smarts and skills than just cranking the framerate up beyond what any browser/processor can actually deliver. Disney classic animation displayed in movie theatres at 24 frames per second, and many of those pieces were done two-up, with a single piece of artwork shown for two frames, for an effective framerate of 12fps! Check out the Johnston & Thomas animation link above... it discusses the principles used behind many of the typography pieces to which Dave linked.

Posted by JohnDowdell at 03:23 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

3D Mouse

3D Mouse: Mac-only. 3Dconnexion, a Logitech company, adds 3D manipulation for models rendered by Adobe Acrobat 8, in addition to its prior 3D manipulation in Adobe Photoshop CS3 Extended.

Posted by JohnDowdell at 11:53 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

August 10, 2007

Lots of links

Lots of links: Looking for some weekend reading? Here's a bunch of pages open in my browser the past few days, some techy, some not....

Chicago Tribune goes all punny with a story about traffic violations with the Oscar Meyer Weinermobile.

Microsoft offers miraculous image-editing.

Aral Balkan tested the Nokia N800 Tablet with Adobe Flash Player 9, and many things worked on the new form-factor, but not all.

Unlike Anil Dash, I'm still a little peeved that Daniel Lyons berated anonymity while exploiting it himself.

Night & Day couldn't have been a standard, it had a 48-bar structure....

Beer bubbles at SIGGRAPH....

Draw Anywhere is SWF which offers flowchart drawing in the browser.

Kyle Hayes ran comparisons of Google Websearch queries for ColdFusion and ActionScript... I was most impressed by the regional distinctions which showed up for these and other terms.

A corporate blogging article turns into a CEO-blogging article, but has some valid observations on how open communications can help in a variety of ways.

Spoilers for life, and I thought it was funny too.

Steve Webster has info on a conference presentation on Flash, Yahoo, standards.

Newspapers use movie footage to illustrate breaking news.

Forrester Research: "Ninety-seven percent of the 1,000-plus corporate Web sites that Forrester Research has evaluated received failing grades... Manning says that there's no perfect Web site on the Internet. Forced to choose one, he picks Adobe.com, which he says is easy to read and full of useful information."

Eve Lee had a post-mortem on the Acrobat/Kinko issue, which doesn't focus on mom&pop printers like the mainstream press did, but which does address the under-reported intranet aspects. "'A direct print link from any application that bypasses organizational controls raises security, policy, and legal issues on a much higher level,' says Ray Chambers, CEO of Chambers Management Group and a longtime director of in-plant (nonprofit) document management. 'There could be Sarbanes-Oxley, HIPAA, and Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act implications... not to mention Safe Harbor in the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.' He adds, 'Many of us have contractual agreements with other print providers, be they local franchises of national quick print providers or local commercial businesses. The FedEx Kinko's link, by facilitating print to an alternative site, may put the organization at risk of contract violations and cause a breach of trust between the organization and a trusted supplier.'"

Drew McLellan has been strategizing how to scale PHP work.

John Gruber notes UI changes in new Apple keyboards.

Apple has an extremely centralized glory structure.

Kuler now accepts color themes in URLs... Scott Fegette has more.

Posted by JohnDowdell at 03:13 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

July 26, 2007

PCs running cars?

PCs running cars? Apparently the number of computers running Windows will continue to exceed the number of autombiles running Windows, at least for the forseeable future... Mary Jo Foley transcribes a Steve Ballmer quote: "'There will be more PCs running Windows than automobiles at that point [June 2008], Ballmer told attendees.'" Or maybe he meant using Windows will continue to be more popular than having your car run your computer. But that doesn't make much sense. Or maybe... oh, I get it, he says there will be more PCs than cars by next year... that's plausible, considering that quick web searches show 66 million automobiles produced in 2005, and 240 million computers produced in 2007. More of them will run Player and Reader than Windows however, even though they all have windows... oh stop it John, stop teasing the poor man. ;-) Mary Jo also adds: "I thought it interesting that Ballmer emphasized repeatedly that Microsoft now sees itself as an advertising company. When identifying the four primary areas where Microsoft sees itself competing, advertising was one of those. (The other three: Commercial software, open source, consumer electronics.)"

Posted by JohnDowdell at 12:18 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

Flash Player, Yahoo Toolbar

Flash Player, Yahoo Toolbar: It's not fair to spring this on me before I have my morning coffee. Google News showed the following story in a newspaper: "How can I install Adobe Flash Player without also getting that nasty Yahoo toolbar?" The answer describes how to visit the Adobe site and uncheck the toolbar offer before installing. The wacky thing is that Adobe doesn't offer the Yahoo Toolbar to people in Microsoft Internet Explorer who actually visit the Adobe site to install instead of using the normal background ActiveX process -- that offer switched to Google Toolbar awhile ago, as Emmy Huang and the FAQ show. It's still true that unchecking offers doesn't offer them, and still true that it's only IE/Win which sees this offer, and only if you're one of the minority who visit the Adobe site to install. (Making such offers of separate downloads on the Adobe site has paid for much of the engineering work on the Player -- it's advantageous to all.) Newspapers can be tricky; it felt like I had wandered down a time tunnel during the night, let me finish off this cup of coffee before instructing me on the evil of Scooter Libby or whatever's next, okay...? ;-)

Posted by JohnDowdell at 07:05 AM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

July 18, 2007

New tech confusions

New tech confusions: Not all speakers are up to speed; here's a refresher. Adobe Flash Player 9 is already plugged into nearly all the world's browsers. Microsoft's Silverlight is a proposed future browser plugin. The beta Adobe Integrated Runtime gives webpages extra privileges -- to become more like OS-native applications -- across different brands of operating systems. Adobe Flex consists of MXML, the framework and compilers, and optional tooling and data servers from Adobe -- its compiled SWF output runs locally within Adobe Flash Player 9. In 2002 Rich Internet Applications introduced in-browser applications which separated data requests from display requests, and RIAs became very popular after Ajax enfranchised JavaScript developers. Sun's JavaFX is an announcement about a new scripting language which can compile for playback in each browser's Java Virtual Machine. Flex adoption is through the roof, but is still only at the start of its growth curve. Silverlight can not possibly be "a reasonable choice for anyone planning on building cross-platform RIAs today", even if you were willing to accept the extra user costs of installation, because there's not even a definitive installation yet. Comparing Silverlight to "Flex" makes no sense; the author could more usefully compare XAML with MXML. The best thing about Microsoft's adoption last year of the "Experience Matters" mantra is that they're greatly helping to raise the expectations about acceptable user experiences today. Related: Mike Downey distinguishes similar parts of proposed technology stacks from potential future competitors. (Mike says they're already competitors, but I think only in marketing campaigns, not in actual deployed technology.)

Posted by JohnDowdell at 12:08 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

July 08, 2007

Offline a bit

Offline a bit: Blogging should be light for me this week... going to take a few days, enjoy the summer. See ya!

Posted by JohnDowdell at 11:23 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

July 07, 2007

BarCamp: Feel of the Floor

BarCamp: Feel of the Floor: If you'd like to get a feel for what it's like on Townsend St today, then Enric Cirne has a nice, lengthy video, just walking around the facility, observing what people are doing. 45 megs, good quality compression, a real sense of the ambience.

Posted by JohnDowdell at 08:39 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

BSD thread

BSD thread: Over the last week someone who wants Adobe Flash Player for BSD Unix has been posting in various weblog items here. I've moved them all into this thread, in hopes of (a) helping him make a better case; and (b) removing off-topic material from other weblog items. Feel free to add to it. Current laptop ports are listed here.

-----

Posted to Corporate honesty:

adobe corporate culture is hardly a model for
openness and communication is it ?

[jd sez: I don't know who is a model for whom, but I do know that we disclose our affiliations.]

they use code from the (genuinely) free OS's but then
barely acknowledge their existence, and lock
them out of the www.
refusing to supply the free BSD's with
flashplayer has made a complete
mockery of open web standards.
what good are standards compliant web browsers
when there's barely a page that will render
as intended by the designer, and many
*many* sites that can't be used at all ?
why does nobody at adobe even acknowledge this ?
not a comment on the thousands of sigs on
the petitions, or the flashplayer request forms,
no comment to posts on adobe blogs or
the requests made in the forums.
this sorry state of affairs is even
mentioned in the flashplayer wikipedia page.

like the thousands of others,
I am a little tired of being ignored,
this has been going on for years.

why won't you comment JD ?

hello ?

[jd sez: You're posting anonymously. *You* won't disclose. (I think the core of your plaint is "I want Adobe's source code because I choose an ultra-minority platform.")]

Posted by: paul at July 7, 2007 03:52 AM

I'm not posting anonymously JD, my name *is*
paul.
you also have my email address, what more info
would you like ?

and no, I do not want the source code, that's
yours. what I want is for someone to respond
to the thousands of requests with *something*.
I want to be treated the same as everybody else.

as to ultra-minority, check netcrafts figures.
you'll be surprised.
and yet again you haven't answered ANY of the
points I've raised JD.
what's the matter,
cat got your tongue ?

-PAUL (yes, PAUL, honestly)

Posted by: paul at July 7, 2007 07:31 AM

Paul of Saul? Paul of Abbey Road? Paul Allen, protecting his portfolio? Probably some other kind of "Paul", I suppose....

If you won't bet on your own words, why should others invest their time in reading them?

I'm in a bit of a dilemma here, because I try to keep this weblog respectful of the reader's time, and you've been spinning your wheels on "no respect for BSDs" on a few threads here. I should just remove such words which add little, considering you can publish your own blog yourself. I'm always loathe to do, on the offchance that the other party might sometime start actually communicating.

Posted by: John Dowdell at July 7, 2007 07:54 AM

my name is paul jd.
I've continued to post this stuff because I get
nothing but deaf ears.

you can call me anything you like, but
I would prefer just paul.

you still haven't responded, and you are of
course free to censor me, just as I am free
to state the facts anywhere that will allow
me to do so.

the fact that you think the BSDs are ultra-minority
speaks volumes. before hotmail was bought
out by MS, it was freebsd, yahoo is freebsd,
many many millions of webservers run freebsd.
gregs book sold more copies than some of the
platforms you support.
it's a minority only in the sense that it's
not in the top 3 platforms on the 'net.
(unless you include the juniper kit etc)
and has been crippled on the desktop by the
lack of flashplayer.

check netcrafts figures, I can't fnd recent
stats there but here's one from waay
back in 2004
http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2004/06/07/nearly_25_million_active_sites_running_freebsd.html

how large an installed base would be
necessary for adobe to come to a decision ?

I don't enjoy trying to ambush you on your blog,
but it's a little annoying to be ignored for
sooo long.

-paul.

Posted by: paul at July 7, 2007 08:11 AM

How is the number of servers running BSD relevant to a discussion on the lack of client-side technology for the platform?

According to http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_os.asp, Linux hovers around 3.5%. I won't pretend to know jack about *nix, but if Linux as a whole is 3.5% (which Adobe provides a player for the majority of, right?), what is BSD on the whole? 1%? I would certainly consider that an ultra-minority.

Posted by: Ben at July 7, 2007 09:31 AM

personally, I think I'd consider 3.5% as an
ultra-minority, it's an ultra-vocal minority
though.

the BSDs don't get used much on the desktop,
I'm a staunch supporter of course, but it's
painful to web browse without flash, it really
is that much of a big deal.
I'm sat here running
win32 right now purely because of that.
you may think I'm exagerating, but I know for
certain that a lot of freebsd/openbsd/netbsd/etc
users dual-boot or have another system running
just for that purpose.
it's good to have the desktop running the
same OS you're developing for, or admin'ing.

everything else is in place, mplayer, vlc, java,
openoffice, all that jazz, all run the same
as they do on other platforms, it's pretty much
flash that's the killer now, the only bit
of client side technology lacking.
of course silverlight may add to the misery.

if the BSD's are 1%,
(that's probably a generous guesstimate)
then maybe they'd approach 2% with flashplayer.
surely, approaching 100% market
penetration is something worth expending the effort over ?
PC-BSD is looking quite attractive as a desktop,
and 1-2% is a hell of a lot of users, no ?

I can't see how it would be a huge effort to port
to say freebsd, as pretty much all the opensource
multimedia apps build and run without
any drama, mplayer and vlc are monsters.
same compiler, same complete toolchain pretty much.
also, as mac OSX userland is pretty much
FreeBSD, it's an environment that may seem
oddly familiar to a porting team.
as you mentioned linux "as a whole" it's probably
worth saying that there's no such fracturing
and forking of the userbase, e.g. there's one freebsd,
-stable and a -current (dev) branch.
this uniformity is a big deal, it cuts down
support dramatically.

so, when you look at desktop browser
fiigures, I guess ultra-minority is pretty fair.
however, given a little nurturing that would
surely increase.
anyway, guess I'm really asking, why not ?
it's worth much kudos , good PR, and brownie-points
to adobe if nothing else.

-paul

Posted by: paul at July 7, 2007 10:34 AM

-----

Posted to Chocolate confirmation:

why's there no flashplayer for the free BSD's ?
some of their code is in it, do the right thing,
not the absolute minimum the licence dictates!

Posted by: paul at July 5, 2007 11:43 AM

-----

Posted to Nokia N800 tablet, Adobe Flash Player:

why's there no flashplayer for the free BSD's ?
some of their code is in it, do the right thing,
not the absolute minimum the licence dictates!

Posted by: paulh at July 6, 2007 10:11 AM

-----

Posted to Happy Bday, Player 9:

one year since 9 release and still no hint of a
port to the OS's you're effectively locking out
of the www.
(despite the petitions and begging messages)

[jd sez: Hi, I'm not sure why you feel the need to speak anonymously. If you're asking "Is there any guidance for porting to 64-bit architectures?" then here is a good starting point.]

according to your eulas there's openbsd and lots
of other genuinely free (non-viral)
code in flashplayer 9, so why haven't you
"done the right thing" and ported the thing to
the platforms that gift you this code ?
freebsd, dragonflybsd, netbsd, openbsd etc.

it really should be pretty trivial given
past experience, if you need help I'm sure
it would be forthcoming immediately.

[jd sez: Standardizing high-level rich-media support across operating systems which currently lack even low-level standardized support is usually non-trivial.]

nobody is asking for support, just a binary,
this worked well for netscape and was much appreciated.

really does seem that all this talk of supporting
opensource by adobe is just that, talk.
only the commercial and market-viable
platforms are catered for, nobody else matters,
right ?

if anybody does condescend to reply to this,
don't bother telling me "we have no plans now
but that may change" or "the linux binary runs".
the former seems to be flannel and the latter is
untrue.

a year's long enough to let your intentions be known, you've pissed everybody right off.
(even leaving acroread and flash 7 out of the equation)

if this sounds bitter then you're just getting
a hint of the vitriol taste you've left in
my mouth because of this.
at least you know where you stand with microsoft.

-

Posted by: bitter&twisted at July 2, 2007 08:47 AM

didn't realise I hadn't filled in a name,
however although I am by no means a spokesman for
any of these projects, you can take it as read
that I was summing up the feelings I have and
those I've heard expressed by others.
if you doubt this then you could always ask on
irc, examine the petitions, actually ask people.

I didn't mention 64bit port at all,
the 32bit x86 machines running these OS have
no player either.

SDL, OSS, the various X dri and fb
schemes all seem to work nicely cross platform.
(even svgalib where applicable oddly enough)
vlc, mplayer, firefox, *etc*, hugely complex apps
with a lot of dependencies don't appear to have
huge problems supporting multiple *nix platforms,
so what's the specific problem flashplayer has ?
I'd be surprised if it's anything that can't be
overcome, these other apps manage it without much
in the way of drama.

your response was made to sound like there's
a lot of work involved. I have no idea what your
build infrastructure is like, and it may well be
the case that it's a lot of effort to kickstart
something like this.

however..

as to any difficulties porting the code,
you'll never know until you actually try.

Posted by: paul at July 2, 2007 12:35 PM

no response.
fine.

just remember that every time you slap
yourself on the back over this, you're also
slapping some of us in the face.

Posted by: paul at July 3, 2007 07:24 PM

-----

Posted by JohnDowdell at 12:46 PM | Comments (7) | TrackBack

June 22, 2007

iPhone features

iPhone features: Looks like The Onion has a startling exclusive yet again.... ;-)

Posted by JohnDowdell at 03:23 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

June 07, 2007

Silverlight vs Flash

Silverlight vs Flash: Dueling arguments at ZDNet. The pro-SL position: Fewer know ActionScript than .NET and the potential DLR languages; Silverlight has Microsoft behind it. The pro-Flash position: SL is currently non-Linux; no tooling available if you're not on an MS-branded OS; currently has 0% viewability. I'm not sure either argument is strong. The pro-SL author seems to not realize that ECMAScript is used daily by millions, and that the difference in object models between JavaScript and ActionScript is likely less than the object-model learning gap required for Ruby/SL... there's also a greater range of tooling available for Flash. The pro-Flash author has true points, but those may not be as significant as consumer inertia, client inertia, and the continual pressure from other MS business units to support the organization's overall goals. Microsoft has hired many of the top Flash developers to create showcase pieces in their environment... Microsoft and Real have moved their video clients into a more Flash-like space... Microsoft has announced that their main hope for returning growth to the company is advertising, and personalization databases. We'll see how these trends play out. I think Flash is now in an even stronger position than before, myself.

Posted by JohnDowdell at 07:08 AM | Comments (5) | TrackBack

June 06, 2007

Specific solutions vs general solutions

Specific solutions vs general solutions: Yesterday Steve Cutter covered a debate about JavaScript libraries in ColdFusion being larger than needed for a specific use... today Dare Obasanjo suggests that Google Gears may be useless because there isn't an out-of-the-box data synchronization feature. I think both discussions may miss that it's cheaper to build a solution for a specific problem, than it is to build a general solution which can be applied to an entire class of similar problems. It's easier to hack a particular solution than it is to architect a general solution. And once a general solution architecture is available, there's always the question of it being better to use the general solution (with benefits in development time, testing, and maintainence), or bang out a one-time solution for the particular problem at hand (with benefits in codesize and customization). I think it's okay that the current Google Gears doesn't try for a universal solution to data synch -- as their architecture docs show, there's great variance in current applications even without the problem of synchronization, and today even a particular synch solution would be tricky, much less an early attempt at a general solution. Summary: It's easy to build a fishing pole from a stick, a string and a pin, but that doesn't mean that modern fishing-pole factories are bloated or useless... agree, disagree, other...?

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June 02, 2007

Webware 100

Webware 100: I don't usually feel comfortable pointing to online polls, because of the way ballot-stuffing often works online, but in this case CNET's bodytext says "Are you a finalist in the Webware 100? Download a 'vote for me' button to put on your site!", so I guess they're encouraging fan votes. And anyway, I learned of it through a Microsoft staff posting.... ;-) I'm not sure if "Adobe Flash" here means the Player, the visual authoring tool, or the entirely platform -- it's lumped in with Drupal, WordPress, and Silverlight -- but I voted for "Adobe Flash" anyway, and for a few other favorite tools on other pages. Your call.

Posted by JohnDowdell at 09:46 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

May 31, 2007

At least capitalize the F?

At least capitalize the F? I don't understand non-interactive weblogs, which lock out comments even when not highly-trafficked... here, a Microsoft staffer takes the time to tell the world: "I always felt that multimedia apps (like flash) were too lightweight, too scripty and not robust enough for serious data centric development. Well, with Silverlight that's all changing." It's like he's walking around with toilet paper stuck to his shoe or something, how can other people politely help...?

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May 21, 2007

Sequential art

Sequential art: Two links here... the first one goes to "The Mystery of Picasso", a 1956 film that I hadn't seen until last night... Picasso paints on a back-filmed canvas, so all you see is the painting gradually appear. At first this was great, because I could see how he blocked out the painting in his mind, could see it step by step instead of a final finished flat thing. But in some of these paintings Picasso started seeing the filming as performance, changing the art as he went along, making a little story out of it. MetaFilter had more discussion and some video clips of it. The other link is to news that Frank Miller will be writing and directing "The Spirit". Will Eisner's Comics and Sequential Art was one of the first to seriously examine the craft of drawing in time, and Miller's Daredevil and Dark Knight work innovated in sheer emotional impact. Unfolding flat paintings into time-based experiences, and a connection between two of the innovators in sequential storytelling... now all we need is Picasso holed up in a hidden crypt in Wildwood Cemetery and the cycle would be complete....

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Cutty Sark, London to Shanghai

Cutty Sark, London to Shanghai: Off-topic, but shows how far we've come... historic sailing vessel Cutty Sark caught on fire yesterday... this part in the BBC's report struck me: "The Cutty Sark left London on her maiden voyage on 16 February 1870, sailing around The Cape of Good Hope to Shanghai in three-and-a-half months. She made eight journeys to China as part of the tea trade until steam ships replaced sail on the high seas." And the Cutty Sark had no WiFi either, so you could imagine how much email you'd have to catch up on after the 100-day voyage, were you one of the wealthy few who could afford to travel back then....

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May 17, 2007

Virtual Bubble Wrap

Virtual Bubble Wrap: I was browsing the Microsoft blogs and saw that Silverlight has reached the bubblepop stage... you know, that little game where you pop all the bubbles, sort of like virtual bubblewrap. It's a rite-of-passage for browser plugins, I guess. The MS staff credit a Windows Mobile version for Dr. Pepper, but all the different Flash versions owe a tip of the hat to Joey deVilla, who ported the early Mackerel Media HyperCard stack to the Netscape 2.0 browser in 1995. Why's it so popular to pop fake bubbles? I don't know, I always preferred real bubblewrap myself, but this won Shocked Site of the Day and other awards... the Internet Archive has the original Mackerel page, although it looks like that Director 4.0 stuff doesn't fully play back in the browser anymore. (Notice the "loading" screen... took just one textfield, jiggered around to let you know it didn't freeze... we tried to keep plugin content below 40K in those days.) Anyway, the Virtual Bubblewrap demo has a long and honorable history... check out the above links for some of the context on this story.

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April 23, 2007

Google "Earth Day"

Google "Earth Day": I saw a new logo at Google yesterday, but didn't realize until today that it was meant to depict an iceberg, presumably as part of the "global warming" political/business campaign. I'm offended that Google's business would be used to impress fragile minds into supporting unsane restrictions upon others. (Background: The Earth has a long history of climate change, and while anthropogenic causes may contribute, any such effects are not yet calculable, much less intelligently remediable, rendering campaigns such as Kyoto Protocol ludicrous, particularly when these campaigns are engineered by the energy-phagic class themselves. I'm a proponent of Fullerian ephemeralization, and so would encourage improvements in technology such as air-conditioning before endorsing discriminatory and ineffective legislation.) No big thing, and other Adobe staffers would likely disagree, but I'm just personally offended by Google's attempted manipulation here.

Posted by JohnDowdell at 07:33 AM | Comments (22) | TrackBack

Old apps, new OS

Old apps, new OS: Minor story-correction here... a nameless writer at PC Advisor starts out: "Adobe recently announced that it wouldn't release Vista-compatible updates to current versions of many of its products." Adobe Creative Suite 3 is the current version, and it was specifically designed and tested against Windows changes introduced in Microsoft Vista. Some of the older Adobe/Macromedia applications aren't significantly affected by Vista changes; others have already received updaters to address small changes in functionality under the new OS. But not all existing applications will run under the recent OS, as Microsoft's pre-purchase information should reveal. (Adobe has also brought together the info about Microsoft's release, in the PDF Vista FAQ.) I'm not sure whether CS3 has yet surpassed the Vista installed base, so the author might just as usefully have wondered whether the slow Vista adoption was in part due to its changes upon the functionality of existing software purchases. (Ya'll know all this stuff already... I just came upon the incorrect pro tech punditry in a news search, and felt the obligation to repeat the basics of how "new software supports old".)

Posted by JohnDowdell at 07:19 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

April 20, 2007

WinXP vs Vista

WinXP vs Vista: Dell Computer stopped selling Microsoft Windows XP as an operating system when Vista arrived in January, but added it back this week in response to strong customer demand. Nothing in Dell press releases yet, but BBC has context, and Techmeme has commentary. I don't remember such a thing happening before.

Posted by JohnDowdell at 05:20 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

April 17, 2007

WMP in FF/Vis

WMP in FF/Vis: Many commercial websites use Microsoft Windows Media Player, to ensure that their copy is not ripped off for ad revenue by others. If you're in a recent Microsoft OS, but prefer not to use Microsoft's browser, then WMP has again been packaged into Netscape Plugin format, so that such protected video can be viewed in the Mozilla Firefox browser.

Posted by JohnDowdell at 09:59 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

April 15, 2007

NAB news

NAB news: There's a whole bunch of announcements coming out of the big Las Vegas video show right now. Some of these are for near-term deliverables; others are statement-of-intent to be delivered later. I don't have additional info beyond what's in the public record. But if you're awake and are reading now, then there's a lot of stuff going on....

Posted by JohnDowdell at 09:08 PM | Comments (12) | TrackBack

April 12, 2007

The 7 Flash Experts

The 7 Flash Experts: Tom Foremski profiles MixerCast, and includes this arresting line: "Ms Cooper is keen to point out that MixerCast has two of the top experts in Adobe Flash -- out of only seven worldwide." Now I've got all these Kurosawa parallels running around in my head... who's the Toshiro Mifune of SWF work, who's the archer Seiji Miyaguchi, the soulful Takashi Shimura and the rest? Or maybe I should be thinking of Steve McQueen metaphors instead...? ;-)

Posted by JohnDowdell at 10:19 AM | Comments (14) | TrackBack

Windows Update amenity

Windows Update amenity: Ever do a Windows Update process through Internet Explorer, and then have the "Reboot Later" dialog keep popping up every few minutes? This article contains the path to resetting the timeout period. [via Dan Wilson and Jim Priest]

Posted by JohnDowdell at 09:29 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

April 07, 2007

FOSS CS3

FOSS CS3: Caught this while net-trawling... Shahid Shah compiles a list of various free-of-cost tools for media editing, categorized along the functional roles played by Photoshop, Dreamweaver, etc. Some include source code, some have an open coding community, but all can be used without cash.

Posted by JohnDowdell at 05:00 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

Diggable Digg

Diggable Digg: A bunch of links from Digg's Technology page here... Internet turns 38 today, according to WIRED, because it was April 7 1969 which saw the publishing of RFC 1, a plan on connecting different networks into a "network of networks" (retrospective, Wikipedia)... Easter Eggs, Geek Eggs, and standards-compliant church sites... retro brick phones with extended battery life, larger antenna and speaker... Japan limits political videos, Thailand limits humor videos, but in 1747 the bagpipe ban was evaded by lower-tech means... opensource licenses have difficulties too... ten Photoshop masters, five annoying ads, twenty-one tech flops, and a whole bunch of effective logos... research into recognizing images and not recognizing people... Quicksilver tips for Macintosh... a cheatsheet to English punctuation for internet writers. (And yes, I'm stuck inside the house today, how'd you guess...? ;-)

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April 05, 2007

Understanding Flash Smack

Understanding Flash Smack: Ever since Ryan Stewart pointed to the notes by Ben Galbraith of a presentation by two Microsoft staffers, I've been trying to understand the quotes "flash is evil", "we are going to win" and so on. This report by David Malouf may help... he describes attending a Microsoft bootcamp as a potential staffer, and sees a disconnect from the real world: "It seems that from querying people related to the product that MS is not completely familiar with all that is going on with Adobe as they still think of Flash as a gaming and animation environment and they think of PDF as a static environment. Both statements have not been true for quite some time now." This could also explain stances such as "more searchable than flash" and the rest. Lots more here too. But I'd still like to hear from Chris and Don what they actually said and meant with quotes like "adobe pretends flash is standard", "crush google, zero-sum game" and the rest... Ben's notes are good, but it's nothing like the speaker speaking directly for himself. Anyway, David's got some insight into what makes them tick, what they see and don't see... worth a read, if you're trying to understand Microsoft's "experience" rap.

Posted by JohnDowdell at 07:01 AM | Comments (7) | TrackBack

March 30, 2007

"Spring ahead", redux

"Spring ahead", redux: Watch the time this weekend... some devices and services may have been manually switched to the new US timezones three weeks ago, and could toggle over again this weekend if their timing routines weren't updated at the same time their time was. (Or something like that, you know what I'm trying to say.... ;-)

Posted by JohnDowdell at 01:32 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

March 08, 2007

PS development technique

PS development technique: Russell Williams describes how Adobe Photoshop CS3 was constructed. A sample: "The change we made was going from a traditional waterfall method to an incremental development model. Before, we would specify features up front, work on features until a 'feature complete' date, and then (supposedly) revise the features based on alpha and beta testing and fix bugs... [Now] the goal is to always have the product in a state where we could say 'pencils down. You have x weeks to fix the remaining bugs and ship it'." Lots more, not about imaging, but about major application development. Interesting: the PS CS3 preview on Labs had several hundred thousand downloads, but only resulted in 25 new bugs.
Update: Product Manager John Nack has additional information on how this development methodology affected the overall release cycle.

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March 01, 2007

My status

My status: I've been out-of-office this week, nursing a strained quadriceps, and suspect I'll be off my feet through the weekend. If so, then I won't have access to internal email until Monday. That CNET story on "photoshop online in six months" has gotten picked up on Slashdot as well as Techmeme, but the more I read the original article the more I wonder about it... the Google angle in the lede does not seem suggested by the parts of the transcript we're allowed to read... I'm not sure how much is Bruce, how much is Martin. There's also a hit on "Adobe Remix" now, which I suspect is just the Googlebombing effect, but I don't have additional info on either of these discussions yet. I'll be on the web, although at limited effectiveness until next week.

Posted by JohnDowdell at 05:46 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

February 27, 2007

Sidelined

Sidelined: I took a spill on a San Francisco hill yesterday -- got a strained left quadriceps and can't walk well. But I was looking forward to meeting a score of techbloggers visiting Adobe today for new tool presentations, early advisory-board projects, and reality checks on how well these new technologies will be understood by the blogosphere. Lots of people I've been reading for years, and today was the chance to see how they think, the people behind the words, away from the bustle of a large conference -- and my leg won't let me go. Bummer. Fortunately the presentations will be in the public record, and I'll start a separate item here linking to their live reporting from the event. I was really looking forward to the interactions, though. More notes in the extended entry here on San Francisco topography, recuperation and preventative techniques.

The following has no direct tech content, but considering how much time most of us spend sitting these days, some of the notes may help in reducing downtime in the future.

I usually walk from Cole Valley in the Haight-Ashbury, up over 17th & Clayton, then down to 7th & Townsend... just over three miles, takes less than an hour at a moderate pace, lets me listen to Chinese lessons, smoke a pipe, think through the day's work. There was a light rain yesterday, and coming down Roosevelt and approaching Corona Heights, at about a 10% grade, there's been a set of plywood boards over a Department of Public Works sidewalk-improvement the last few months. Yesterday it was wet and I stepped on a leaf on the plywood -- whoosh my legs flew out and my body came down, and my left knee was doubled under my body.

It took a moment to catch my breath, and when I got up my left leg couldn't support any weight... if I locked the knee it was fine, no pain, but any bend in the left knee and it would just give way. The quadriceps are those big muscles across the front of the thigh. When my body slammed down atop the bent knee the muscles were stretched beyond their usual range, at great speed and with pressure. The muscles are still attached to the bone, but they're damaged, and will take some time to repair.

Cabbies take Roosevelt, and I managed to flag one down and get over to the office. I was able to get an icepack and some compression, but there were no crutches or canes to take the load off the injured leg. After two hours I just chalked it up and went home, where I could keep the leg elevated.

The first-aid treatment for such injuries is called RICE, for Rest, Ice, Compression and Elevation. Ice and compression help slow the bio-activity levels in the injured area, reducing damage and pain. Ibuprofen helps. I've also been doing regular gentle stretching and massage... there's a risk that other parts of the body can get tight as they compensate for the injured area.

But I was lucky, my body was loose -- I had my usual stretching and flexing while getting ready to leave the house, and I also had a good workout that morning too. My quadriceps were stretched beyond their usual range during the fall, but if I hadn't been investing time in increasing their flexibility and strength then the muscles might well have sheared from the bone, requiring surgery to repair.

A fall like that, anyone could take. The only thing we can change is how well we're prepared for it.

Technology professionals are particularly at risk, because we sit so much, use just a small range of postures. I think we've got to put extra attention into maintaining flexibility, and maintaining enough strength to resist injury. Making such investments cheap enough to be sustainable, that's the tricky part.

o Hand-weights were a revelation for me... strap them on while doing housework and you're strengthening the abdomen and back, not just the arms... even an extra two pounds per hand during daily chores gives perceptible results, at almost no extra cost.

o Doorframes can be a great stretching tool, whether hanging by the upper molding, or twisting laterally within them, or hanging forward or back to stretch leg and back muscles. Even ten seconds helps.

o Time spent brushing teeth can easily be double-purposed for stretching and flexing, going into a catcher's squat.

o Why bend when you can squat? It took some conscious effort for me to change habits, but once you decide you're no longer going to bend over to pick something up, it's an easy change to make.

o A weird little New Years Resolution for me is working out well... putting on my socks standing up. No sitting, no leaning against a wall... just focusing on balance while putting on socks. Sounds silly, but I've noticed an improvement in my overall balance since doing so.

I was lucky, with the fall I took -- no back strain, no ligament or bone damage -- just a hyperextended leg muscle to deal with. But slips and falls cause 10% of all injuries, 15% of all accidental deaths -- and those of us who work at computers are more vulnerable than people with more active daily lives. Finding ways to build protection within daily routines seems like a very important thing to do.

Posted by JohnDowdell at 08:21 AM | Comments (8) | TrackBack

February 15, 2007

Gartenberg at Microsoft

Gartenberg at Microsoft: Microsoft hires an industry analyst as "Enthusiast Evangelist". It's good that he believes in what he does: "Why Microsoft? There's a revolution going on. A battle for the hearts and minds of consumers in terms of their digital lives. I firmly believe that Microsoft is the only company that will enable the seamless transition for users to move in and out of the different aspects of their lives. In short, no one else comes close to presenting a complete, unified and integrated view of the digital home of the 21st century." Me, I think that we'll find a variety of technologies which work together to bring about such a future... Microsoft remains an immense power, but the entirety is more than any one player. (I'm not keen on the martial metaphors either, for similar reason.)

Posted by JohnDowdell at 09:11 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

February 04, 2007

January picks

January picks: Important Adobe releases this past month... Flex 2.01 signifies more than a .01 might suggest... PDF 1.7 and beyond will be determined by International Organization for Standardization (ISO)... Adobe Flash Player 9 for Linux is released (and here's my obligatory 64-bit link ;-) There was also continuing guidance on new projects, and hints on things beyond that. Microsoft launches its new operating system, and compatibility questions can now be addressed, while Microsoft itself is likely to start reprioritizing for its next phase. Worrisome stat: Vint Cerf estimates that one computer in five today is under remote control, as part of a zombie botnet... when the network itself is compromised, what happens to Web 2.0?

Posted by JohnDowdell at 10:11 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

January 08, 2007

Printing metal

Printing metal: Off-topic, but I haven't been able to get these out of my mind since seeing the link at Cool Tools last week. Bathsheba Grossman draws sculpture and mathematical models in CAD software, then uses a metallic deposition printer with laser binding before the final baking and a bath in molten bronze. It looks like they'd be fun to hold, but they're very compelling to just look at too....

Posted by JohnDowdell at 03:23 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

December 17, 2006

Binary ISO-Latin 1 in desuetude

Binary ISO-Latin 1 in desuetude: US Federal Communications Commision drops Morse Code from its testing requirements. Jeff Pulver has perspective. There was a time when we didn't have even 8-bits to handle simple English text -- only the ability to turn a signal on or off. Now we have YouTube. Progress, true, but....

Posted by JohnDowdell at 06:06 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

December 15, 2006

Snap Preview

Snap Preview: Figured I'd pass this along... if you visit weblogs which recently added miniature fullpage screenshots when you roll over a link, and if you'd rather not indulge in looking at where you might be going while losing the text underneath the popup, and if you don't mind holding a preferences cookie from a site you may not have otherwise visited, then click the above link. It turns those "Snap Preview" windows off.

Posted by JohnDowdell at 08:16 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

Me on Digg

Me on Digg: No news here... just some policy background I'd like to get into the public record. I've read Digg for awhile, but refrained from joining because identity is not assured, and the service is vulnerable to gaming... I don't want Adobe to be accused of astroturfing Digg. But last week I finally did join, under my own name and address, with the intent of doing regular outbound-support work in comments. I do not plan on introducing articles to Digg, or voting articles up or down... my plan is to only do support work in comments. Let me know if you see any problems or risks with this plan, thanks.

Posted by JohnDowdell at 03:11 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

December 03, 2006

November picks

November picks: I'm looking back over the last month of entries on this weblog, pulling out some them seem to have long-term significance. The Tamarin donation may have been the biggest thing, showing how high-performance, platform-neutral logic-processing will soon be available to JavaScript developers as well as ActionScript developers, changing the dynamics of application delivery. This is part of a number of Adobe initiatives with opensource and platform-neutral work, and people are starting to see how this new company may evolve. Flash Video won an Emmy, even as it adds immersive viewing, very rapid audience adoption, and people show where the new interactive video might grow further. Search engines evolve towards author-controlled hinting, and Flex components add spatial navigation of datsets, while the Apollo project is firming up in its details. Meanwhile, Adobe document technology becomes more essential to more vertical markets, and Adobe imaging is working on even stronger basic science. One thing we've still got to do, though, is reach outside our traditional base to the wider tech audience. There's much work yet to be done, but this past month we've seen a wider outline of near-term improvements.

Posted by JohnDowdell at 07:53 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

November 30, 2006

Lots of links

Lots of links: Science toys, mobile web video, spammers suing citizens... some little links here, which stayed in my browser over the past few days.

American Science Surplus has lots of cheap nerdy gift ideas. Sample text: "The Incredible Growing Brain may be a first for water/toy growth science! You've put little dinosaurs, frogs and figurines into bowls of water to watch them get huge but we'll bet you've never put a 1-1/2" brain into a bottle with a 2" opening and come back to a floating, fist-size human brain!" Like Archie McPhee, but in the Advanced Placement class.

Here's a 5-minute YouTube intro to the new interface in Adobe Acrobat 8 Professional interface.

Brian Fling writes "10 Things I Learned at Mobile 2.0", from an HTML/mobile perspective.

This CNET article disturbs me... it's about someone who was spammed, and called out the spammer by name, and was then sued and was financially ruined by the spammer. The fault seems to lay in dysfunctional laws crafted by politicians. "'The Can-Spam Act essentially protects the e-mailer; it doesn't protect us,' Mumma said. He added: 'I don't agree with the court's decision, but I'm not going to challenge it. I'm done. They completely ran me out of money. I'm broke.'"

Jason Kottke notes how social dynamics change within a group over time... the Flickr folk nursed along the conversational group in its early days, until it took on a self-fulfilling strength.

TechCrunch covered Stickis, a webpage annotation system which offers choice of RSS feeds for comments, so that you're not locked into a single universal pool of ocmmenters... feels like a good approach.

Wunderground Trip Planner is a handy way to check historical weather records for a particular city during a particular time... look how it lays out Shanghai in early December, for instance.

The YouTube publishing system is being used to increase the world's lockpicking skills... there's some commentary at TechMeme... I wouldn't feel right about banning content, but it doesn't feel right that YouTube allows its publishing to be used to hurt others either... strange story, I'm not sure what to think yet.

There's a long discussion in Microsoft's Channel 9 forums about the ethics of Microsoft staff providing a tool to make it easy to take vector artwork out of a SWF. (More here.) I'm not able to translate licensing materials into English... that's outside my range... I do see that people have a variety of strong opinions on the subject, though.

Ed Foster uses the new Vista activation system to publish reader comments about the Adobe License Manager, but I don't think all commenters read what ALM actually does... it's an administration tool which does let you know if your intranet is using fewer resources than purchased, for instance. I appreciate the nameless reader who took the time to detail his own personal experience with Adobe License Manager.

Tim Walling thinks we should be seeing more action with URLKit, considering how often there's conversation about maintaining application state within an URL.

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November 22, 2006

Lots of links

Lots of links: Offices in the US will be closed the next few days, but I've found a number of interesting sites this week, quick links in the extended entry.

Mitchell from Mozilla talks about how the recent Firefox Summit focused a lot more on user experience, and not just the delights of implementing.

Niall Kennedy reports on social gaming mechanisms: "I spent the last few days among webmasters at the PubCon conference, where most conversations were focused on marketing yourself online to humans and search engines. The 2000 attendees focused on ranking themselves as high as possible in search engine result pages and driving site traffic. Methods of achieving these goals cover a full spectrum of white hat to black." More comment via TechMeme.

Alan Musselman pointed out WhatTheFont, where you upload an image of a typeface and the system tells you what its name is.

Video scares are lurking: "'Old video files were just sets of frames you could view and create video applications [with]... Now you can insert all kinds of things into a video file: information about it, external links, etc. That presents more possibilities for exploitation... YouTube is a prime candidate for attack, as well as other multimedia sites. Arbor's Zielinski says all it would take is an attacker downloading a video from YouTube, injecting his exploit, and re-uploading it, and then anyone who viewed it would get infected. 'If there were 20,000 people viewing a popular video, they would get [infected].'" YouTube delivers their interactive SWF skin, and various non-interactive FLV files which YouTube transcoded from members' source files. There may be a situation where someone can upload their own FLV, but YouTube does not host strangers' SWF.

John Gruber likes Kuler.

Steve Rubel and Robert Scoble are still seeking ways to believe the net, instead of being skeptical of the net. (I've got comments in both, but neither responded to the questions.)

Sean Tierney notes how many business processes are self-contradicting, when you actually try to follow their interfaces as advised.

Mike Potter describes how the sourcecode used in Adobe Photoshop's slideshows has been released for public use.

Robert Scoble has been collaborating in a series of Photoshop video interviews.

Kristofer Strom produced an inspiring, four-minute long stop-motion animation with a whiteboard, drawing pens and eraser. [via Todd Dominey]

Cameron Moll tests projects' validity by whether they can be functionally summarized in a single sentence. I like it. (oops, that's two... now, three... oh, well.... ;-)

Scott Fulton of BetaNews debunked the wild headlines sparked by a seven-sentence Reuters parsing of an (unlinked!) article in a German newspaper which probably translated Chizen's remarks into German before the Reuters writer translated them back again. Scott went to actual source interview and found the news professionals were bogus: "However, our read of a semi-decent Google translation of the actual interview fails to indicate Chizen made that pointed of a threat. Instead, Chizen declined to exclude the possibility of legal action against Microsoft as an alternative to co-operating with it in leveling the playing field for Adobe's Portable Document Format, should Microsoft resume what Chizen described as illegal behavior."

Another example of professional news services behaving unprofessionally: a photographer in the Mideast tells how Newsweek and TIME put patently false captions on his photos, in an attempt to extinguish Israel.

Mike Heck from InfoWorld tests out the content protection mechanisms of Adobe LiveCycle Policy Server and concludes: "Offered as software or hosted service, Adobe's rights management ensures sensitive information isn't disclosed and provides detailed audits for regulatory compliance. Currently, it only protects a few file types. Nonetheless, usability and cross-platform support make this a sensible enterprise DRM solution."

Roger Johansson summarizes the three types of ways that existing sites break when viewed in Microsoft Internet Explorer 7.

The headline for this Fortune article seems to diverge from the bodytext which follows: "The race to create a 'smart' Google: Everything you buy online says a little bit about you. And if all those bits get put into one big trove of data about you and your tastes? Marketer's heaven." (The rest of the article focuses on recommendation systems, instead of the business opportunities of tracking aggregate audience choice.)

I don't remember where I found this anti-telemarketer tactic, but listening to the audio of a real sales call was hilarious.... ;-)

Posted by JohnDowdell at 03:23 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

November 17, 2006

Lots of links

Lots of links: When I have so many browser windows and tabs open it's time to harvest some... here are some links I've found this week that I found interesting, and you may too.

Google Maps has historical overlays, and Middle Earth... no satellite imagery on the latter yet, though.

Confabb is a meta-conference planner... goal sounds good: "Confabb links you with other attendees including your existing contacts who might also be attending the same conferences. Confabb also helps you organize and maximize the time you spend at conferences. You can get information about other attendees, about speakers and other special programs as well as networking events taking place around the conference. Conferences are opportunities to learn and network. Confabb helps you do both."

"Turing Test Proves 2-Year-Olds Not Human".

Christina Wodtke rants on certitude, in a very useful and positive way: "I've been angry because so many (not all!) design practitioners whine about how no one pays attention to them, when they don't take time to understand the business folks. When they proudly crow about their empathic skills, and just as proudly crow about their hatred of excel. They expect business to read GAIN, but refuse to read businessweek. Too often they judge from their point of view, instead of questioning and learning instead. And I'm angry because I've been so very stupid in so very many of the same ways, and my hubris pisses me off."

JavaScript frameworks: Easier to create than to use...?

Jason Kottke urges "skip intro" for "podcast" and "vlogging"... Gabe Rivera urges the same consideration of reader costs for text.

Good Flex validation... some are now trying to replicate this development style and user experience in clientside Java. (Whether or not they can reach it doesn't matter so much as Flex's success has now become the new benchmark.)

Kurt Foss summarizes how to handle version-to-version changes between Adobe Acrobat Professional, Standard, 3D and Reader... because of connections to system printing mechanisms, it's better to uninstall old stuff *before*, rather than after, doing a new installation. Kurt also points to a five-minute video intro of the new interface.

Microsoft efficiency tips for JavaScript, in IE7 and other environments... lots of this material revolves around clientside interpretation and untyped variables.

Yahoo Maps goes beyond beta, and has secured the rights to mapping data for much of Europe, as well. Yahoo Maps may be the most widely-used Flex 1.5 app at this point.

Java comments: GPL is counter to freedom... a very foul mouth but a wicked sense of humor at Bileblog...

URL parameters for the Google FLV controller... there are a couple of different player skins available, you can set autoplay and loop from the linking URL, etc.

FlashForward track at MacWorld Expo this January.

Microsoft WPF/e makes a reappearance from its apparent slumber, as lead Joe Steggman says "is not 'me too'!" Stefan Richter had asked "What does WPF/e give me that I don't already have in Flash?" and Joe points out that Microsoft needs a complement to its "works best in windows" theme, so a new plugin addresses different needs. (It looks like Sparkle got a refresh and another name (don't bother to thank me ;-) , and that they'll make announcements after Thanksgiving, but before Christmas holidays kick in.)

WIRED has an overview of how different restrictive governments are dealing with citizens' new abilities to communicate with the world.

University of Michigan has an article summarizing health effects of chocolate, part of a series of articles they have on foods you may already enjoy.

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November 16, 2006

Chris Pirillo, Bob Dobbs

Chris Pirillo, Bob Dobbs: Off-topic, but when I first saw Chris Pirillo's little cartoon portrait I had thought it was homage to Bob Dobbs... but now it looks like Chris was a pink boy here, and has not yet understood about pulling the wool over his own eyes. Wikipedia has a good overview. Is this set of websites new to you too...?

Posted by JohnDowdell at 02:27 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

November 02, 2006

October picks

October picks: I went through the last month's posts here, and picked out some which seem to have longterm significance. SAP, Salesforce and Oracle come out for Flex, even though we're still early in adoption ramp-up... Adobe Flash Player adds browserless viewing and goes 9.0 on Linux, although the latter seem more aware of watching video than making apps... Adobe Digital Editions shows PDF ebooks in a 2.5M download with better reading experience, while Adobe Reader now renders XML documents... Tom Green's article "The Rise of Flash Video" drew significant attention (see part 2)... Adobe is adding new expertise for the new workflows under development... Christina Wodtke writes of how true design work satisfies audience & client needs, and isn't just extravagant self-expression... Two new browsers during peak buying season is a still-unfolding story... Google acknowledges the usefulness of richer media over text, even as it seems to be moving towards correcting your writing... Charlie Arehart is putting together a portal of Adobe-related technical videos, similar to how others are developing linksites of recommended topical videos... Lots and lots and lots and lots of stats about browser adoption and audience size, while the AS3 VM in Adobe Flash Player 9 surpasses them all in improving Other Peoples Machines... Even though Apollo drew the biggest crowds at MAX, the long-awaited availability of Flash Lite in North America will rival it for improving the world's computing experience: one of the desktop, the other in the pocket. (My top MAX thoughts are here, although I'd like to update it this weekend after digesting the changes.)

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November 01, 2006

You & hardware migration

You & hardware migration: Last week's preview of Adobe Soundbooth drew a lot of positive attention... see Hart Shafer for links. But, as a new project which likely won't reach 1.0 until mid-2007, and whose functions require much processor-specific code, the current builds are for Windows XP and Intel-based Macs, not older Macs. This created a lot of blogosphere heat. I think this may be because Soundbooth is one of the first Intel-only Mac apps, and so it's triggering people to analyze their system plans, when they'll update what, and so on. There's a good amount of angst in that. But here's what I'm hoping you can help me with... I'd like to understand how you regard your own system update plans, whether for Vista, or MacTel, or whatever. I want to make sure various Adobe teams have the best grounding possible when they bring forth both updates and entirely new projects in the future, so anecdotes about how you go about decision-making can be of great help. For instance, my cube-mate Scott Fegette and I were both shopping new notebooks late last year... I went with a Motorola-based Powerbook, while he went straight for Intel... I think he's having more fun with his machine, but I just wanted less hassle with applications, fewer system updates. How do you balance the situation of moving to new hardware? Personal anecdotes appreciated, thanks. (Disclaimer: This is about you, not Adobe or what the company "should" do, so I'll edit or delete comments which talk about Adobe instead of your own priorities, your own decisionmaking style.) Thanks!
Update: On Fri Nov 2 I see that my post here is linked at TechMeme to a post from John Gruber (Daring Fireball). I don't know why, but in case you're coming here from TechMeme, then I've given John's essay a few tries but haven't made it through yet, and can't even restate his case succinctly, much less comment on it. Here I'm focused on how you approach architecture migrations, so we can see the range of different situations, and the strategies different people use.
Update II: I've opened a new topic here for discussion of Friday's Daring Fireball essay.

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October 30, 2006

Lots of links

Lots of links: Too much stuff to read last week, but here are some of the pages I've kept open in my browsers so I wouldn't forget 'em, you may find something here you missed....

YouTube Tools, a lengthy list of varied utilities.

Google is reportedly preparing ads for audio.

Cahlan at Coding Cowboys wrote of Apollo, and drew info from architect Ethan Malasky.

Animated Knots uses JavaScript JPEGs rather than stronger formats, but that's enough to make an effective presentation of how to tie most any knot.

37 Signals discusses some of the less-obvious difficulties of debugging existing work in the new Microsoft browser.

Dion Almaer picked up on how Apollo promises to extend the capabilities of JavaScript developers as well... thanks for letting more JavaScript experts know what Apollo offers them!

AppFusion of San Diego appears to be first out of the gate: "AppFusion, the leading provider of Rich Internet Applications based Business Intelligence solutions announced today that it plans to provide full support for Apollo, Adobe's upcoming cross-operating system runtime for deploying Rich Internet Applications (RIAs) to the desktop."

What's good for Loose Change is not good for Wendy's, it appears... seems to be a double-standard, depending on whose side you're on... sort of like how the Walmart story drew more outrage in the blogosphere than the Fenton astroturfing is doing.

Brendan Eich talks about future JavaScript growth. (The browser's back button doesn't work here... look for nav controls at lower-right rollover.) A concise quote: "Browsers actually don't interoperate so well at the frontiers". The first and final sections have the ideas; the center holds details on how JavaScript will change.

Drew McLellan asks whether microformats can be validated... I never got answers on how we'd decide which calendar data format was the approved one, and so on. (Who chooses "the standard", and how?)

Don Park is acerbically humorous with "WPF? WTF!"

Richard MacManus writes of "Web 2.0 Security Scares", but the domain restrictions in invisible calls seem like they'd choke off most of these exploits...?

At Web Standards Project, Ian Lloyd pushes back against overuse of "Ajax" style work in forms.

Molly Holzschlag hosts a discussion on what people suspect IE7 adoption rate will be, and more importantly, what the rate of IE6 disappearance will be.

Marc Canter writes, as only he can: "Anf finally today - here goes Macromedia again trying ot jump start their own ecosystem. Haven't they learned by now? Nobody wants to hang out with slimeballs? Does anybody remember Grand Cenral..." and so on. Here's two dollars my poor man, go freshen up that bottle of Eight Ball and may God bless....

Randall Fish Rand Fishkin provides a long list of searches, to illustrate the range of ways incoming visitors may try to find you. He also uses some rare Google operators (I hadn't known about "num" in the search line), and links to directories to find more sites competing for search terms you're targeting.

Hart Shafer of Adobe has the most authoritative list of Soundbooth reviews.

Michael Mulvey has seen fonts go fuzzy with Adobe Flash Player 9. I've read his description through twice but don't see a handle for research. Anyone know of similar symptoms, know of conditions where this could occur? tx.

Brian Deitte and I had a conversation about ways to enable creators' rights on content, without triggering those programmed by "DRM" label.

Mark Piller advises on how Flex, Apollo, and other new technologies could gain more mindshare more quickly. These types of posts may not receive replies, and are rarely executed as-is, but I can assure you that they are eagerly read by many people within Adobe.

Richard MacManus interviews Chris Beard of Mozilla, and there's a neat vision of the browser's future towards the bottom: "[...] if at some level the browser can move into the background, and it's really the web content that's the most important thing and the ability for you to cleanly interact with your online life [...] it really shouldn't matter whether you're accessing your content from your computer, your phone or your tv - we're going to see consistency in that experience."

WebKit blog has a bit about Apollo using WebKit as the HTML renderer. In comments "chrisb" says he's on the Apollo team and provides some more functional details. (I can't confirm, from the webpage, the poster's identity... as members of a group, we need to reveal identity and testable affiliation when posting, thanks in advance.)

A ten-ounce, wandlike paper scanner, with Acrobat optical character recognition built in... I'd never use one, but still, somehow, I want it. ;-)

I don't know all the issues and politics in the e-book arena, but I see that Jon Noring and Bill McCoy are already discussing Adobe Digital Editions at TeleRead.

Deeje Cooley points to an Analyst Breezo of some of the MAX announcements. I haven't gone through it yet, but it seems to have material of interest.

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Soundbooth painpoints

Soundbooth painpoints: I hate blog commenting systems which don't tell you upfront that they'll send a confirmation email to you... third time this weekend that I had a comment go up in smoke. (Jason Calcanis had a notorious "podcast" which I asked him to textually summarize.... some other thing on the Weblogs Inc network too.) Here at "DV Guru" Ajit Anthony ranted today on what Adobe "should" do, and I tried to find out what really mattered to him, not what he thought everyone else's marching orders should be. (I was more polite a few minutes ago than I am now.) Anyway, Ajit, if you happen to be engaged enough in the blogosphere to catch my response here, below in the extended entry was my earlier attempt at finding out more of what you need....

Hi, could you give me a little more insight into the most painful part for you? Not "what others should do", but more "what makes this matter to me". Which is it closest to?

(a) "I can see my old computer's value diminishing now."

(b) "I need to use Soundbooth today and cannot."

(c) "I'm concerned that this means I won't be able to upgrade to the next Photoshop."

(d) "I work on multiple Macs, of differing architecture, and see future difficulty in coordinating my work among them.

(e) Something else....

Could you give me an idea about what gives *you* the most personal concern here, please? Thanks!

jd/adobe

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October 29, 2006

Microsoft Firefox 2007

Microsoft Firefox 2007: It's a joke site, but cute. Features "Microsoft's AKobe Phlash(TM) Plugin (lawsuit pending)". [via Steve Bass]

Posted by JohnDowdell at 10:47 AM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

Don't think of a white bear

Don't think of a white bear: Off-topic, but I still don't quite get this angle of the media biz. This link goes to UK newspaper Daily Mail, about cartoon series South Park's poor taste in using the recently-deceased star of "Crocodile Hunter" as a character -- the family is grieving, experts provide concerned quotes, and so on. And then the newspaper shows a big JPG of Steve Irwin with a stingray stuck in his bleeding chest. I mean, if the story's basis is that Parker&Stone had Bad Thoughts, isn't the newspaper spreading them further? If the goal is to be sensitive to others and not inflame their sensibilities, then why would the newspaper itself try to push such an image into people's heads? The Mail's readers comment that South Park should be cancelled, but none of them question the newspaper drawing ad revenue and sustained readership from its programming of offensive content. Can you explain to me how the audience doesn't see what's being done to them...?

Posted by JohnDowdell at 07:39 AM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

October 28, 2006

Travel tips

Travel tips: I heard a lot of people talking about the need for Chapstick this week, and many told me during parties "Ah, I wish I brought earplugs like you did". In the extended entry are some of the techniques which have improved my travel lately... if you can add to these tips in comments then we'll have a better resource, thanks.

Chapstick is just a little tube of petroleum jelly, but it comes in handy in many ways. Prevents dried lips in desert air of course, but it also protects the nostrils when it's cold or windy. It keeps a papercut or hangnail protected from bacteria, and comes in handy for blisters or chafing.

A pair of foam earplugs in a plastic minibag squishes to nothing in your pocket, yet can cut decibel levels by 29 to 36db. More people suffer from hearing loss than secondhand smoke, yet ambient volume levels can still be ridiculously stupid. Don't let the morons hurt you -- carry earplugs, control your own environment.

Colds and flu have increased with worldwide travel. The Adobe Mobile team travels a lot, and I heard many testimonials to the PAZ approach:

• Purell or other hand sanitizers to clean hands, disinfect airplane surfaces, refresh the back of the neck, ears, and face;
  
• Airborne or Vitamin C to increase resistance before entering crowded areas;
  
• Zinc, either dietary or aerosol, at the first sign of nose or throat tickles... a pocket Zircam mister is $13 but dramatically reduces frequency & duration of colds.

Speaking of drugs:

• Caffeine tablets are widely available, dosed at one tablet equivalent to "two cups of coffee" (whatever that means), and help avoid the scheduling problems of bad in-room coffee, help provide that extra burst when you need it.
  
• When travel gets tough, a bar of good chocolate can do wonders... there's always one in my computer bag now.
  
• I used to carry 6-8 aspirin in a pocket plastic minibag, but now I also just take a 50-tab jar in the travel kit... somebody else always needs aspirin. ;-)
  
• A two-ounce flask of Jameson's Irish Whiskey in the suitcase handles all other emergencies, and is particularly useful if I'm too wound up to sleep.

Socks... I could use some tips on socks. Sometimes I travel with lots of cotton socks, other times I use two washable synthetic liners and two thicker wool outers... excuse me for getting personal, but when you'll be gone for four days or two weeks, how do you plan out your socks...?

Even more personal, I've got enough to carry, and don't want to haul around yesterday's lunch with me. I've been eating a lot lighter recently, particularly on the first few days of a trip, and a light laxative the first few days helps reduce bloating from travel nerves. Staying a little hungry at the start of a trip has made a big difference in my energy levels and ability to move around.

A pair of packable shoes sounds like an indulgence, but even if they're only worn once they give the main shoes a chance to breathe, and make a big difference.

My bags mostly contain other bags these days... my suitcase and computer bag had over two dozen Eagle Creek quartercubes, Outdoor Research stuffsacks, Clic zip envelopes and Ziploc sandwich bags within them. On longer trips the suitcase holds a daybag which holds other bags.

I check luggage for the flight, because I won't travel without my pocket tools. It's also helpful for tech conferences, where everybody flies out at the same time and they're always trying to stuff their computers and suitcases into the overhead bins.

I used to skimp on sleepwear, but room thermostats sometimes don't work, and frequently have wonky interfaces... it sounds silly, but polypropylene longjohns and a pair of soft wool socks let me control my own environment, and make a big difference in how I feel the next day.

I still bring a book, but somehow never read it.... ;-)

You have travel tips? What has surprised you lately, with how well it has worked out for you...?

Posted by JohnDowdell at 07:17 AM | Comments (9) | TrackBack

October 24, 2006

Best error message

Best error message: I used to answer the tech support phones for many years, and just thinking of trying to handle a call on a string like this makes me feel very uneasy: "Error Message: Your Password Must Be at Least 18770 Characters and Cannot Repeat Any of Your Previous 30689 Passwords." I mean, where could you start with something like this...!? [via Victor Mitnick on the Dreamweaver team, who doesn't seem to have much of a Google footprint, but who I bet could write a fun weblog.... ;-) ] (btw, I just got over a temporary connectivity disruption, and am behind on my reading, but this item in internal email was too much fun to not share.)

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October 20, 2006

Lots of links

Lots of links: It's been a wild week, and I'm behind in reading and writing... here's a bunch of stuff which caught my eye the last few days....

Virtual communities are being investigated for contributing to The Tax Effort....

Washington Post describes how mobile phones are improving the situation for fishers in India. Mobile phone in India grew from 1.6 million in 2000 to 125 million today, outnumbering landline phones 3:1. (If the Washington Post link rots, try a news search with term "pallipuram 'kevin sullivan'".)

Yahoo User Interface course, in video format... I haven't had time to sit through realtime speech, and so can't evaluate it yet. (The video UI has worked for me sometimes, not other times... may be a Flashblock timing issue.)

Bruce Schneir understands that distributed access to technology means that everybody gets to play Big Brother, it isn't limited to the central authorities... what he misses is that much of the intentional damage today is being done by unsourced leaks... "How do you know what you say you know?" is the vital question we're not consistently asking yet. Laws may help, but don't have a good history... self-protection practices and skepticism help more than paternalism.

San Francisco's wifi deal got tangled up in San Francisco obstructionist politics: "Some of the crazier demands that were suggested at the meeting included a 'requirement' for every San Francisco renter to sign a lease addendum with their landlords before being allowed to install a WiFi card in their PC, forcing Google to agree to transport kids back and forth to the Zoo in their Google busses and a requirement for EarthLink to pay the electrical costs for running computers in order to prevent brownouts." John Gilmore has a comment there noting that Google could track people's locations by their telephone pole repeaters, which is true, but if John doesn't wish to use the service then he shouldn't prevent others from doing so. San Francisco's moral elite can be pretty paternalistic. (Then again, later on in the comments, my friend Sasha Magee says that some of the reporting was inaccurate... me, I'm still not sure why The City "owns" telephone poles in the first place, and why this has to be a centrlized political discussion.)

More on technology, governments, and individual choices... China apparently will be imposing penalties on those found spreading "internet rumors"... France has already brought legal proceedings against a website which "insulted" state TV with inconvenient questions... European Union is considering content regulations on videoblogs... a Candian Member of Parliament was kicked out of his party for things he wrote on his weblog.

Mike Potter has a tip if your IE7 foobars your debugger Player.

I really liked the Claude Monet animation here... looks like the brushstrokes were also used to deform the geometry, but there's so much non-photorealistic stuff going on that it's just a wonder to behold. There are also links for DaVinci animations and more open in my browser right now... I think I got them from a Digg conversation.

Brendan Eich writes: "For Mozilla 2, we will have a JIT-oriented JavaScript VM (details soon) that supports the forthcoming ECMAScript Edition 4 ("JS2") language. Among the desirable characteristics of this VM will be a conservative, incremental garbage collector (GC). If it makes sense, we can use this GC module to manage DOM object memory instead of using XPCOM reference counting. We can use its conservative scanning code to assist in cycle collection. And we can JIT calls directly into DOM glue code entry points (provided no JS mutation has overridden a method property value), bypassing the powerful but relatively slow typelib-based dispatching machinery of XPConnect. This will kick Ajax performance in Firefox up a notch or three."

Niall Kennedy compares "the current state of video search".

Marshall Kirkpatrick of TechCrunch summarizes things to watch for in the Firefox 2.0 release.

Vista's graphics will apparently impose too much of a battery drain for many current notebooks.

Two articles which concern me more when they're combined: software piracy in the Philippines, and the evolution of zombie networks.

Brian Ferris made an Emmy speech on being aggregated into MXNA.

Bert Monroy talks about creating photorealistic Photoshop work, in downloadable audio format.

Michael Arrington cites history in trusting all your data to Google.

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October 18, 2006

Technophile felines

Technophile felines: One more thing I wouldn't have expected from new technology... there's a subculture on YouTube of cats on exercise treadmills. Oddly fascinating, because the cats show confusion at why they're not walking anywhere, but they don't give up, they keep on walking. We humans do better with new options... well, maybe not all of us, but we generally adapt a little more quickly than those cats do.... ;-)

Posted by JohnDowdell at 03:44 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

October 13, 2006

Browser failure

Browser failure: I use Tab Mix Plus in Firefox to save tabbed windows in case of a crash. Unfortunately, crashing too often seems to crash this session manager too, and I've lost 75 tabs I've been tracking. My apologies in advance if I leave you hanging on a thread somewhere, but I've lost some significant continuity here this week.... :(

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

October 12, 2006

Scoble's deathmatch

Scoble's deathmatch: Robert Scoble talks today of a coming war between Microsoft and Adobe. For what it's worth, I don't see things this way at all... Microsoft and Adobe are in fundamentally different businesses, and have fundamentally different roles to play. Microsoft makes an operating system and expands outwards from there; Adobe provides the background technology for people to connect with their audiences regardless of media type. The new company will be much more clearly visible after the MAX conference this month. In the meantime, after checking with other folks here, I think the impression left by Robert's piece is rather strange. He's a nice guy, but I'm not sure of his speech.

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October 09, 2006

Lots of links

Lots of links: It's Monday, but my browser still has lots of interesting material from last week... short links here, on a variety of subjects.

Steve Webster notes that some Firefox don't transfer requests from Adobe Flash Player to text-to-speech assistive technology (JAWS, eg), when the Player does not render directly to screen (WMODE parameter). Related: Andrew Kirkpatrick on how various browsers affect accessibility with different markup styles (Aug 05), and Geoff Stearns amassed lengthy comments on other squirrelly behavior from browsers (March 05).

You can pipe the messages from the debug version of Adobe Flash Player into a Firefox panel with this FlashTracer extension for Firefox.

Most weeks the newspapers carry stories about "iPod DRM" -- New York Times has one today -- when recorded music first became popular phonographs and records were sold by furniture companies, oddly enough -- this was even after the recording industry finally converged on a format. Radio sparked massive evolution too, as forgotton stories of the Petrillo ban attest. Another interesting look at the actual history of the music business comes from studying Ralph Peer.

Speaking of which, Mike Masnick has some thoughts on Tower Records being liquidated. I moved to San Francisco in 1976, and Tower Records was very impressive then. But later, at Amoeba Records, I bought some Japanese DVDs which were incomplete Chinese knockoffs. Tricky stuff, that music business.... ;-)

One more music link: 100 popular classical ringtones... if you play, then the Hal-Leonard Real Little Classical Fakebook gives melody and harmonization.

Gregg Wygonik has a new version of his Flash component to produce PDF files.

Adrian Cummings is describing how Adobe Flash Lite looks to a J2ME developer, at Mobile Games Blog.

For MacTel ports, some folks still haven't heard what Adobe execs have been advising for over a year.

Next-generation androids functioning as booth babes in Japan... spooky video on this one.

Looks like major media companies are accepting the flow of their low-res content to sites like YouTube.

I don't know how I got to this page, but it's a good collection of classic putdowns... Mark Twain is quoted as "Why do you sit there looking like an envelope without any address on it?" (Maybe it was the way he told it.... ;-)

Nice interview with Robert Scoble here, about how his role interacted with Microsoft, but it's still strange that the pre-weblog, pre-ClueTrain conversations are off-the-radar for these folks.

New paperlike screens are increasing in area, decreasing in thickness, increasing in colors, but latency is still a problem.

Near as I can tell from reading 'way too much, this Attention Computing stuff might be about working while standing, "ten-HUT!" kind of stuff, I'm not sure what else they might be talking about here.... :(

Lots of bad news in the world today... children assaulted for not being of the correct tribe in Glasgow and Lyons... women accused of adultery still being stoned to death... Internet cafes attacked for indecency, journalists murdered, and very odd people with nuclear tests. Sometimes it seems like the work we do doesn't make enough of a difference in stopping the sick and counterproductive things, but twenty years ago we wouldn't even have known of some of the bad things going on in the world....

Posted by JohnDowdell at 02:03 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

October 02, 2006

Lots of links

Lots of links: I've got a couple dozen browser tabs open here from last week, with articles I found interesting enough to re-read over a few days. In the extended entry....

Mark Hall at ComputerWorld talks about the Flash-based email client Pronto. (The article later includes an AJaX "counterpoint" line about another version of another JavaScript library, with Tibco marketing guys saying "... the key advantage of AJAX over Flash as a foundation for Web development is its ubiquity among browsers." That's not righteous marketing -- "Ajax" is merely generic branding, and no one has yet shown a good way to describe which JS/CSS/HTM functionality a given app requires from how many audience members. His story does not make sense for me.)

Eric Meyer proposes that the W3C "become a foundation instead of a consortium", by having a few multimillionaires donate enough to hire invited-experts to committees, abolishing membership fees.

Gartner Group understands that PDF is now much more than just a way to get predictable printing from a web browser... they also show how unexpected abilities, like interactive 3D rendering, directly address the needs of specific customers.

Nicole Hernandez at WebProNews thinks current video sites are dumb because they chose to deliver using better codecs, even though Linux users are a few months away from being brought into the fold.

Jens C. Brynildsen has a good long piece on the experience of first using Adobe Flex 2.

Matt Todd, at 37Signals, has a lengthy post on how shorter posts, with fewer buzzwords, are stronger. One of the many good lines here: "Tech folks often use terms that imply we're part of some secret club. It's as if we're saying, 'We can speak in a code that those other people can't understand.' It's a way to build a wall that separates us from them. It's a form of exclusion. You don't need to build walls or exclude people when you're confident in your message though. When you're confident in your message, you want everyone to understand. When you really have a point, you want to say it sharp so it can penetrate deep."

I read Linux complaints, but I wish they read me too.

Ryan Stewart had a great piece last week on global computing, where an interface which makes to Silicon Valley entrepreneurs might not make sense in a village outside of North America.

An uncredited author describes potential social site exploits -- recommendation sites like Digg and bookmarking sites may soon be used to publicize nasty things.

Liz Gannes at GigaOM talks about the narrow social base of some of our technology today: "DEMO has a thing about blasting loud rock in between presentations that’s incongruous with the geeky, nervous presenters"... small point, I know, but if we're actually developing for a global audience, then a diet exclusively of things a small number of people listened to while going through adolescence does not give us a wide enough base from which to work.

Google Video has added closed captions.

Listings of physics engines and isometric engine resources for Flash work.

Steve Jobs blooper reel is actually pretty good... I like how he deflates some of the more-techy-than-thou buzzwords seen in such high-profile presentations.

Jess Ezell called me by name when saying he'd like to build things atop the video codecs used in Adobe Flash Player, but I couldn't make a comment there... Tinic Uro laid out some of the total factors going into codec decisions, and the ability to make alternate servers cheaply wasn't as high on the list as playback, adoption, hardware support, and so on.

Brent Simmons talks of intercommunication between his NetNewsWire RSS client and the browser.

New support plans from Adobe... I like how they lay out the matrix from the perspective of the reader, so you can easily see which choices might be the best fit.

John Rhodes likes many of the new data-fed visualization tools.

Better software license management cuts away confusion and cost... here the US Army National Guard had purchased software they didn't actually use. (Adobe License Manager is an upcoming way for volume purchasers to more efficiently handle the software they use.)

Nick Gerig has an intriguing essay on how cross-cultural development works both ways... here, experienced mobile developers in Japan need to learn the cultural issues to expand into worldwide development too.

Posted by JohnDowdell at 10:11 AM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

September Picks

September Picks: I went through the last month's posts here, and picked out some which seem to have longterm significance. Adobe Flash Player 9 and its new high-performance virtual machine are being installed by consumers at record rates... Macromedia Breeze becomes Adobe Acrobat Connect, combining Acrobat's archivable collaboration with realtime communication... Gapminder combines great data with great interactive control; it's a really inspiring way to understand global trends... the Web itself is becoming more and more a global medium, and within five years I think we'll have a very different understanding of the implications... the Silicon Valley blogosphere still regularly has its attention directed by social pressure... browser reach and predictability are still open issues, even as we're starting to evolve beyond... not only developers and designers, but also consumers and enterprise are pulling the Adobe technology infrastructure along.

Posted by JohnDowdell at 06:26 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

September 28, 2006

Google Maps bug

Google Maps bug: Looks big. Apparently caused by some maintainence problems during publishing. Thanks to Slashdot for the tip. Shades of Grace Hopper!

Posted by JohnDowdell at 05:09 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

September 27, 2006

Infini-D mailing list

Infini-D mailing list: No news here, I'm just logging this in the blog for easy retrieval later. Specular Infini-D, the Macintosh 3D authoring tool, still has a mailing list archive online. This list has root connections to the whole pre-blogging, pre-Cluetrain graphics conversation. Lots of that material has disappeared from the Web, some of it never made it to the Web. The technology conversations have gone on for longer than many people might think. (If you know of similar historical resources, please feel free to log them in comments here, thanks!) (And btw, I'm sure there must be some embarrassing material here.... ;-)

Posted by JohnDowdell at 10:43 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

September 24, 2006

Quick links

Quick links: Lots of good stuff in the aggregators today... conference tips, surprising uses of bitmap manipulations, three or four more articles I particularly enjoyed reading today.

Aral Balkan has a great list of what a modern audience needs from a conference presentation.

Benjamin Doubler made a standalone which was "counter to YouTube's terms of service"... we're all still feeling our way towards using remote services within quickly-evolving interfaces.

Tim O'Reilly republishes a great summary from Stewart Brand on Orville Schell's understanding of the dynamics in China today.

Andrew Trice has an extensive collection of the different user needs which the pixel-manipulating abilities of Adobe Flash Player can now address (source code, presentations included).

Esther Dyson also agrees that Google must shape up in making sure their AdSense revenue-sharing partners are legit.

Los Angeles Times writers react to the recent Hewlett-Packard controversy by noting the greater dangers to individual privacy... we're all still trying to figure out ethical, sustainable ways of harnessing the new information deluge.

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September 21, 2006

Lots of links

Lots of links: Many things which I found interesting the last few days, variety of subjects, which I can't toss out before updating my Firefox.... ;-)

Matt Chotin notes Adobe hiring on Flex/LiveCycle integration. More here.

The C64 emulation continues to spur please excitement among all who come across it.... ;-)

Stacey Mulcahey points out that Flex 2 just makes it much more economical to develop an interface, and that there are still large costs in correct design and testing of a piece, to make sure that it actually serves audience needs as desired.

Sean Corfield offers a cautionary tale that the evasion of scammers is a never-ending task. Gmail had a temporary demonstration phishing vulnerability recently too. And speaking of spammers, Spamhaus was just ordered to pay $11M in damages to a spammer. That doesn't seem right, it cannot stand.

This article on 1985-era bloggers, at the newly-opened archive of TIME magazine, is actually pretty interesting to read -- the democratization process has been going on for over a few hype cycles now. [via Evan Williams]

New York Times has also moved paper archives to digital form, with resources stretching back to 1851!

Blufr asks you to guess whether assertions are true or false. It's interesting, but I'm not sold on it... some of these you can guess contextually, but some are a toss-up. Interesting, though.

Motley Fool has another Adobe Q3 analysis, this time with info on how PDF creation is only a small part of the Acrobat platform, and the implications of some of the rapid increase in web video popularity this year.

Mike Potter, from the Adobe side of the merger, lists changes he's seen in the past ten months of the new company.

John Nack had a striking quote on fauxtography: "For me the conversation throws the debate over digital manipulation into greater perspective: the battle for truth is fought on many fronts, and compared to the questions over what meaning can and should be assigned to images, the technical side starts to look straightforward. The bits matter, but we see in them what we want and need to see."

Marcel Boucher is doing some work on Flex and LiveCycle integration... this uses a Flex UI to have LiveCycle automatically generate PDF and HTML forms.

Boing Boing has a piece on public webcams connected to loudspeakers, so that litterbugs can be appropriately scolded when spotted.

Paris Hilton is a 2.0 of Madonna, and "Every web developer should pay attention to her." Sounds strange, but makes sense.

Dion Hinchcliffe notes, in passing, that "Ajax" is an authoring technique, and that the actual deployed browsers in the world define the true runtime capabilities: "It's worth noting that a great many of the more successful Web sites are actively and liberally using Flash plug-ins to provide the rich application and media support they need (Flickr, YouTube, Google, to name just three of thousands). That's because Ajax can never provide a complete solution to what you'll need to do in a browser until the browser gets a serious overhaul. The most common RIA platform is actually the Flash plug-in, found in 99% of all computers in the world, and it alone can provide the browser safe local file storage, audio/video capture, audio/video playback, and more...."

Ralf Bokelberg describes "5 Reasons Presentations Suck on the Web". Fortunately most of these can be addressed with considerate design.

Michael Arrington discusses the difficulty of combining reputation-based comments with anonymous comments.

Dean Edwards at Web Standards Project links to some JavaScript improvements in the new Microsoft browser.

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September 15, 2006

Lots of links

Lots of links: Looking for weekend reading material? Here's some interesting stuff I've kept open in my browser since end of August, with a sentence or two of description for each....

Ryan Stewart had an essay on Sept 6 about how JS/CSS/HTML engines not only vary at a given moment, but can change across time too... the HTML 4.0 spec suddenly outlawed LAYER and EMBED tags and broke the web, so there's historical precedent for what he writes.

Techworld described "zCodec", an apparent scam which offered improved video and audio improvements but which actually delivered malware. (I'm looking forward to the Apollo project, in the hope that we can safely offer desktop persistence, without the trust requirements for installing native code from strangers.)

Beautiful visualization of air traffic patterns, rendered in Adobe After Effects and delivered as QuickTime video.

Someone likes the Acrobat icon for layer cakes.... ;-)

CNET analyzes the current state of mobile web, but I think there will always be different presentation needs for different form facts, different situational use... the big ol' hypertext-document model doesn't seem appropriate for info retrieval on the go.

TechKnow had an article end of August comparing Google Web Toolkit (which lets Java writers compile to JavaScript) with Flex... I'd credit the author but don't see a name on the page, and I'm too lazy to WhoIs again. (As a sidenote, I don't see how JavaScript can provide "richness"... you'd need to extend the browser to get simple audio or video, for instance.)

Om Malik shunned Google hosted applications for privacy reasons.

Elliot Back apparently wrote a routine which could be used to scam Google AdSense and pollute the blogosphere... he got slammed by Scoble, which may or may not indicate an actual problem, and I never got around to testing his work myself.

People try Microsoft's XNA kit for XBox development, and would prefer that it work like Flash.

Ryan Stewart noticed that some of the InterAKT group will be working with Flex.... ;-)

Details on audio improvements in Vista.

James Governor writes: "Adobe doesn't seem to be ruining the Macromedia community-building mojo, which was always a risk. Indeed Adobe is becoming more open and more conversational and using blogs and other cool stuff."

Amalgamated search engine tips from Matt Cutts of Google. (I'm not sure of the Vanessa Fox material, though, 'cause I recall Matt rebutting that elsewhere.)

Y Design Awards is seeking votes on UK SWF projects, but I'm not sure whether they accept out-of-the-country voters.

John Nack is the best source of info for confusion on a Creative Suite updater which got fouled by some type of OS update.

On Sept 12 Slashdot had a debate on "The Future of Rich Internet Applications", which did not appear in their main index. While reading the commentary, the main between-the-lines work seems to be figuring out what the writer *doesn't* know....

Washington Post (linkrot alert) tells of a content provider who withdrew their video content after a Microsoft video DRM exploit -- some people who produce video content *do* want to know how their work is being used.

Happy Birthday to Adobe Mobile and Devices User Group of Boston!

Yakov Fain points out some of the frequently-ignored realities of clientside capability.

Andrew Shorten has a great list of current Flex deployments in the UK.

TechCrunch examines AmateurIllustrator, a social site for illustrators.

Back in August, Chris Pirillo advised on ways to avoid the bloggy echo chamber... of course, the article then got crosslinked into the aggregators.... ;-)

There's a specs-first article on possible CSS changes: "Many exciting new functions and features are being thought up for CSS3. We will try and showcase some of them on this page, when they get implemented in either Firefox, Opera or Safari/Webkit."

Yakov Fain has more Flex info for people coming from the enterprise Java side of things.

Bill Predmore of Pop! Multimedia is interviewd about the early days of Flash, its use on MSN, Bill Nye the Science Guy, more.

MarketingProfs.com cites the reaction to the Adobe acquisition by the development community.

Marcin Wichary hosts a collection of classic Flash splash screens.

Rich Ziade talks about minimizing artwork to first study gameplay... great tips.

Interview with Alan Stubbs deals with photo-illusion.

An article on the future of imaging goes into much detail on how Adobe Acrobat 3D allows for interactive models in documentation, and the future employment opportunities in this area.

Adobe staffer Damon Cooper quells questions about JRun and ColdFusion, on David Fekke's blog.

Om Malik writes at CNN Money on the movement to widgets in webpages. (Encapsulation and namespace collisions remain a problem with HTML implementations.)

Details on keyboard input of FlashLite-enabled Sony Ericsson M600i mobile phone.

ITWorld Canada examines accessibility issues of dynamic websites.

Caroline Jarrett examines why some people prefer to use paper forms instead of electronic forms. (Acrobat technology already has ways to roundtrip from paper to bits and back again.)

Adobe staffer Ben Forta notes that future product development depends mostly on the audience for the tool, not on whether it partially competes against other Adobe technology.

On2 Technologies had big excitement on their live Flash videocasting... I don't have much original information, but it sure sounds good.

Nick Bradbury noted that Rhino Software has been working for ten years now... geesh, we're all getting old or something.... ;-)

Experiments with running IE & Flash under WINE on Linux.

Google promotes banned books, but I'm a little skeptical of all these western corporate bookchains congratulating themselves on offending Judeo-Christians when they avoid posing meaningful questions to those who wish to destroy them. (Oriana Fallaci, thank you... I still don't shop at Borders Books... France prosecutes bloggers who question authority.)

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September 14, 2006

Cagle on SVG

Cagle on SVG: Kurt Cagle has 35 paragraphs here... I see ideas like "Canvas vs SVG in W3C", "CSS vs SVG", personality clashes in the various "standards" campaigns... not sure I can summarize his main point, but he has a lot of tidbits here. On the SVG mailing list there's lots of discussion about "Which renderer should we move to now?", but others think this is an opportunity to move away from a focus on engines, to a focus on the file format. At Macromedia we always focused on deploying capabilities to consumer machines... lots of the other plugin developers instead focused more on their implementation, not taking the extra step to deployment... much SVG evangelism seemed to focus on the format, which preceded any implementation, which then preceded any deployment... completely different focus. I still can't figure out why they ignore Claus Wahler's work here... if they actually want to render SVG instructions on client machines, then it's odd that these machine's actual current capabilities lie unused.

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September 13, 2006

QT7.1.3 and Flash

QT7.1.3 and Flash: This shouldn't become a serious issue, but it *is* a confusing issue, so here's a quick FYI. Long ago, Apple's QuickTime included a Macromedia Flash Player, about the time of QuickTime 5 and Flash 3. The engine has stayed among their codecs, even though there has been little real use of it. In yesterday's releases, Apple apparently disabled this codec in their prefs. Result: people who viewed SWF3 content via QuickTime would have to explicitly enable that codec to view it. Real result: there don't seem to be many people viewing SWF3 in QT, so it shouldn't have much effect, but it will probably hit Digg and Slashdot and people will get confused. You, however, know the dirt. ;-) I tried Apple's site for QT Release Notes and could not find info, but thanks to Martin Sammtleben for raising the profile on this issue. If you see any other public discussions, or possible impacts, then a note in the comments here would be a great way to bump it up, thanks! (Just to be clear, this is unrelated to the Adobe Flash Player that gazillions of people install each day -- it's about some limited SWF-rendering abilities within the QuickTime plugin -- two completely different things.)
Update: Apple docs here... "The version of Flash that ships in QuickTime is older than the version available from Adobe and used in Safari, therefore, while we still ship Flash with QuickTime, it is turned off by default." While this doesn't help those who have already deployed QuickTime projects which include SWF tracks, it does provide the company's current speech on the matter. MacFixIt links to this document too... MacInTouch has commentary... succinct wrap-up from Carol Caroling... Philip Hodgetts has what sounds like Apple text (from another document?): "The means that most interactive QuickTime material on the Internet will display with a gray or blank screen, without any warning to the user. Even if the user looks at the track properties there indication there is even a Flash Track to enable." Once again, this is .MOV files in webpages that we're talking about, not .SWF files in webpages.

Posted by JohnDowdell at 03:44 PM | Comments (5) | TrackBack

September 09, 2006

Bodywaxing mobiles

Bodywaxing mobiles: Want a sleek feel and appearance? Engadget says sugarcubes are abrasive enough to remove logos on phones, yet soft enough to leave the case's finish unaffected. Over to you, Scott Fegette....

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Faster XP startup

Faster XP startup: Great tips here, that I haven't come across before... a single registry setting can turn off prefetching older applications when the system is trying to start, for instance, and there are some network operations (finding old drives, printers) which can be toggled off to speed system starts too. (btw, I liked Ted Patrick's tip this week on minimizing Eclipse to regain Windows memory.)
Update: Thanks to Jay Greer for a tip in the comments here. Ed Bott says the above info is wrong. I'm not sure he makes the best case though. As I read the original article, the goal was to stop prefetching apps installed long ago and no longer used, and Ed cites documentation that says app data is not loaded at system start anyway. At worst it seems the first tip would be neutral (with a slight negative at first app activation), rather than having a negative effect worth warning about, as the critique implies. A better rebuttal might be a stronger description of why operating systems slow with age, and effective app-removal & registry-cleansing techniques... the reason the meme spreads is because many want to speed their system starts.

Posted by JohnDowdell at 02:02 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

September 08, 2006

PD parks icons

PD parks icons: US National Park Service provides icons and textures used in their wilderness maps for free public reuse. Artwork is vector, in Adobe Illustrator format. [via Peter Merholz, who also links to a good discussion on data visualization]

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Free iRiver

Free iRiver: If you're going to MAX in Las Vegas, and have a weblog, then my Ottawan friend Ben Watson may have a free iRiver device for you. I'm not sure which model he's offering, but he's hunting for projects to demo on the conference show floor, and he's soliciting weblog testimonials to pick the winners. I'm bumping the offer up here in case it flew by you in the aggregators. (By the way, the Adobe MAX conference in Las Vegas in October is not the only MAX event this year... I know there are parallel events throughout Asia, for example... check out the localized versions of the Adobe sites for various events closer to where you might be.)

Posted by JohnDowdell at 02:26 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

September 04, 2006

Eating beats hunger

Eating beats hunger: An overwrought conference covered by the AP includes a very telling stat: "Zimmet, a diabetes expert at Australia's Monash University, said there are now more overweight people in the world than the undernourished, who number about 600 million." We humans passed through millennia of hunting, hungry, dying young. All of a sudden the past few decades, we can produce and distribute enough food to enough people that the main problem now is eating too much of it. Wild. If it takes us a few decades more for family structures to learn to teach eating to replace just what you burn, it'll be a huge step forward for life on this planet. (I read the conference as "overwrought" because of reliance on BMI stats, calls for more laws to make a growth trade out of redefining "junk food", terms like "pandemic" used for the concept of "social infectiousness", etc... might have been just the reporting slant, though.) Good news hidden in there: now the bigger problem is learning how to handle food, not just to find it.

Posted by JohnDowdell at 07:00 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

August 24, 2006

Language courseware

Language courseware: Free courseware for human language, not computer. This volunteer effort has been creating PDF and MP3 files of the language-learning materials produced by the US Foreign Service Institute. This public-domain material has also been repackaged by Barron's, Audio Forum, others. It's '60s-style courseware, drills and sit-down-and-studyware, but it's a massive resource, very useful. Why the link here? Because I believe that it's advantageous for native English speakers to reach out to varied regions and cultures: English is where the world meets, a hub language -- those already at the hub have an easier time reaching out to varied spokes than it is to jump from spoke to spoke. Anyway, these US government materials are thorough, and free to use -- my thanks to those volunteers doing the digitizing -- more free online language-learning resources here... discussion of the Mandarin courseware here.

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August 21, 2006

Illustrator history

Illustrator history: Macintalk has screenshots and context today for Adobe Illustrator 1.1, released in March 1987. More history links for Flash, ColdFusion, FreeHand, Pagemaker, Photoshop here.

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August 15, 2006

Lotsa links

Lotsa links: There's a potluck here of recent articles I've found interesting, but where I didn't have enough original content to enter as a top-level weblog item, mostly from outside-of-MXNA sources.

Wharton offers some reporting on the recent Supernova conference, with a bit on the Apollo rationale by Kevin Lynch, but mostly whether consumers will have rights-management abilities of their cross-device personal data.

Richard MacManus writes on "Web 2.0" technologies (blogs, audio and such) and their use in e-learning.

Drew McLellan is joining Yahoo: "...Yahoo! is apparently trying to hire most of the UK standards-aware development community."

Peter Warner at InfoWorld compares six "AJAX toolkits": Dojo, Google, Atlas, Rico, Yahoo, Zimbra. (There are "screencasts" available, but in QuickTime format, and it will not play as-is on my machine, missing a component or some such.)

Reuters ran a weblog entry on fauxtrography and what Reuters considers acceptable... "if we could do it pre-digital then it's acceptable today" seems to be the summary. Good two-way conversation in the comments, a rare achievement with such a hot issue, although the tone does get more divisive towards the later comments.

Related: John Nack talks about research Adobe science is doing on detection of image edits, and closes with a line with which I quite agree: "A lack of context and clarification may be ultimately more damaging than faked pixels, given that it's subjective & maybe impossible to prove. Technology may help sniff out forgeries, but it has to go hand in hand with the audience seeking out multiple, diverse sources of news."

At ComputerWorld, Dan Tennant interviews Martin Newell and Dave Story of Adobe, on the way that advanced science is integrated into the applications. Sample quote:

Hypothetical: You're given the opportunity to develop a single piece of technology to incorporate into Adobe's product line in one day -- no work, no pain, no cost. What would you develop? Newell: I would like a product out there which is able to, from a single image of an everyday scene, completely understand and recognize everything in that scene, a product that could tell me everything about all the objects, including the people and who they are, so that the necessity of tagging faces in photographs becomes obsolete. All the things that a 10-year-old would be able to tell me, I want the computer to tell me.

John Battelle analyzes how Google is handling its clickfraud issue.

InterAKT has released the MX Ajax Toolkit: "a Dreamweaver extension that enables AJAX development in Dreamweaver. Not only it has a perfect integration with Dreamweaver, but it is also based on one of the most revolutionary AJAX platforms, supporting features like degradability, web services and implementing lots of useful controls and widgets."

Denise Caruso, a technology analyst since the Seybold days, has a weblog. (In answer to her "telcos astroturf net neutrality but our side wouldn't, would we?", you really need to look into the role played by Fenton Communications -- they successfully program the public through media placement of remarkably counterfactual stories.)

It's Torvalds vs Stallman on how the GNU Public License specifies what hardware it can run on. The article doesn't seem to succinctly explain its apparent favored position, however... sample: "...The use of DRM to disallow freedoms (c) and (d) is what FSF doesn't like. Richard Stallman (RMS), founder of the FSF, calls this situation Tivoization. The term originates from TiVo...." (I like solutions which work in wide variety of combination, and am not drawn so much to the drive-towards-omnipotence sometimes seen in the MS and FSF approaches.)

The Calcanis weblogs are refactoring... Flash Insider and Unofficial Photoshop blogs are no longer receiving investment there.

Mark Niemann-Ross is soliciting redesigns of the Adobe DevNet site. He also mentions a plugin summit for traditional Adobe applications this autumn.

Breeze is getting further business partnerships, this time with the SumTotal learning system.

Jakob Nielsen has a great point about how a hand-drawn map may be better than a generic Web2.0 map. He makes an interesting assertion with "Therefore, interaction techniques like drag-and-drop should almost never be used on web sites"... I know that I've been surprised by seeing drag'n'drop in WWW pages, but I'm not sure yet that this will never work.
Funniest bit: "The very nerdiness of the name 'AJAX' gives me hope that it will be used for causes more worthwhile than those now characteristic of Flash. Doomed by its own name, Flash had similar potential but was so grossly abused for 'flashy' design that it never succeeded in adding much useful functionality to the Web." Betcha he wouldn't say the same if he had been born with the name "Rock Hudson" or "Clint Eastwood"... or "We'd have less linkrot today if only it hadn't been called 'World Wide *Web*', which doomed it to a musty, dusty, uncleaned existence...."

Adam Engst at Tidbits is searching for some collaborative writing software, and here he explains why several current solutions (Contribute, Web20 stuff) don't quite fit for him yet.

The Guardian has a piece on "15 websites which changed the world"... sort of what you'd expect, but this article does pull together founding details of many of today's top sites.

SWF Guardian seems an easy way to eliminate many cases of unauthorized SWF reuse, although in this age of decompilers I expect we'd need a server component to proof against more theft. (Related: The new Protect PDF Online service uses Adobe LiveCycle Policy Server on the backend to offer ongoing permissions for ability to read a file.)

Here's another example of how Adobe authentication technologies are helping with document authenticity, in this case ensuring that documents are not altered after initial distribution.

Josh Tynjala investigates varying degrees of separation of content from presentation in Flex work.

A. Bertocci compares Adobe Photoshop with Photoshop Elements, and the distinct audiences for each. His parallel article on Adobe Premiere seems like it was written a few years ago, though... response seems quite different to the Premiere Pro line today.

I liked this Flex business perspective from Yakov Fain.

Peter Bell writes of his competitive advantage when using the higher-level abilities in ColdFusion to quickly develop iterative apps, rather than ones which start with a full functional specification.

Computer donations end up going to scammers who punish their benefactors by restoring hard drive data.

Kim Cavanaugh achieved the impossible and made me want to attend a Dave Matthews concert.... ;-)

Posted by JohnDowdell at 01:25 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

August 14, 2006

"No military" GPL

"No military" GPL: This is an odd wrinkle in an "open source" license... they say they only like it when people who aren't in the military use it. Does this mean that armed combatants who are not in any declared military are okay? Or that only those in countries with fair legal systems cannot use it for defense? What would FSF do if an autocracy's military used this code? I don't see a way this could be sustainably enforced -- the only people who would respect it are those you wouldn't need to worry about anyway. (Asimov's First Law of Robotics adds additionally knotty questions, with its "nor through inaction" clause.)

Posted by JohnDowdell at 05:28 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

August 09, 2006

Photoshop 0.0

Photoshop 0.0: I'm swiping this title from Victor Mitnick on the Dreamweaver team, who sent the link around on internal email earlier this week. It's an appropriate title. Everything still comes back to careful selection sets anyhow, regardless of whether computers or Xacto knives are involved.... ;-)

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July 27, 2006

Quick links

Quick links: I came across lots of interesting articles today, but don't have enough original content on each to make them top-level blog items (and risk flooding the aggregators)... new Adobe FAQs and forum changes... firefighting robot snakes and carpets that guess your age... lists of commercial video sites and Rupert Murdoch on global MySpace... if you're looking for some reading for a lazy summer evening then you may find it here (and, for my Aussie friends, you know you can read whatever you want in whatever season you want.... ;-)

Adobe has a FAQ on "Adobe solutions for technical communications", with questions like "What are Adobe's plans for RoboHelp? Framemaker?", "How do these work with Captivate?", and answers like "New versions of FrameMaker, Acrobat, RoboHelp, and Captivate are currently in development and will be released over the next 12 months."

Roland Piquepaille has an interesting article about a giant robotic firefighting snake last week. "This robot, which has been developed in Norway by SINTEF, is 3 m long and weighs 70 kg. The snake contains 20 water hydraulic motors that move the robotic joints. And the energy needed to power these motors comes from water pressurized to 100 bars and already available inside the fire hose. This gives enough energy to this water-powered robot to climb up stairs, to lift a car up off the ground or even break through a wall. Very clever design!"

Dan Zambonini nailed how to boost weblog stats -- say something so controversial that half the audience will rush to correct you. (There used to be a Usenet trick to get replies... just say something was impossible and you'd draw more suggestions of implementations than if you merely asked how to do it.)

Speaking of controversy, Ryan Stewart pointed to a Tara Hunt essays about "the browser is dead". I think document browsers are just as useful as they were yesterday, and are by no means "dead", although this essay could be useful in reorienting those who had thought WWW browsers would be able to do everything we want from the Internet.

Spry:Patches is a list of changes to the Spry framework, contributed by Doug Nourse. (Spry makes it easy for an HTML page to manipulate XML-formatted data with JavaScript.)

Ryan Mattes offers encryption functions for SWF and more.

A discussion of ways to do serverside transcoding of AVI to FLV without spending any money.

Web Standards Group interviews David Storey at Opera... one of David's work items right now is to contact websites when their implementation of "web standards" don't match Opera's.

Real World Flex Seminar in New York City Aug 14... lots of good speakers here, and I think that an intensive like this may be the easiest way to pick up how easy Flex actually is.

Julian on Software had an essay last week on "The Fat Client: A Brief History of Flash, Flex, RIAs and What Else Is Up"... a current overview from a Java veteran.

I like the essay from Jared Rypka-Hauer about how it's easy to lose the sense of the miraculous about what we do every day.

Recent interviews with David Mendels and Kevin Lynch about Adobe directions. (More.)

New sensors: license plate scanning (not tracking) is automated so that a scanning vehicle can report to a central server about nearby traffic... new carpets not only have built-in weight sensors, but can also accurately estimate age (how, I don't know), and can also estimate gender with 75% accuracy. We're going to need good interfaces to handle the explosion of new data people can access....

Google Maps is tied with news services to create a geographic UI to the Iranian attacks on Israel... seems useful, but the scrolling gets a little wonky.

The Adobe User-to-User web forums, previously powered by WebCrossing (I think), are now moving to ColdFusion.

Jeff Pulver has a big list of commercial television programming on the internet. I clicked through about half of the 80 sites listed here... most used Flash, and runner-up was Windows Media Player when the shows were being sold for viewing.

Interesting interview with Rupert Murdoch on how he sees the globalization of MySpace, use of video on the net, more.

Boing Boing has a wacky story on how the French court has ordered Greenpeace to stop using Google's mapping service to identify where "genetically modified" plants are grown, presumably to mark targets for violence while maintaining plausible deniability. (More on net threats here.)

I really liked this Flash 9 synthesizer from Andre Michelle.

Posted by JohnDowdell at 04:30 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

"Ripeness" sticker

"Ripeness" sticker: Off-topic, but I've got to get this off my chest. A researcher invents stickers for food (like the little stickers you see on bananas or apples) which react to ethylene gas -- the invention is billed as being able to "tell consumers if a fruit or vegetable is ripe." All it would tell you was if the sticker was exposed to ethylene. Different plant products respond to ethylene gas in different ways, and ripeness has little to do these days with when something is picked. Mass-market apples, for instance, are usually picked early with low sugar content for sturdiness, then held in vast nitrogen-flushed containers for months until being shipped to retail. It doesn't matter if they release a little ethylene while on the produce rack, because they were picked before peak flavor could be developed on the tree. Matter of fact, with an apple in that condition, ethylene exposure would hasten mealiness and loss of texture -- it's hard to work an early-picked apple. Tomatoes are a more dramatic example -- during winter they're picked full-green and are exposed to ethylene gas during transit north to change color and texture, but they sure as heck aren't "ripe" just because a sticker detects that one-time ethylene hit -- a ripe-picked tomato kept ventilated might even indicate as "less ripe" with such a sticker test. Retail produce markets usually "cool" or "cook" dozens of 40-lb boxes of bananas every week, either opening them up to air or sealing them in plastic to concentrate the natural ethylene release, even storing them with ethylene-releasing fruits like citrus to hasten ripening for a yellow skin when on the stand. Stone fruit, like peaches? Don't ask... you could never sell ripe nectarines in most markets because you'd lose over half to on-display spoilage, people squeezing the fruit. Harold McGee's "On Food and Cooking" is still one of the best books on the science of food, and yes, I worked with fresh produce in a prior life. The story got published in USA Today and lots of people blogged it, but there story doesn't hold up to what I've seen myself about how produce, ripening, and ethylene interact. There, now I can get back to work.... ;-)

Posted by JohnDowdell at 03:29 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

July 24, 2006

Lots of links

Lots of links: Lots of interesting tidbits from last week here in the extended entry... mostly from outside of MXNA, stuff I didn't have much to say about, but which seemed too interesting to just close out of the browser without logging....

Marco Casario pointed to an article on how Opera tested across all the various Java mobile implementations.

Photoshop tutorial for "sparklines", simple, uncluttered data-fed inline graphics. [via Jason Kottke] Also see prior entries here on sparklines.

Extreme Tech had info on a tipster program: "The Business Software Alliance (BSA) doled out a total of $15,500 in reward money on Tuesday to three individuals who came forward to report that their ex-employers used pirated software in the workplace."

Microsoft staff talk of exec changes: "There was allot of press over the last few weeks about the sudden 'vaporization' of Martin Taylor. I've had several questions about what this means as Martin as influential in Microsoft strategy and close to Steve Ballmer...."

MS staff talk on "rich vs reach" still seems to me to be more about arguing over label definitions than about saying anything... this writer seems to posit an equivalence between "user experience" and system calls... I'm more concerned about how easily a new person can approach an interface, the number of people able to approach that interface (whether by physical capabilities or language barriers or system requirements), how secure they are in using that service... system calls are just one small part which may affect other parts of user experience, and lines like this don't scan for me: "But the reach client in the browser does provide a restricted application environment, so there is a cost -- decreased user experience."

Jeffrey Zeldman wrote last week of dissatisfaction among "web standards" folks with the World Wide Web Consortium. But my current understanding of his stance seems along the lines of "Everything would be better if we just changed the people at the top," where I've always been more along the lines of "What *actually* happens when you have a committee deliberate over how others should act, compared to when you let people act and see what works?" (That probably didn't come across, but that assumption that starting with a spec and encouraging multiple implementations seemed to me to handle some needs, but not all needs.) Interesting situation; I just hope it evolves usefully.

Yahoo is soliciting video advertisements from customers... if you've got a flair with a FLV then this may be a good way to get more prominence.

Mike Potter offers a populated JamJar space to play in... all you need is an adobe.com user name.

Ryan Stewart wrote last week that "Adobe Needs a Scoble" ("anybody who didn't do X should be fired!"?), but he's actually looking for video viewing of people inside Adobe, going about creating the software understructure for creative expression. The more I thought about such videos over the week, though, the more I saw conversations between staff & customers as the key interest, rather than just staffers sitting around in cubicles talking to ourselves. Focusing just on staffers seems short-handed to me, doesn't give the full flavor of how things get done. I'm still thinking about this, though....

A list of video funding, of new webtv businesses which have received venture capital investment.

Adobe's main offices in San Jose were the first offices to be awarded the highest level of certification from the Green Building Council... more info here on the smarter lighting systems, the use of remote weather services to influence irrigation cycles... PDF itself is helping to reduce the paper impact of voluminous building permits and documents.

Wil Shipley offers a bet at good odds to Bill Gates, after he said "...there was an 80 percent chance the company's next-generation operating system, Vista, would be ready in January."

Digg discusses stats on how a few of its superusers carry disproportionate influence on the site. The orienting quote at SEOMoz: "When folks think of Digg, they're often misled into believing that the content seen on the homepage is representative of what a wide base of Internet users think is news-worthy and important. The numbers tell a different story - that of all stories that make it to the front page of Digg, more than 20% come from a select group of 20 users."

Swarm is a SWF display of the web pages its members are currently viewing. You can become a member by installing a Firefox extension which sends your viewing info to Swarm.

John Dvorak pulls the troll-trip, this time on CSS: "The real problem is that no two browsers -- let alone no two versions of any one browser -- interpret CSS the same way! The Microsoft browser interprets a style sheet one way, Firefox interprets it another way, and Opera a third way. Can someone explain to me exactly what kind of 'standard' CSS is, anyway?"

Posted by JohnDowdell at 12:34 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

July 19, 2006

Google News operators

Google News operators: Off-topic, but it came through MXNA... Jon Udell of InfoWorld tries "site:infoworld.com" searches on Google News. I don't think that engine uses the "site:" operator... if you do a regular search on text "infoworld" then articles come up... Google News uses a "source:" operator instead, with a private syntax naming each news service (example). Here's a Google News search to find recent InfoWorld articles on Vista. Summary: Google News uses slightly different advanced search operators than Google websearch... GoogleGuide.com has a useful comparison listing of the advanced operators used in various Google search engines. (Jon's main point, about "How does Google News decides who's an authoritative news source?", remains a live and vibrant question, however... sites have been blacklisted due to complaints from others, and I'm glad I'm not the editor on that one.... ;-)

Posted by JohnDowdell at 11:38 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

July 11, 2006

Windows vs Flash

Windows vs Flash: No particular point here, just something I've been curious about after hearing "browser plugins should be included in the OS" in the weblogs. The Windows release dates below come from the incredible chart from Eric Levenez, and the Flash dates come from the Wikipedia article (which is still attracting someone obsessed with United Virtualities' PIE). Windows 3.1 (1992), Windows 95 (1995), Windows NT 4.0 (1996), Windows 98 (1998), Windows 2000 (2000), Windows XP (2001). Flash 2 (June 1997), Flash 3 (May 1998), Flash 4 (June 1999), Flash 5 (Aug 2000), Flash MX (Mar 2002), Flash MX04 (Sept 2003), Flash 8 (Sept 2005), Player 9 (June 2006). During the eight generations of Macromedia Flash Player, we've seen three major releases of Windows. The smaller thing evolves faster than the bigger thing. Fortunately, it gets adopted much faster and more widely, too.

Posted by JohnDowdell at 01:00 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

July 08, 2006

Richer than Rockefeller

Richer than Rockefeller: A bit off-topic, but I wanted to get this link in 'cause it's hard to search for this argument. Working in technology does provide long-term benefits to everyone: "Consider John D. Rockefeller, a name nearly synonymous with wealth. At one point he had a net worth as high as 1/65th of US GDP at that time, a figure that would be the equivalent of $190 Billion today - four times what Bill Gates currently has. He owned land, employed people, and had political clout that would seem extraordinary at any time in history. But, having died in 1937 at the age of 98, Rockefeller never had photographs of his childhood, never watched a color film, never flew in a jet engine airplane, and never saw a photograph of the Earth taken from space. If Rockefeller wished to travel from New York to Chicago, it took him and his entourage more than a day. If his servant cut him during a morning shave (or even if he did it himself), a cloth bandage was the only kind available. His underwear did not have elastic, and since no cohort of servants could have realistically alleviated that problem for him, he probably spent every day accustomed to irritating hassles that would be unacceptable to even the poorest Americans today." Sometimes it's easy to focus on incremental income differences today, but I think that improving things for everyone has the bigger longterm impact.

Posted by John Dowdell at 08:48 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

June 26, 2006

WeFeelFine.org

WeFeelFine.org: This is a Java applet, not a SWF, but the interface and data resources are interesting... they mine the blogosphere for strings like "I feel" and "I am feeling", then graphically display the results by time, location, weather, more. The API to their data is available under a Creative Commons license, but I don't know if their server is already set up with a policy to accept cross-domain SWF requests. [via Evan Williams]

Posted by JohnDowdell at 04:51 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

June 16, 2006

在度假

在度假: heh, *that* should break some aggregators... I'm on vacation this week, back on Monday June 26, although I may skulk around in web-comments towards next weekend. Lots of other Adobe staffers will be writing, in both MXNA and blogs.adobe.com. 再见!

Posted by JohnDowdell at 04:39 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Lotsa links

Lotsa links: Too many browser windows open, but too much interesting info on the web to lose... check the extended entry for a smorgasbord of interesting things you may or may not have seen before or ever wish to see again....

Info on the work required for font-encoding in Chinese.

Joel Spolsky writes on how, as a new Microsoft employee in 1991, he gave a review presentation to Bill Gates, and passed. (But how MacroMan was killed in the process.)

Matt Marshall has succinct information on how Riya may be attempting to generalize image recognition across a wide range of search tasks.

Philip Su has an on-again, off-again essay on the dynamics within a very large software group... Mini-MSFT has more... in comments at Scoble's there's proof that you can never really delete anything from the web. Those problems aren't unique to Microsoft, or even to large software efforts... even in the most intimate of settings you still have to carefully consider the actual effects of honestly describing posterior acreage in a new Armani suit....

The mobile Linux initiative seems like it will have repercussions, although I can't yet see what they might be.

Alexandru Costin has notes from yesterday's Adobe financial conference. (Odd note: The immediate Reuters syndication was headlined "MM drags Adobe results", but Alexandru's notes confirm my own memory is that no such thing seemed to have been said in the call... the integration is going as planned, but it was the bundle software sales dip which had the biggest impact on results. At least they spelled the name right.... ;-)

Tim O'Reilly hosts a number of observations on how mobile culture is evolving more quickly in South Korea than the rest of the world.

An analysis of payback to musicians for CD sales and online sales... the writer advises Weird Al Yankovic to push CDs, 'cause he gets next-to-nothing from online sales.

Nick Carr commented on Robert Scoble's change of venue: "So Microsoft's self-styled human face is now some other company's human face. This must be the first corporate human face transplant ever attempted. Will it take? Or will the new body reject the used puss? And what does it say about this whole human face business when a person proclaims himself to be a company's human face and then, when a better offer comes along, tears himself from the old noggin and stitches himself to the new one?" (I think it's more sustainable to have a network of staffers blogging, rather than focus on a single contributor... "The company is the company, and you are just you.")

There's growing conversation about how text advertising is changing the very content of the blogosphere. (I hit the same idea last month with ironic followup.) At some point advertisers will realize that the ad vendor has no immediate incentive to cut down on ad fraud... to make things sustainable they need better feedback and monitoring somehow, I think.

More innovation in Flash delivery to environmental signage.

Microsoft's Windows Presentation Framework has an elevator pitch... I would've thought it to be more like "Like Flex, but able to use !3D! !acceleration! on the far fewer machines on which it runs", but I guess that's why they didn't hire me to write the blurb.... ;-)

That Yahoo Mail worm is very interesting... it's not so much "an ajax bug" as it is a consequence of exposing user data to the WWW browser's presentation layer. How can a user access that data while blocking off hidden automated abuse of that data...?

This set of XAML animation behaviors got a lot of play in the MS-oriented communities this week, but the approach is already available in Flex.

Renaun Erickson does some spot-checks of WMODE efficiency in his current browser... he found that performance was 10-40% slower when asking the browser to add the plugin rendering to the browser's offscreen compositing buffer, as opposed to blasting plugin content directly to screen in the normal way. This will vary greatly by browser, too, and even by platform... Firefox/Mac performance differs from Windows, and for Internet Explorer, well.... ;-)

Info on getting listed in Google News.

Microsoft finds it difficult to integrate with GNU Public License, which enforces a strict separation of engineering work between its license and others.

Ryan Stewart has info on the growing awareness of need for offline access and remote synch.

Posted by JohnDowdell at 03:26 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

My status

My status: Yes, I've had a silent weblog this week. It's been self-imposed, I just felt in an odd position for posting anything. I found a Pocket-Lint article Tuesday morning about an Adobe statement on recent Microsoft events, and have been seeking guidance on how much attention the company wishes brought to this document. It's been busy during earnings week, though, and other mainstream news sources have since run articles on the statement. I want to do the best thing by shareholders, other employees, customers and even by other companies too, though -- didn't want to risk a misstep with this new, still-forming company, and so I shut myself down pretty fully the last few days. I've also been sensitive that not everything is as it may first appear -- Joe Wilcox pointed out that it's rare for a lawyer to work through the newspapers, and the ambiguous voice of the sudden Microsoft blogging is unusual to read too ("is he speaking for himself? how does he know what he says he knows?") -- it's hard to talk about something with so much behind-the-scenes movement. But the issue is also the elephant in the room, and I found it hard to write about other things normally without acknowledging it. Soooo.... that's why I've been silent recently... I've scheduled a vacation for next week, and anticipate a clearer perspective when I come back towards June 26.

Posted by John Dowdell at 08:42 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

June 09, 2006

Lotsa links

Lotsa links: Gotta clean up some browser windows here, and while I don't have enough to say to make these top-line blog entries, there's too much of interest to let them go unacknowledged....

Seen On Slash is one author's choice of the most striking comments from regular Slashdot reading.

Ben Forta is keen on the Flex-based interface to National Geographic's Map Explorer. (I put some time in here, but haven't yet figured out how to overlay demographic info.)

Claus Wahlers talks about XML meta-languages for declaring interfaces, before choosing the delivery method. Daniel Fischer pursues similar ideas.

Glenn Fleishman expands on his earlier reporting to trace back last week's "those bastards killed golive" story.

Robin Ducot describes some of the strategizing behind merging the Adobe and Macromedia websites.

John Martellaro has an insider's perspective on why Apple may not focus on gaming.

Lots of comments at this article describing practical failings with LAMP.

Forbes describes the actual management environment at Google: "As charming as he is, Schmidt runs Google about as much as much as the Dalai Lama runs the world's spiritual life."

Michael Mace described some possible Flash/Microsoft dynamics a month ago, and his article is still drawing fresh comments today.

Jim Allchin's description of attempts by Steve Ballmer to clean up an infected Windows system.

iMode use in the United Kingdom reports good adoption, and that there's a signficant increase in consumers who use mobile data services via this richer kind of interface.

A new type of assistive device I didn't fully understand... seems to toss the visual metaphors still followed by screenreaders. "To use a screenreader you have to understand the visual paradigm - what dialogue boxes are, radio buttons and all the rest.. That's the wrong model as far as I'm concerned - what you really want is a model that is intrinsically orientated towards a one-dimensional audio stream."

Darrel Plant proposes a "Shockwave and Awe" meet-up alongside the upcoming Adobe MAX event in Las Vegas.

Firefox and Microsoft are both dropping the Win98 OS.

John Rhodes has a whole bunch of usability links.

Tim O'Reilly notes that data-mining of the public record is not limited to (friendly) government analysis.

Posted by JohnDowdell at 03:59 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

June 06, 2006

CS2, new Intel Macs

CS2, new Intel Macs: No news here... I'm posting it in hopes of assisting someone whose comments lie behind a registration wall. The new Intel-based Macintosh require not only a port of application code, but a prior port of development environment as well... expect a native version on the next full version of the creative suite. For QuickTime 7.1, yes, it did have problems with existing applications, but fortunately those problems have been addressed in QuickTime 7.1.1.

Posted by JohnDowdell at 07:45 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Wilcox on magicians

Wilcox on magicians: Off-topic (but it's a chance to confirm that I still don't have any info of my own on the MS lawyer's story from last week ;-) ... Joe Wilcox wrote in passing "Good magicians are effective by way of distraction. The crowd looks here instead of there and so misses the trick behind the trick." That's true, but it may be more accurate to state that top magicians consider where attention would naturally flow, rather than create distractions themselves. Tony Slydini introduced a wonderful sense of timing into the New York magic scene in the 1940s... there were few "moves" as such, but the business happened during the natural cycle of relaxation and attention. Other great magicians, like John Ramsay, did deliberately create bits of business which would distract those who thought they were clever... some of his sleights are actually pretty easy to spot (his thimble steal is blatant), but he'd create an "aha!" suspicion which would lead other magicians astray. Overall, though, I think it's not the sneaky business which was effective, but the long-term pattern of watching how things really do play out which led to the most real magic. (And by the way, if you like sleight-of-hand, I'd recommend the Ross Bertram home movies which were recently pressed to DVD... the lighting is sometimes off, and the score of Canadian schottisches is seldom heard today, and some of the "educational" stock footage would cause today's video editors to shake their heads, but Ross and Helen Bertram were early do-it-yourself creatives, and they managed to preserve some really important records of some exhilaratingly beautiful impossibilities.)

Posted by JohnDowdell at 11:42 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

June 05, 2006

Whitespace coding

Whitespace coding: Funny... a programming language written in strings of whitespace. "The Whitespace interpreter ignores any non-whitespace characters. Only spaces, tabs and newlines are considered syntax." Theoretically you could embed these instructions into other code, but my brain is starting to hurt now, so.... ;-) [via Greg Costikyan] (btw, I'll likely be blogging light most of the week... I'm at an offsite, meeting other staffers from other workgroups.)

Posted by JohnDowdell at 04:15 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

June 02, 2006

Semi-offline

Semi-offline: For those interested in such things, I have internet access, but do not have access to email and similar similar functions. (Friday afternoon I started sneezing at the office and so left for home, but now I'm having difficulty negotiating the new VPN system.) If you came by my blog looking for comments on Microsoft's story today, then I don't know enough to usefully comment about it. And if you notice any typos in the above paragraph, then you'll know that the cold medicine is starting to kick in here.... ;-)

Posted by JohnDowdell at 04:19 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

May 31, 2006

Lotsa links

Lotsa links: I'm 'way behind this week, so let me do quick links on some of the pages still open in my browser from last week....

WIRED notes how bad interfaces gain constituencies... the state of California mailed out prefilled tax returns for citizens to sign and return (they know all that data already, the paperwork purgatory is just for show)... but tax preparers are pursuing political action to prevent the "ready returns".

13 reasons for and 13 reasons against using Microsoft for "Web 2.0 development".

Simon Wacker shows another way to declare SWF interfaces in XML.

Media College offers "The Pro and Con of Flash Video".

Joe Clark writes "To Hell with WCAG 2" at A List Apart... the accessibility spec is apparently lengthy and difficult for people to implement.

Roger Johansen talks about accessibility (principally text-to-speech screenreaders) in the context of dynamic content via JavaScript. I particularly dislike the nameless commenter who tells screenreader manufacturers to "take their finger out".

Andrew Kirkpatrick discusses accessibility in the larger sense ("no js", etc) in the context of the recent Adobe Spry framework.

Ajax & SEO as a search term is pulling up an increasing number of results these days too.

Andres Zapata wrote "The Guided Wireframe Narrative for Rich Internet Applications" at Boxes & Arrows... lots of comments here as well.

John Battelle describes the "Too Many Passwords" problem... Meebo.com apparently has 11,000 people hit the "forgot your password?" link each day.

The Lion King was a classic trainwreck, watching a high-profile title try to play atop a newly-delivered system capability.

Ryan Stewart points out how blaming the browser does not suffice... you've got to match the task to the capabilities, a tricky piece of judgment. There's a bunch of comments on various angles.

Gabor Cselle essayed on occasional connectivity and synch of local storage, but from a browser-centric position: "First, take a browser you can run on any platform, then add a mechanism to easily create applications that perform three things..." Asking 90% of the potential audience to change their browsing chrome is difficult, I think.

Seattle Times discusses how Google is playing US politics.

A PHP pitch does the standard debatable feature matrix, but I liked this line: "PHP has broad functionality for databases, strings, network connectivity, file system support, Java, COM, XML, CORBA, WDDX, and Macromedia Flash."

Dr. Dobbs discusses Microsoft's proposed new photography format, but says "Then PNG came along, a dollar short and a day late as it turned out. A public domain alternative, PNG avoided most of the acrimonious legal wrangling of GIF and JPEG, but was introduced too near the end of the LZW patent lifecycle to gain much traction." The format actually came together amazingly quickly, much faster than later W3C Recommendations... it was over the end-of-year holiday weeks when the issue arose and most of the work was done.

BitTube has been doing some SWF development for Sony Playstation, and notes that it's similar to how we've had to refactor downwards for smaller devices or more constraints every few years.

I like these maps of language spread over geographic areas.

Posted by JohnDowdell at 02:33 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

May 27, 2006

IE7 name change

IE7 name change: MS staffer says it will be called "IE7+", or "Internet Explorer 7+". I guess they want us to refer to it in conversation like this: "Tested in >=IE7+". No idea if next version will be called "IE7++". The commenters make the points you'd expect. At least it's not called "IE7+MX" eh...? ;-) [link fixed]

Posted by John Dowdell at 12:00 PM | Comments (7) | TrackBack

May 26, 2006

T-shirts

T-shirts: Get 'em while they're hot! (There's a big Web2.0 beatup on Memeorandum now, but it's particularly tricky for individuals within a group like O'Reilly.com to speak when they have to consider another group as well (the CMP conference organizers and senders of the letter), and meanwhile think about possible legal ramifications of anything they do say. I'd ask folks to consider the general background and significant contributions of the whole O'Reilly effort, and give them some time to get their internal group conversation together before they can speak publicly with a solid voice. The US has started a long holiday weekend today... please give them a little slack, 'cause we know their overall intent is good.)

Posted by JohnDowdell at 12:25 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

May 18, 2006

Microsoft vs Adobe

Microsoft vs Adobe: I don't usually go in for articles like this, but Michael Mace's lengthy essay raises so many ideas that I think you'd like to read it too. (My general take is that Microsoft must become Microsoft, Adobe must become Adobe, Google and Yahoo and Apple must become more themselves too -- each business starts with a different mission, has a different ecology, and they only fleetingly overlap.) Michael looks at mobile, Flex, the universal client for SWF/PDF/HTML, portability of Microsoft's future work, corporate structures, more. What do you think of his viewpoint on various details...?

Posted by John Dowdell at 08:16 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

May 15, 2006

Lots of links

Lots of links: Got some open browser windows here, and want to make these links searchable within this weblog's database... airline boarding, Flash in Fortune 500 companies, changing understanding of accessibility, more tidbits from the last few days.

An article asks "Is FLASH Appropriate in a Business Web Site". I'd guess so, because most successful businesses use it -- a recent informal study shows 67% of Fortune 500 companies use SWF, compared to 36% back in 2004 (no source; just what I've heard). The article starts "The short answer is maybe. The long answer is that the question might be better asked, 'Is a 100% FLASH web site appropriate in business?.'" About as appropriate as a 100% HTML site, without bitmaps or other richer media, I'd wager. You blend together your media assets to create the experience you'd like your audience to have. The article also contains folklore such as "Search engines can not see the text in a Flash page" and such.

Telamon used to be the first search result for "father of Ajax", but these days he doesn't even place.... ;-)

Kevin Kelly pointed to a resource on general debugging troubleshooting, and it includes stuff the stuff that's heard so regularly on the mailing lists... change one part of the problem at a time, know how to make it fail so that you can prove you've made it stop failing, watch out for philosophy getting the way of observation, the basics.

Massimo Foti describes how the Spry framework focuses on data display within a page, instead of on JavaScript programming. Meanwhile, Drew McLellan is unhappy that Spry uses HTML attributes which have not yet been approved by the W3C, as do many of the approaches people are taking to do things application-ish inside of document browsers.

Carol Sliwa of ComputerWorld writes on "Massachusetts OpenDocument plans questioned by disabled"... one thing I've been seeing lately is that the needs of the accessibility community, the web-standards community, the dynamic-data community, the open-source community, all can often be a little askew from each other. It's hard to raise one priority above the others; we've got to find ways to make these different needs fit together.

Target Stores is apparently dealing with a lawsuit because its website is hard to use for an unsighted person. I think we're all differently-abled, to some degree or other, and more people have sub-average intelligence than visual impairments... I'm not sure how you'd be able to codify where to draw the line.

Joshua Porter had a good essay on "7 Reasons Web Apps Fail", describing some common ways to get distracted away from user experience these days.

Airlines are still testing new boarding strategies.

A little bit in Business Standard about Adobe Mobile growth trends in India replicating those in Japan.

I'll be looking to learn more about the Brevity project, which provides a different type of abstraction layer: "Brevity takes source code files written in Brevity syntax and processes them into valid ActionScript 3.0 files, which it then compiles into Flash 9 SWFs using the Adobe AS3 command line compiler. This is very much like Processing converts processing source files into Java code and then compiles them."

Kim Cavanaugh was written up in the "Technology Horizons in Education Journal" for his use of Breeze meetings, presentation and training in school districts in Florida. It seems a relatively easy way to extend current practices, for both time-shifting and space-shifting.

A new proxying approach may make it more difficult for the mundanely powerful to control what others say or read.

Posted by JohnDowdell at 12:06 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

May 09, 2006

Lots of links

Lots of links: My browser has too many pages open, but some of this stuff I want to get into my weblog's search engine. This isn't everything great that people wrote recently, because I still sometimes lose browser sessions, but here's some of the writing I found impressive, useful, or just plain weird during the past week.... ;-)

Valleywag dings Google for not creating a special Cinco de Mayo logo like Yahoo did. (In contrast, today I was moved by the story of Ayaan Hirsi Ali.)

Plagiarism Today is a weblog dedicated to the unauthorized reuse of someone else's original content.

"Linux Kernel 'Getting Buggier'" is a Ziff-Davis story about how older systems do not seem to get the same support that equipment used by early-adopters does.

37 Signals had a good business tip for "Web2.0 companies" last week -- set up a pricing model where people can choose premium services: "What we learned from this is that people will pay for quality. Offer them something really good, and they will go for it."

Derek Powazek discusses ways to steer clients back to reality. [via John Gruber]

Roger Johansson describes how he uses JavaScript to open new browser windows, instead of the TARGET attribute, which various validators currently disdain.

Jesse Rodgers writes "AJAX and screenreaders - could Flash make it better?", but I suspect the core problem is how to turn an interactive, non-linear experience into a linear and unchanging text stream. (I think there's a great deal of work to be done in audio-only interfaces... there's investment here, in the phone tree world, but mobile users may not want to be staring at a screen all the time too.) Joe Clark offers related articles.

Noel Billig has a great summary on video streaming vs progressive download, when to use each... a gloss to Chris Hock's DevNet intro. One key difference: progressive download leaves a local copy, while streaming does not, and this has implications on random access... both techniques are useful.

Last ActionScript Hero has more info on undocumented (and therefore use-at-your-own-risk) FlashPaper calls and properties.

Wall Street Journal describes how the increasing complexity of larger software applications means that security concerns need to be addressed earlier, and has a few paragraphs on Adobe's Adrian Ludwig toward the end.

Brian Lesser took ten strong pages of notes on sessions he attended at Flash In The Can in Toronto last month... how he remembered all that despite catching a cold I don't know.... ;-)

Koen De Weggheleire and Peter Elst describe the new Adobe road show, this one at an event in Brussels.

The story about using laptops to steal cars got big play last week. Even keeping a ravenous pitbull in your car won't protect against thieves equipped with Rohypnol and hamburger, and then there's always EMP to deal with.

A book company is releasing titles based on images rather than just text, and offers free on-screen reading with nominal charges for higher-res versions for printing.

Posted by JohnDowdell at 12:28 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

May 04, 2006

DirectX OS support

DirectX OS support: Paul Thurrott has a piece, unconfirmed, that the next version of Microsoft's graphic routines and APIs will not be portable to Windows XP or other Microsoft users. Buy it all, or none, if this report is correct.

Posted by JohnDowdell at 02:53 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

May 02, 2006

Tracking and complexity

Tracking and complexity: Four different links I find interesting, even though not directly relevant to our work... believe I picked these up through Slashdot and Digg. Popular Science describes how to track where someone goes if they're using a mobile phone you've modified... P2P.net publishes an activist press release which alleges that Levi's Jeans are impregnated with short-range RF transmitters in certain stores. An essay on "freedom from complexity" got picked up on Slashdot... at first I thought it would be about writing concisely and clearly, but instead it's apparently about encouraging consumers to use opensource-branded software on Windows instead of Linux. Norbert Ehreke has a parallel Thoughts on Simplicity essay which I'm not sure I can abstract into a single sentence.

Posted by JohnDowdell at 03:09 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Five-gig texture

Five-gig texture: Not really a texturemap, more like a very large database table with values coded in RGB instead of ASCII. John Carmack's next game references this giant bitmap to figure out where to place 3D objects (grass, moss) for rendering, what types of footstep soundfiles to play, more.

Posted by JohnDowdell at 02:48 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

April 26, 2006

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 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 10, 2006

Computer cafes, SF, Shanghai

Computer cafes, SF, Shanghai: The San Francisco Chronicle has an article today about people forcibly robbed of their computers while using the wifi in a local cafe... 70 incidents so far this year. "Where else do you have a thousand-dollar item sitting on a table in a coffee shop?" For some reason I thought of this story from two years ago, where internet cafes in Shanghai installed cameras to watch people using the cafe's computers. But for laptop theft in general, it seems like it should be easy to install a pinging routine or even a keylogger or auto-webcam onto your own machine, so that when it's connected to the internet it can send a message back to you... have you heard of any utilities along these lines yet? (If you're in SF, the robberies seemed neighborhood-dependent, with the majority taking place in one high-crime section of the city... probably just a few perps, doesn't seem widespread.)

Posted by John Dowdell at 08:02 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

April 07, 2006

More Active Content info

More Active Content info: The Adobe Active Content Center has some more resources up for dealing with next week's expected deployment of IE/Win changes to ActiveX user experience. In addition to the existing screencapture of the user experience, there's now a companion article highlighting the markup... info on handling larger sites with many instances of ActiveX invocation markup... the Flex 1.5 hotfix (I haven't heard of ColdFusion FlashForm tags yet)... reasons to stay in the mainstream with this rather than use handrolled solutions. Many reporters are getting this story wrong, but checking the screencast and FAQ here will show the actual effects. Microsoft is expected to roll these changes to Internet Explorer into their mainstream security fix this Tuesday, April 11... a story last week about deferrals apply mainly to intranet use, not consumer adoption.
Update: [Additional blogsearch terms: eolas, patent, activex, Active Content]

Posted by John Dowdell at 03:31 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

April 06, 2006

CNET on IE changes

CNET on IE changes: They do have a point: "On Tuesday, Microsoft will push out an update for Internet Explorer that will change the way the Web browser displays certain pages. Web developers who have not tested their Web sites with the update may be in for a surprise." But they also muddy the water a bit: "This means that certain parts of a Web page, such as a Macromedia Flash animation or QuickTime movie, might need an extra click of the mouse to start." It'll start fine... it's the interactivity which needs an extra click first. Anyone rolling over that part of the screen will see some text pop up first... hassle, but not breakage. Still, it's a good reminder that all those PCs which now use Windows Update and don't use Opera or Firefox will have a bit of a different experience next week. Source info at Active Content Center... lots of people are modifying these ideas, one search term is here.
Update: [Additional blogsearch terms: eolas, patent, activex, Active Content]

Posted by John Dowdell at 09:40 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

Linux Nano

Linux Nano: It sure is a gender-bending week for computer operating systems... "Linux on my desktop, workstation, laptop, Tivo, and router. I had to have it on the Nano, too. Here's my report how I converted my stock iPod Nano into a dual-booting, sweet MP3-singing, iDoom-playing monster."

Posted by John Dowdell at 12:40 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

March 31, 2006

Flash coup

Flash coup: uh-oh, this could be bad news... I just had a thousand new business cards printed: "Microsoft's own scripting efforts are regarded as relatively inferior to the cross-platform Flash, which now supports XML, Unicode, MP3 and HTML and which was taken closer towards Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE) in 2002. The Flash Player, meanwhile, is compatible with most browsers and used on nearly 90% of desktops. Flash would give Microsoft access to tools for building rich interfaces on both desktops and mobile devices, furthering .NET." (My point with all this Foolishness? Here. We humans are a flawed lot, but skepticism may be our most valuable trait....)

Posted by John Dowdell at 09:36 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

VRML becomes mandatory

VRML becomes mandatory: It is now standard, for websites. ISO-approved, no less. Many sites will probably implement this over the next week, on principle alone, just as they've already switched to PNG instead of JPEG or GIF. I must have missed the memo on this one....

Posted by John Dowdell at 09:25 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

MS web plugin

MS web plugin: Hey, this sounds significant... Microsoft's Steve Ballmer says: "One of the most exciting is something that we call Chrome Effects. Chrome Effects was just released to our hardware manufacturer partners. They are integrating it with the Windows that they are now shipping on new machines. Chrome Effects is a set of technologies that we've built using XML that live inside the browser, and let you do very exciting 2D and 3D publishing and animation work inside our browser. Chrome Effects requires a machine that's 300 megahertz. Chrome Effects requires a machine with a 4 meg 3D video card in it. You can buy a machine that runs Chrome Effects today for $1,100-1,200. And we have hardware vendors who say they'll have Chrome Effects machines in the market by Christmas that sell for $900 with the monitor included. It's a very, very mainstream technology for the future, but of course as you look at it, you'll say to yourself, it's not mainstream in the install base today. But I think when you see the kinds of things that you'll be able to do from an online publishing perspective, you could get very excited about the potential. And it will be a mainstream technology as OEMs start offering it standard on their machines over the next several months." Bill Gates has more. Sounds impressive, if they can bring it to fruition....

Posted by John Dowdell at 09:18 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

More SF events

More SF events: Please pardon the regional chauvinism, but the San Francisco Web Innovators Network will be meeting in the Adobe building at 7th & Townsend on Thu April 13... keep an eye on Niall Kennedy's Tech Sessions too, if you're trying to network with people interested in pushing the edge.

Posted by John Dowdell at 03:02 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Another Eolas wrinkle

Another Eolas wrinkle: Earlier this week Microsoft announced that they'd offer a switch to defer the expected April 11 installation date, and today Mark Swords of the patent-holding firm laments all the work people around the world are doing in complying with this set of events. ... ... ... I've been sitting here five minutes now trying to figure out how to end this paragraph without giving Adobe Legal a heart attack, but this is the best closing line I've got. ;-)
Update: [Additional blogsearch terms: eolas, patent, activex, Active Content]

Posted by John Dowdell at 02:37 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

March 30, 2006

Lots of links

Lots of links: Lots of tabs & windows open in my browser, mostly with content that did not appear in MXNA (although Samurai Kittens is, like, really freaking me out)... hit the extended entry for varied interesting links....

Tips on optimizing weblogs for higher placement in a range of search engines.

Flaraby offers Arabic text in Flash Player, now in beta2 and free... more info here.

Robert Reinhardt had one of the most interesting takes on Microsoft's MIX06 event last week -- he was a speaker at one of the sessions. WPF/E guy Joe Stegman has a blog, and even Wikipedia sounds a little confused about how the talk relates to the eventual reality. Tim Anderson seems to be the most diligent in understanding the talk -- here he seems to imply a fullsized WPF, the WPF-Compact, and then WPF/E as something like a WPF-Tiny -- but I'm now sort of waiting until they commit to a ship, myself.

AppleInsider seems to suggest, with its "Despite rumors to the contrary" lead, that part of the reason Scott Byer's MacTel essay got such heavy linkage was that it contradicted a ThinkSecret "sources say" piece awhile back. Check your source evidence, best longterm cure.

I'm not sure, but this reads like PGP encryption has been comprompised... the press release cites password-recovery on an intranet network, but the same distributed processing could occur on a stolen botnet as well.

Claus Wahlers has implemented his DENG multiformat renderer in Laszlo development workflows to SWF.

The latest campaign from Rebecca MacKinnon feels increasingly strange to me... leading with describing the head of Yahoo as "spewing excrement", responding to his "we think the balance makes things better" with "tell it to someone in jail"... something doesn't smell right about this deal, and I don't see full finance/influence disclosures on her blog. Maybe my view is colored by knowing prior CNN influences or underreported cooperation stories, might color my judgment. Just feels like there's something odd here, pieces don't seem to me to hang together, different groups pushing and pulling over how various group endeavors should act....

Notes on Casual Gaming session at GDC... development funds will more likely come from sponsorship and product placement... piracy in Asia helped push towards more online-connected gaming... gaming supply is quite high, so developmental efficiencies, good distribution & business modesl will likely be key. (Darrel Plant has a photo of a recruiting poster there for Flash & Director developers.)

I don't remember how I pulled this site, and haven't had the chance to research it, but here's an interesting-looking list of satellite TV coverage in North American continent.

It's been six years since Liquid Motion faded away.

A mobile report says that it's the actual user interface which is the gating factor towards full use... this is hard to bake into a box, universal for all audiences... lots of support behind "experience matters" these days....

Arul Prasad has the first comment I've seen with an official "Adobe Flash Player" sighting.

Posted by John Dowdell at 01:24 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

March 24, 2006

Flash/MacTel wrap

Flash/MacTel wrap: I like the way this MacFixIt summary is organized... first they offer the link to the version-test page, then identify 8.0.17 as the early Apple preview, 8.0.22 or 8.0.24 as the security updates for Motorola Macs (which must run under emulation on Intel Macs), and 8.0.27 as the official MacTel preview, to tide us over until the full 8.5 release for all platforms later this spring.

Posted by John Dowdell at 01:06 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

March 13, 2006

Lots of links

Lots of links: Boombox sneakers and houseware telepresence... eBooks, Ajax, John Denver, Visual Basic, lots more links that stayed open in my browser over the weekend, in the extended entry.

If you're travelling light you may not have a good pocket for an MP3 Player, so why not put it in your shoe? Might as well put some small sneaker speakers in there too. Me, I'd probably record some munchkin voices saying "Hey, you big galoot, watch where you're walking, you almost squashed us!", but then, each of us has our own little oddities.....

People made fun of these Lovers' Cups last week, but I think there's a real angle in simple household objects which naturally inform you of distant events... the single example may not hold, but I think the general principle will.

Slashdot had a rework of current attitudes on eBooks... I've scanned it a few times but can't summarize patterns... part of me wonders about the future for longform text in general, but now that reading devices are reaching a friendlier form factor I've got to believe this will take off sooner or later.

Internet hunger strike: "Guillermo Farinas, a 41-year-old psychologist, went on a hunger strike on Jan. 31 to press Cuba's Communist authorities to respect his right to freedom of information and allow him Internet access, which is controlled by the government." Castro replies that the reason is limited bandwidth with their satellite relays. His condition is deteriorating, updates here.

Burritobot collects reviews of San Francisco taquerias. Meanwhile, CNET bought Chowhound... lots of great behind-the-scenes info in this interview.

There's a lengthy essay here comparing Ajax Frameworks for ASP.NET... I've made two passes through it but don't feel I can explain the concept of "indirect Ajax programming" (best guess is that it's "you never type 'XmlHttpRequest()' yourself", but I suspect there's an additional qualifier hidden within the text)... it's a lengthy piece of work, which I respect, but the browser dependencies section still just deals with browser brandnames, rather than also their version and OS cofactors, much less how the JavaScript libraries support visitors in non-compliant browsers.

Slashdot argues over Visual Basic history/use... VB made forms for early Windows apps, and then got over-complexified, and even had a backwards-compatibility chasm... in some ways Flex reminds me of the original strengths of Visual Basic, being approachable and fast, although having a wider audience and being more savvy of remote services.

Simple brainpower boosts -- do something different. Now that the consensus is that adult brains can indeed grow new cells, techniques like these can spur cell growth in general, and I guess we're hoping that this growth can then be steered in profitable directions....

This "Adobe mobile" article got syndicated a bit last week, but there's one line in there I particularly like: "Flash does for mobile devices and content creators what it did for computers running on various operating systems. It provides a neutral platform for displaying rich media content." All of these Adobe engagement technologies, from PostScript printers to video-editing to web browsers to network applications, they're all neutral to the OS differences (MS vs Apple) and the service differences (Google vs Yahoo).

Kevin Kelly put together an annotated catalog of different news-discovery services, such as Digg, Newsvine, del.icio.us and more.

Jon Udell writes: "Why can't the standard description and the standard implementation be the same thing?" It is, when you don't start with the file format before the implementation (Flash, Acrobat, MacOS, etc). But I think he may have a qualifier in there "for technologies which have multiple implementations", which would make it more like "How can you have a single implementation for things which have multiple implementations?", or something like that. If so, maybe one trick is to stay a few years behind on using new features of the various implementations... it took a few years to browsers to render HTML 2.0/3.2 the same, then a few more years to get most of the older CSS requirements in compliance with each other... staying a few years behind the curve is one proven way to get similar performance from multiple clientside implementations.

Lots of pretty money origami I found while musing on the high hype level of a Microsoft product last week.

Bruce Tognazzini dissects the airplane interface that turned a Rocky Mountain High into a Monterey Bay Low.

Posted by John Dowdell at 01:16 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

March 07, 2006

Amazing Origami Photos!!

Amazing Origami Photos!! I'm just catching up -- been in jury duty much of last week -- and I've been seeing a whole bunch of links on Memeorandum, interspersed among the "Fox Interactive buying Google!" posts, so somehow I just couldn't resist.... ;-)

Posted by John Dowdell at 05:21 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

March 01, 2006

FlashForward photos

FlashForward photos: The link goes to the Flickr tag... they're beating out WebDU photos, although there's a lot of straight tourist shots in the FForward group. If you're in conference mode, then here's the FlashForward search term on MXNA, Technorati, and on IceRocket, each with links the others haven't indexed.

Posted by John Dowdell at 04:42 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

Quick links

Quick links: Stuff found while seeking something else... exercise grows neurons... hidden passages in your house... more, in the extended entry.

Exercise triggers brain growth by releasing brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF), which spurs growth of new brain cells. We used to think humans didn't grow brain cells, but that's because we examined the brains of primates locked up in cages who lacked both exercise and novel stimulation. Use it or lose it, bigtime.

HiddenPassageway.com supplies a range of clandestine solutions for your living needs... site in SWF UI.

Press release of a study about how people still prefer to watch video on their home system in the living room -- the sitback experience -- and that this tendency even *increases* among those who have grown up with computers.

Hints from Mena Trott about where their blogging software/service is going... more media types, more customization for readers, more emphasis on the user experience.

Adam Green covers some of the sociology behind Memeorandum.com, and proposes a test to confirm his hypothesis of linking patterns.

Slashdot talks of wall paint which blocks mobile transmissions, a new book about "AJaX" (skeptical replies, with a request for offline work), and a viewpoint on how search engines encourage garbage when combined with an advertising program (see Wall Street Journal).

A design contest cosponsored by Adobe.

Some debate about the role of corporate investment in opensource projects, as well as speculation about how some are being purchased.

Greg Costikyan muses about anti-theft mechanisms on a game he is distributing via CD.

Molly Holzschlag described how some are whiners, some are lonely, and some crave understanding rules that others do not... more via Paul Boag (who also has a good definition of "web standards", it's basically HTML for layout, CSS for styling, and JS for interactivity, so you don't need to junk GIF for PNG -- main goal is the normal separation of data from presentation).

Geoff Stearns has been logging anecdotes about the user experience and design experience of the new Internet Explorer version.

Matt Haughey missed the obvious title of "iPad".... ;-)

Dave Shea has tips on public speaking, particularly for a webtech crowd.

Posted by John Dowdell at 03:41 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Recursive critters

Recursive critters: Novelty link here... a hardware company is releasing a computer whose case is in the shape of a seven-inch-tall plastic penguin. It contains a single-board computer called "Fox". So the penguin contains a fox, which runs Linux, which gives you another penguin. Then I guess you can run Firefox on the computer, which gives you a fox within a penguin within a fox within a penguin. Then, if you call up a page which has a picture of Arctic birds, then... okay, I'll stop now, but you get the idea. ;-)

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

February 28, 2006

More links

More links: Various interesting items, only some of which have come through MXNA so far. Hit the extended entry for gloss & links.

Singapore guide, in SWF, for PocketPC use.

Ten-page article (short pages ;-) at informit.com on things the writer particularly likes about the beta Adobe Lightroom, a photo-management application.

Robert Hall has info on David Lynch's new SWF-based production.

A long discussion via Roger Johansson about various ways of handling noise while working.

John Rhodes has a short bit on the dynamic tension between playing-by-the-rules and breaking-the-rules when designing interfaces... he titles it "Eye Candy and Creativity Constantly Beat Down Web Standards".

David Adams summarized some of the recent news about Flash Lite two weeks back.

Jakob Nielsen is advising against the way that links to named anchors are often used.

Lots of people are building applications atop Flash Platform... today ChatBlazer announced their service for text, audio and video chat with a number of enterprise features.

Speaking of chat, Jon Udell publishes an audio-chat with screensharing, where Christophe Coenrats does 20 minutes on Flex. In the first section he shows how easy it is to declare a messaging interface... towards the middle they get into how the serverside element adds to the clientside interactivity... they close out with some discussion of the Eclipse-based FlexBuilder development environment.

If you're in the UK, Adobe has a road show of the authoring tools coming up.

There are various reports today that Google has been quietly testing video ads delivered as SWF.

Jen deHaan has notes from FlashForward, Seattle.

An intro to the use of personas during the design process... by defining fictional customers who represent specific audience elements, you can often minimize abstract arguments when trying to settle on a design with a group of coworkers.

Jason Fincannon: "I'm not sure how I'm going to do it. I'm not sure where I'm going to do it. I really don't know who will even listen, but I'm going to get the word out if I have to tie people down to chairs in conference rooms and give them hour-long presentations on the extreme power that Flash has grown into."

Posted by John Dowdell at 01:53 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

February 22, 2006

Funny headline

Funny headline: Ran across this at CNET: "Congressman quizzes Net companies on shame". Wish I were there, I always do good on experts' true-and-false quizzes.... ;-) (If you're interested in such things, then search term "able danger china" is turning up much under-reported news this week.)

Posted by John Dowdell at 04:25 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

February 21, 2006

Lots of links

Lots of links: My browser has windows full of tabs, and I don't want to click that little red X to close them out without at least logging them here... more in the extended entry.

Ballmer on mobility, the Microsoft keynote at 3GSM. Requires Windows Media Player to view. (I haven't had the time to invest watching this, so if you've got any observations after watching it then I'd appreciate hearing, thanks.)

SYS-CON has a call for papers on "Rich Internet Applications -- AJAX, Flash, Web 2.0 and Beyond". Deadline for submissions is mid-April, but I'm not sure of time & place yet.

Max Shuleman had a cute line in his essay "Putting AJAX in Perspective": "There have been attempts to add "richness" to the standard HTML "experience". Macromedia Flash brings us all the way up to the level VB programmers enjoyed in 1992. And if someday Sun people pull their collective head out of their collective asses and deliver simple to install and thus usable Java on the desktop, it will rule the world. Meanwhile the current meme is the AJAX - the attempt to raise Javascript silliness to the level of application frameworks." I don't know if I could defend that "Flash 06 = VB 92!" stance to others, but it gave me a kick.... ;-)

Dion Almaer has an audio interview with someone from Tibco, an IE-only JavaScript library. Dion posted his interview questions; if you've got notes on the audio answers then I'd appreciate a summary, thanks.

Niall Kennedy has a great few paragraphs on the vital difficulty of simplicity... the real key to everything, I think, is in making interfaces which are natural and easy for diverse audiences to use. Niall's also hosting an office app faceoff at CNET in SF this Thursday.

Here's a list of forbidden emoticons, so you'll know what not to send in email. And, as an equal-opportunity blasphemer, I finally found the lyrics to "He's Giovanni Montini, the Pope", in waltz time, chord progression I V I I, I V I I, I V I vi, ii V I I.

The first-ever "Sex in Video Games" conference will be held in San Francisco in June... I wonder if they'll have a game of Twister set up in the hall....

That "Flash controls your webcam" meme is still spreading around... fortunately, Jack Schofield of The Guardian did do some quick web searches before publishing, so he has a link to source info in there. Oddest comment: "flashplayer not the only new player group called NEW ORDER creating information resevoirs using prisoners inside penal institutes via internet and phone technology...." Now that you mention it, Jonathan Gay does look a little like Adam Weishaupt.... ;-)

LiveJournal seems to have a lot of discussions like this recently, about warez infections... I think their solution is to go where a stranger says, which doesn't seem like the strongest advice to me.

US movie studios are apparently suing Samsung because they once produced a DVD Player which didn't respect their privacy bits. I suspect this is mostly a legal move, to establish that they're indeed trying to protect their intellectual property... hardware prohibition is like other prohibitions, it just increases the incentive to enter the greymarket.

Om Malik hits a sensitive point, in discussing online video services: "I believe that the growing popularity of You Tube and other online video sites has less to do with amateur content, and more to do with copyright infringing content... I wonder how many people actually visit You Tube to watch broadcast content online." I think we'll eventually get to a place where it's easier & cheaper for small groups on small budgets to produce audio/video content which captures significant audience interest, but these days it's still strange to see how those who don't buy into BigCo stores still buy into BigCo content... I mean, and I hope this isn't a shock to anyone, Britney Spears is not actually much of a singer, even though she's at the tops of the warez charts.

I guess this is a good place to link in the Rice Krispies theme song, too... I like the way three singers interweave their lyrices in the final go-round.

Getting back on-topic, Marcus Alexander had a piece earlier this month on diagramming interactivity... it's easy enough to storyboard a linear presentation, or to wireframe a site navigation, but more complex interactivity requires a stronger set of visualization techniques.

The lost camera story seems to be spurring some net vigilantism reminiscent of Dog Poop Girl.

A Microsoft Product Manager proudly shows off a new feature, but after getting Slashdotted, there's just a long list of comments about how ugly the interface looks. Some days ya just can't win.... ;-)

A discussion on Google, Measure Map and privacy correctly notices that many online services are involved in third-party content on websites, which raises the ability to do some tracking of some visitors across multiple sites. I'm not sure why the author singled out Measure Map, though... AdSense, Amazon badges, lots of other off-site content all contributes to a trackable web. (I have no reason to suspect that Google is collating these various bits, but just know that it will be a constant temptation to do so... centralization creates attractive targets more quickly than decentralization does.)

Posted by John Dowdell at 04:08 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

February 20, 2006

Waterfall 2006 conference

Waterfall 2006 conference: Held in London on, uh, April 1 2006. Includes sessions like "Pair Managing: Two Managers per Programmer" and "Slash and Burn: Rewrite Your Enterprise Applications Twice a Year". There's lots of ways that humans can do work together, and here's a good dissection of some of the ways that don't.... ;-)

Posted by John Dowdell at 08:07 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

February 16, 2006

SE/30 + HyperCard

SE/30 + HyperCard: There's no law against it, and they're consenting adults, so why can't they have fun with old gear? "You can say what you want about its cramped, nine-inch, black-and-white monitor and its snail's-pace 16MHz Motorola 68030 processor, but it's impossible to keep yourself from grinning once you start monkeying around in Hypercard, an easy-to-use program that inspired Macromedia Director, Flash and the World Wide Web."

Posted by John Dowdell at 07:41 AM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

February 15, 2006

Lots of links

Lots of links: Many of my browser windows have interesting articles, but I don't have enough interesting to say to make them first-class weblog items here... check the extended entry for some of the stuff I just couldn't throw away....

Trevor McCauley gives an overview of creating custom panels in Fireworks, from SWF graphics to JavaScript to having them control the app. (Both JavaScript and Flash can be used to control the various Macromedia Studio tools.)

Glyn Moody of Netcraft talks with Miguel de Icaza of Gnome about Gnu, Linux, Microsoft... the part that got quoted the most is about "What do you see as the greatest danger to the continuing adoption and progress of open source?"

Ryan Stewart has a meaty two-part interview with Wes Carr of Gtalkr.

Joe Wilcox writes two essays about Microsoft's releases this week, What Office Live Is Not and What Office Live Is. I'm still not sure how to describe it -- "it's the all-new .NET!" is probably politically incorrect of me -- but there's mention of advertising being used, which will probably shape a lot of blogosphere debates in a month or two.

Jon Udell touches on an upcoming skill in web-development work -- the ability to compose an interface with varied data feeds.

A discussion of why mobile customers in Japan use data services so much more effectively than do mobile customers in North America.

zone-h has been monitoring the rise in attacks on websites by people offended by cartoons (the most offensive of which were apparently designed by imans). That report was picked up by the BBC last week; this week Michelle Malkin has links to other attacks on varied websites.

Stefan Richter collects a whole bunch of rarer Windows shortcuts, such as making a screengrab of just one window on the monitor.

.... hmm, not as many links as I thought, but I hope some of these were of interest to you, though.

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February 03, 2006

Lots of links

Lots of links: I'm reading lots, but don't have time to say much yet... here are some of the interesting things others have said this week that may have slipped by among other events....

Jesse Warden had a good essay Feb1 putting the various parts of Flex 2 in context, and there's an "i saw the light" post from the person whose blog is named "Bitch Who Codes" (it's hard for me to refer to someone with that hotword when I've never even met them.... ;-) Both offer a quick way of seeing what all the excitement is about.

Thomas Landspurg writes an "Analysis of Flash Lite" which was prompted by recent adoption by more high-profile partners... in the Adobe Analyst Call I recall one section in the Q&A which announced an even larger deal which was nearing conclusion. [Thanks to Marco Casario for turning up this review.]

Adobe Video Terrorist Studio may not be in the best of taste, but it did make me laugh. (The cartoon jihad is not making me laugh, but did prompt me to wear a button in solidarity today.)

Jeff Schiller wrote a guide to invoking SVG capabilities among various browsers with PC HTML... puts a different perspective on the way we've tried to get SWF invocation past the various specs which proscribed EMBED.

Vera Fleischer, recent Macromedia alumnus, is now offering you Psychic Valentines.

During this week's Technorati trawl, my favorite title so far is "Must... contain... geek-gasm...".

Tony MacDonnel has an essay exploring the effect of recent mainstream attention on refreshing data in a browser while retaining the presentation and logic: "The story should not be: 'Ajax is redefining the way we develop for the web'. It should be: 'Unfortunately it took 5 years for the standards movement to realize that XML could be used asynchronously to improve web development'."

If you follow how big media companies are adapting to new technologies, then Richard Edelman has a collection of short pullquotes from NYT, Reuters and more at Davos. I particularly like the Sergei Brin line "Not all content wants to be free but it needs to be easy."

Autobytel served about a thousand hours a day of video last year... that's about forty television stations' worth of content.

According to The Gematriculator, I am more evil than Scott Fegette, but both of us are far more foul than Sean Corfield.

A district judge in Nevada has ruled that Google Cache is fair use, and does not constitute unauthorized republishing.

I know that ESRI ArcWeb Explorer is important, but I didn't have time to dig into it this week... see Glenn Lethem, Kirk Mower, James Fee... Jeff Thurston says "The only viewer service with world data"... I'm not sure whether some of the negative appraisals were due to configuration, server load, design or what, because I'm confused by comments like "It uses Flash 8, which seems to work fine. It's Java, so you need not download anything." Orbit FlashMap is apparently another service with Flash interface and mapping data for Europe, but I'm behind-the-curve on this effort, too. :(

For some reason, an old entry here which mentioned Entertainment Tonight still gets tons of late, off-topic evangelism....

Matt Haughey talks about timeshifting Usenet, mailing list, weblog conversation along with his timeshifted TV shows, as well as the place-shifting of minor league sports funding.

Flash Voice from Matteo Penzo sounds interesting, but I don't know much about it yet.

Posted by John Dowdell at 12:47 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

January 26, 2006

More links

More links: Abandoned robotic dogs, Pixar history, massively multiplayer dancing, and more... lots of links I found this week while searching technology-related discussions, that are just too interesting to close out of my browser windows....

Sony discontinues Aibo, the robotic dog.

Chris Seibold at AppleMatters has a great history of how the elements of Pixar were put together over the years, and how business needs affected creative output.

A Korean game called "Audition" is a different way for people to get together online.

Lots of people really like the iRiver U10 device.

Debate over whether we should carry multiple small devices, or one larger uberdevice.

Chris Pirillo has a way with words when he's talking them, more than just writing them.

Online learning may have increased realworld absenteeism.

"You can write, people like your style and enjoy your work. But you can't make enough money from advertising to pay your bills. What can you do? Have you considered blogging for hire?"

Google analyzes the markup of a subset of the web. The requirement for a particular browser version to view charts sparks debate. (More at Slashdot.)

An interview with Sean Stewart about producing website games which reach out into the real world. Mike Masnick pulls out this quote: "What people do on the web is they look for things and they gossip. We found a way of storytelling that has a lot to do with looking for things and gossiping about them."

Tactics for dealing with requests for your (US) Social Security Number.

Brad Fuller: "Why don't we have an aural web? Can web-sounds be a new paradigm for professional sound designers? Will new web technologies enable the web to make it past the silent-era?"

Jeffrey Zeldman dissects some of the bluster behind the loudest talkers in "Web 2.0"... Dion Hinchcliffe responds, with followup conversation here.

Jeff Jarvis dissects the sections of a modern newspaper, to figure how to sanely re-create them in today's world.

Luar has a bunch of photos of the "Thank you, Macromedia" essay in Japan's Web Designing magazine.

Jered from Razorfish has a different view of Microsoft's Sparkle than what we read in the newspapers: "Do I think that Interactive Designer is the Flash killer? No. Do I think that it is a direct competitor? Only somewhat. Unlike Flash, WPF is a true platform. Interactive Designer is built on and made to build content for that platform. Flash can actually be one of many pieces of content that is served on the WPF platform. There are similarities in what they do as far as vectors and animation but Interactive Designer is built to serve a very complex, robust and highly integrated platform of which UX is only one element."

"Bill Gates Runs Like a Girl", while politically incorrect, made me laugh out loud more than a few times.

Back in September, Mark Niemann-Ross summarized the public record on ports of Adobe software to the new Macintosh/Intel platform.

The FreeBSD advocacy list has a new petition for Flash Player port, but I didn't see that they've yet linked to Tinic's backgrounder on the subject.

Jason Kottke analyzed the maintainence costs of open comments at a high-volume weblog.

Microsoft spends $328,767 a day to be perceived as a small company.

"Java Champion" Yakov Fain looks around for matching client-side interactivity, and starts to look into Flash Platform technology.

Sergey Brin of Google has a great op/ed about growing up in the USSR, and finding a way to stay engaged with China.

Business 2.0 lists out 2005's "101 Dumbest Business Moves", and this page focuses on tech companies.

In Paris, Sunny Ripert lists out "Flash isn't a browser" objections and closes, "I beg you, please stop asking me to make sites in Flash!" (Sounds like he's got more work than he can handle, if you're local and can help him out.... ;-)

The markup used on the IEEE "Social Implications of Technology" website does not please a member, who unfortunately doesn't quite specify the elements to which she objects.

Posted by John Dowdell at 04:38 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

January 24, 2006

PC tower with tailfins

PC tower with tailfins: Got a desktop tower with an empty drive bay, and a $20 bill you can spare? Then trick out your computer with a sturdy cup-holder and lighter. Classic outfit, particularly when paired with the USB ashtray.

Posted by John Dowdell at 01:57 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Sparkle preview

Sparkle preview: Microsoft releases a Community Technology Preview of the project codenamed "Sparkle". This project has often been portrayed in media stories as "Flash-Killer!", because it designs interactivity with vectors and nice graphics, but I suspect that audience needs, not the technologies employed, will tell the real story -- it's being a universal media/interactivity layer, not drawing vectors, that defines Flash these days. More discussion at Microsoft forums, and Robert Scott at Robert's Scoble blog has a good comment: "Visual Studio / WPF developers need a default tool for building vector graphics". I'm not interested in deathmatch comments on this item, but am interested in how you see the technologies and their actual audiences, thanks.

Posted by John Dowdell at 08:12 AM | Comments (5) | TrackBack

January 23, 2006

iPod battery FAQ

iPod battery FAQ: Apple doc says that it doesn't matter either way whether the battery completely runs out before recharging. There are also tips on extending battery life.

Posted by John Dowdell at 04:52 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Google News out of beta

Google News out of beta: One of the longest betas I can recall, nearly three-and-a-half years. Now let's hope no government body asks which articles people click on most.... ;-) [via Search Engine Watch]

Posted by John Dowdell at 03:12 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

January 19, 2006

Scripting Photoshop

Scripting Photoshop: Jeff Tranberry has a good set of links here on ways to automate Photoshop through JavaScript. (I'd credit the link, but forgot how I got here! :( The Fireworks automation model is also driven by JavaScript, is documented on LiveDocs, and can be run as a headless background agent. A third geekification of the graphics world is Acrobat PDF Library, a way to integrate actual Adobe PDF handling within standalone applications.

Posted by John Dowdell at 03:37 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

MacTel ports

MacTel ports: This CNET interview with Adobe CEO Bruce Chizen is still the best resource I know for estimating completion of new Intel-based Macintosh products -- I haven't seen any more recent or more detailed announcements yet. (The reason I'm pointing to this again is the subject hit various blogs this morning, and a comment I made to the PS blog on my morning shift hasn't made it through their comment-moderation process yet. (Tip: If a comment needs an email response, better to put that in the header, not as afterthought.)) Anyway, last August Bruce Chizen said that it would be more likely to build a port for the new hardware into a new full software release, rather than port for only half a product cycle. Impact: If you're buying a new architecture, it can take awhile to get native apps, so checking against Apple's Rosetta emulation would be advisable, at least for the near term.

Posted by John Dowdell at 01:06 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

January 13, 2006

Smarter power strips

Smarter power strips: Home hardware... a multi-outlet power strip which can sense when you power up or shut down your computer, and which then powers on or off your peripherals. Makes sense, cuts the daily routine, cuts the daily costs.

Posted by John Dowdell at 10:58 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Automatic time zones?

Automatic time zones? Off-topic question... have you ever seen a computer utility which can detect when you change your physical location? When I travel, then connect, I usually send out a few emails before going "doh! I forgot to reset where I'm at, so my timestamps are off". I'm not sure how such detection would work, however (location of nearest connectivity point? GPS requirement? some type of analysis of timestamps on incoming documents? other?). Does this topic ring any bells for you...?

Posted by John Dowdell at 08:23 AM | Comments (5) | TrackBack

January 05, 2006

Anti-beta comments?

Anti-beta comments? At Publish, Stephen Bryant had an op/ed decrying the number of beta applications on the web. I think much of this is arguing over a label, rather than a thing, but am opening up this blog item here to collect comments from anyone who'd rather not have Adobe public betas, or even the public alphas now at the Labs site. Anything in this article you'd recommend to other Adobe staffers, any related thoughts you'd like heard? Thanks in advance for any feedback.
[via Anil Dash]

Posted by John Dowdell at 12:47 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

January 04, 2006

Engadget on CES

Engadget on CES: Multiple gadgetbloggers are contributing to this group blog, and they seem to be handling pre-event coverage pretty thoroughly -- here's a virtual case of caffeinated beverages for ya'll, hope you can keep it up. ;-) I think this general Engadget search term on "adobe" should surface anything interesting... for instance, that Sony eBook may have an Adobe connection, from hints I've seen.

Posted by John Dowdell at 04:56 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

January 03, 2006

Links from December

Links from December: I'm closing out some browser windows, and these varied links were too interesting to just throw away without archiving here....

On Dec17 Andrew Orlowski of The Register wrote "Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales has been shot dead, according to Wikipedia, the online, up-to-the-minute encyclopedia." It was a farce, of course, but the structure of the story followed one commonly used by AP, NYT, CNN and others: someone else said something was a fact, so it's news, even though there's no way or effort to test the accuracy of the statement. Replace the phrase "Wikipedia" by "highly placed officials", and....

On Dec 8 Mena Trott raised some valid points about "things you write become the public record, so make sure you say stuff you're proud of". Ben Metcalfe snarked comments in backchannel messaging (which was also projected behind the speaker), and was challenged by Mena to own his words. Some of the comments at Metcalfe's blog were remarkable, citing his courage in standing behind his speech -- that should actually be a given. Bloggers may think the whole communication process started in 2001, but Steward Brand's "You own your words" at The WELL nailed it at the start of online conversations. Speech can stand on its own, but some of its meaning is contextual, and whether the speaker will actually own their words, and link their reputation to their advocacy, plays a big part in the overall usefulness of that speech too.

On Dec13 David Coursey concluded "'Open Source Content' Has No Quality Control" because of an unsubstantiated factoid in a Wikipedia article on one of the yet-controversial Kennedy deaths. I think David's right in noting that not everyone will become a useful content producer (Usenet taught us that much), but there are indeed checks and balances when the means of production are democratized more fully. Many of those who became used to owning the channels of communication still don't seem to have much of an integrated appreciation of Salinger Syndrome -- it isn't "Wikipedia isn't useful" so much as "untestable stories aren't as useful". (Writing at eWeek can suggest believability, but doesn't guarantee a story should be believed for merely being told there.)

I like this ionizing clothes cleaner... just a prototype now, not yet in production, but it seems a smart, convenient way to do things.

The PCWorld 50 Greatest Gadgets story got a lot of linkage, but I liked how they started the list with the Sony Walkman -- it was not only a new form-factor for a device, but really changed the sociology of how people used electronics -- it seems far away now, but there was a time when someone walking down the street with headphones was regarded as... as... as someone walking down the street talking to their earpiece was regarded five years ago, I guess.... ;-)

There are some more open links on my other computer, so I'll continue this entry later....

More:

Engadget mentions an android boxer.

Longtail and SocialText are tracking whether, at Fortune 500 companies, employee weblogs correlate with stock trends.

James Coates of Knight-Ridder writes of the consumer accessibility of Adobe Photoshop Elements 4.0 and Adobe Premiere Elements 2.0. (As applications add more features they become more difficult for new users to approach -- refactoring a user interface to the needs of new audiences makes sense to me.)

Digg likes a SWF-based recreation of Apple's Macintosh OS X operating system.

Christian Cantrell is interviewed at AjaxInfo.com by Alexei White -- good reading, here's a sample: "There has been pent-up demand for building powerful Flash applications outside the traditional Flash Authoring environment for a long time, but our pricing was such that it wasn`t realistic for everyone. I spent a lot of time asking people to be patient, and explaining that quite frankly, we didn`t want it to be available to everyone yet. Flex 1.0 was our first attempt to bring RIA development outside of an animation environment (Flash Authoring), and we wanted to make sure we got the framework right before opening it up to everyone. We took what we learned from our enterprise customers and rolled it into Flex 1.5, and now with Flex 2.0, it`s ready for prime time." Much more.

Rich Ziade gets into that subject of better ways to use serverside applications in a world where you're occasionally unconnected.

Turdhead asks "Where did you learn to animate like that?"

MySchizoBuddy has an extensive survey titled "Best codec for Screen capture content (benchmark)"... the summary says H.264 quality beats WMV v9 but is slower to encode, yet Sorenson Sparc reaches the widest audience.

Jonny Axelson of Opera writes of the effects of the recent Google and Microsoft rumors, and ways to lessen the effects of such blogosphere infections.

Ray Ozzie, now at Microsoft, says "If 2005 was a year of 'change' for me, 2006 will be a year to 'build'."

Nettie Hartsock writes at PDFZone.com on "How to Manage PDFs on Your Mobile Devices", detailing PDF reading strategies for Palm, Blackberry, Symbian and PocketPC. (Free readers at Adobe site.)

Matt Hines of eWeek writes "Interactive Nature of Browser Colors Past and Future"... on page three he has a long segment on how Flash Platform already goes beyond the browser.

Posted by John Dowdell at 08:00 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

December 23, 2005

JD buys Opera

JD buys Opera: I don't actually need a browser company myself, but someone has to do something about these pesky "anonymous sources say" blogosphere infections, they make us all look so credulous and goofy, wouldn't you say...? ;-)

Posted by John Dowdell at 07:45 AM | Comments (9) | TrackBack

December 20, 2005

More Top Changes in 2005

More Top Changes in 2005: Building atop the prior items, here are some more significant changes of the past year, all in my own opinion. 2005 saw the widespread acceptance of the need for both clientside and serverside interactivity -- the acceptance of the Rich Internet Application approach. This was formalized by the widespread press buzz around "AJaX" -- the ability to refresh text independently of presentation isn't a new thing for HTML browsers, so the attention paid to AJaX actually signified general acceptance of the R