Archive for the 'Flash Platform' Category

Web ‘08 predictions: The rise of RIAs and the 3D web

Published on December 7, 2007 in .net magazine, 3d, APIs, Flash Platform, Rich Internet Applications, Web '08 and iPhone. 16 Comments

Recently, I gave a talk titled Web '07 - Web '08 at the Christmas charity dinner (linking to the Google cache as the original site appears to be down at the moment) organized by Sussex Geek Dinners. It was a lighthearted tour through the highlights of Web '07 and a look ahead to Web '08* with predictions by myself and some of my friends.

In my predictions for 2008, I talked about how we will be seeing more RIAs in 2008 -- both from Adobe and third parties -- how Silverlight is not going to have a widespread impact (although is definitely something to keep an eye on for 2009/10 and the competition is going to give Adobe a welcome push in the right direction), how mobile Flash is going to move away from Flash Lite to full-scale Flash playback on devices and how we're going to see Flash on the iPhone, how sometimes-connected applications and web/desktop hybrid applications are going to gain importance with AIR, Google Gears, etc., and how real-time 3D in Flash is going to change the aesthetics of the web.

If you've been reading my blog for a while, you might remember that last phrase. It's the same thing I uttered back in 2005 before the release of Flash 8. Back then, .Net magazine pasted my prediction on its cover and I was talking about alpha-channel video, not 3D. I think we can agree that alpha channel video in Flash has altered the aesthetics of the web in the intervening period and I am convinced that 2008 is the year that Flash is going to do the same thing with 3D thanks to Papervision3D.

Specifically, the combination of alpha-channel video, bitmap effects and filters, and real-time 3D is going to create a new benchmark in production values for online experiences. We're already seeing trailblazers like Carlos Ulloa, Ralph Hauwert, and John Grden are pushing the boundaries in this area and, in 2008, we are going to see more mainstream adoption of these techniques.

(I just read a somewhat myopic article in 3D World magazine titled "The look of 3D in 2008" that didn't even touch upon web 3D in any of its predictions! Could it be that web 3D is going to blindsight the traditional 3D community?)

To these predictions, I add two new ones that are closer to my heart: Firstly, Flash developers are going to get a lovely toy-box of APIs to work with and, secondly, we're going to witness a conference that's also going to be a technological tour-de-force to very visibly and publicly define how far we've come in Web '08. The latter has me more excited than I've been in a _very_ long time. And that's all I'm going to say about that for the moment.

The web just keeps getting more and more exciting... here's to a most wonderful 2008!

* Just as an aside, can we please drop the version numbers? We know in software that the moment an application gets its version number it's out of date. So why do we want to apply the same paradigm to describing the web? It's far more accurate, imho, to analyze the characteristics that defined the web in a given year. Hence, Web '08, not Web 3.0).

Why is Adobe creating its own web applications? (Hint: It’s not what you think!)

Published on December 5, 2007 in Flash, Flash Platform, Flex and RIA News. 14 Comments

Adobe released several new web applications this year and many more are on the way.

In a relatively short timeframe, Adobe acquired an online word processor, created a cool color tool, released a free document sharing tool and announced online versions of Photoshop and Premiere.

Now you might think that this is simply Adobe's latest attempt to grow the company by entering waters previously traversed by the likes of Google and Yahoo! But I feel that there's more to it. Specifically, there is one important advantage that having popular web applications will give Adobe: a new avenue for increasing the rate of Flash Player penetration.

I realized this today when I used Kuler and it asked me to upgrade to the latest Flash Player. Now I'm sure that Kuler doesn't use H.264 video but it still requires the latest Flash Player. And, I'm pretty sure that we're going to see Buzzword and the other Adobe applications start doing the same. If Buzzword becomes the online equivalent of Microsoft Word, you can be sure that a lot of people are going to upgrade to the latest Flash Player very quickly in order to keep working on their documents. Ditto for Photoshop and Premiere.

This is part of the reason why I predict that Adobe will keep these applications free in an effort to garner the largest user base it can. A user base that it can then transition almost immediately to the latest Flash Player the moment one is released.

Good one, Adobe!

Flash Platform text resizing accessibility solutions mature

Published on September 29, 2006 in Accessibility, Community, Flash, Flash Platform, Flex, Open Source and Usability Design. 3 Comments

Bob Corporaal Text Sizing Demo

This has been a good week for Flash accessibility.

Bob Corporaal has a system that he is working on that gives Flash developers more control over how to react to browser text size preference changes.

At the same time, I noticed that the Flash Player doesn't work correctly with the browser keyboard shortcuts for the Increase Text Size and Decrease Text Size commands in various browsers. I documented the problem and presented a workaround on Monday, in my post, Making Flash movies obey browser text size changes.

Bob released a demo and source code for his system on Wednesday, with a blog post titled Browser Integration: Resizing Text. I commented there that the system was suffering from the same Flash Player issue I had run into and linked to the workaround.

Today, I read that Bob has updated his text resizing demo with the workaround I presented and the new system works like a charm. Find the updated demo and Bob's commentary in his post titled Resizing Text Headaches.

One of the things I love about open source, sharing and community is how ideas can take fruit and evolve at almost the speed of thought without any bureaucracy whatsoever. I think last week is a good case study in this. It also serves to underline the fact that there are people working on the Flash Platform who are passionate about accessibility and usability and who are working to improve things in a pragmatic manner. Won't you join us and help?

Ich bin ein Berliner

Published on September 18, 2006 in Flash Platform, General, Open Source and iCommons. 3 Comments

I left Austin for Berlin on Friday morning. After flying for an eternity, I landed in Berlin about an hour before I was due at the iCommons workshop at Wizards of OS. Without my luggage. And my power adapter was in my checked luggage. Oh, boy! That should explain why I've been so quiet recently. Two of the three bags arrived yesterday and the final one (the one with the power adaptor) arrived today.

What little I experienced of Wizards of OS (I arrived on the last day) was very interesting. The audience at the iCommons workshop was definitely quite anti-Flash. In fact, some in the audience were probably anti-Flash to the point of fundamentalism. I had one attendee tell me afterwards that he was recently asked to evaluate technologies for their next rich Internet application project and that he found "no justifiable reason not to use Flex" but that he made an "ideological decision" and convinced his company to go with an HTML-based solution. (So, basically, instead of choosing the best technology for the project, he chose the one that he is ideologically compatible with.) His rationale is that he finds Flash "technically superior" and that scares him because the Flash platform is not fully open. I find this somewhat silly and furthermore, a hurtful representation of the free software community.

During my talk I had brought up the Java platform as an example of where Flash could be heading. Although the Java virtual machine was initially closed, it didn't stop a huge number of open source projects from being created on the platform. This sort of support virtually guaranteed the survival of the platform but it also did more than that. It gave those in the developer community the ability to influence the direction that the platform has taken. Today, open source Java virtual machines are no longer a pipe dream. The worst thing free software developers can do is isolate the Flash platform because it is not as open as they would like it to be today. Instead, I hope there were those in the audience during the workshop at Wizards of OS who will take my call for them to "embrace" and "engage" us on the Flash Platform. This is the only way they can influence the future direction of the platform.

As an aside, Wizards of OS, despite the name, didn't feel like an open source conference but more a free software conference. The Free Software Foundation had a huge presence and nearly every other person was wearing an FSF t-shirt. It's important to remember that free software and open source are not the same thing. The former is very much an ideological movement where as the latter is a practical one. I personally favor pragmatism over dogma.

Finally, it was a huge honor to present alongside Lawrence Lessig and he was kind enough to give me a few pointers about using the Lessig technique, including a neat little trick in Keynote that makes it much easier! :)

Oh, yeah, and absolutely-truly-finally, could the asshole who is posting spam comments on my blog please stop. You're very annoying. Please get a life. Thanks!

PS. Berlin is absolutely lovely.

Flashing at BarCampLondon

Published on September 4, 2006 in Accessibility, BarCampLondon, Best Practices, Community, Design Patterns, Development Process, Flash Platform, Flex 2, Usability Design, Usability Testing, Web standards and eXtreme Programming (XP). 2 Comments

Aral Balkan's Agile Development and Usability presenation at BarCampLondon.

BarCampLondon was a blast! Over the course of a weekend, I got to meet some amazing people, catch up with friends, learn some great stuff (including a new game called Werewolf) and get inspired. Big thank-yous to Ben Metcalf, Ian Forrester, Murray Rowan, and Paul Hammond for organizing the event and for your tireless omnipresence throughout the weekend. Similarly, thank-yous to Yahoo! UK, eBay, BBC Backstage, TechChrunch, Chinwag, and Belkin for sponsoring the event with food, drinks and network cables! And, of course, thank-you to everyone who attended for making the event what it was, for sharing and for lynching me so early in the game -- I wasn't a werewolf dammit! :)

My first session was titled Agile Development and Usability. It was a one-slide presentation in which I talked about the three big problems I see our field faced with today. Namely, a lack of understanding of development process, of the importance of the user and of application architecture. I followed this up with a high-level overview of solutions to these problems, including the use of Agile Development (with examples from eXtreme Programming/XP), User-Centered Development and usability patterns and pattern-based architecture. I ended the half-hour session with a brief glimpse into how these solutions can be implemented in projects for the Flash Platform using Flex 2, Arp and open source tools.

After my first session, I got a couple of requests for more information on Flex 2 and decided to hold a separate talk on just that subject on the second day. In that talk, I gave an overview of the Flash Platform, Flex 2 SDK and Flex Builder 2, using my Flex 2 Quick Starts for the examples.

In addition to presenting, I also got to attend quite a few presentations by other people. You can find notes from those sessions in the BarCampLondon category. Without fail, the sessions I attended were all highly engaging and informative. I can only surmise that the quality of the attendees and the BarCamp format had a great role to play in this.

You can find links to other media from the event on the BarCampLondon What Happened wiki page.

So, when are we going to have the next one? :)

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