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iPad and the Marketing of Technology

The volume of discussion on this iPad launch is astonishing. What really blows me away and took me by surprise – was how the small anti-Flash world is trying to use this as a “Flash must die” podium. Apparently Steve Jobs is joining in, calling Adobe ‘Lazy’ and Google ‘evil’. You know who else used a scapegoat in vain? Hitler! TOTALLY kidding – not going Godwin on ya; just trying to lighten up the mood.

In all seriousness, this flash-bashing is nothing new and I believe stems from a lot of JavaScript devs who made a button once in the Flash IDE and think they understand the Platform, however, they were too uninspired or simply involved in learning OO JavaScript to care to really understand how to unleash the full potential of Flash. They (the 100 or so I know) think of Flash in large part as extra fluff to ads and video, period. They do not consider things like the Avatar AIR app, Google Finance, Mint.com’s charts, interactive video, interactive television, streaming media with DRM and server side multi-bitrate encoding etc..

I think it’s a good time for Adobe to consider why today’s youthful developers do not see Flash as a Platform and something worth learning. It is evident many AJAX devs young and old are waiting it out; giving Flash 1-5 years to “fall off the planet and die”. Right or wrong, they blame it for browser crashes, the bane of all sluggishness on the Web, and it has indeed become a scapegoat. The validity of these accusations is mostly hogwash because if any app is designed poorly enough it will crash any browser. Lord knows I wish I had a dime for every time my Browser crashed, with no Flash running, just because I had Firebug installed and not even using it! If people think no Flash inherently equals a more stable browser, they are delusional. But this doesn’t diminish the fact that Adobe might need a refresher course on how to make their consumer products a little more palatable to new developers and to corporations– for without getting this right, history has shown a Brand can indeed “fall off the Earth” and “hogwash” can turn into a raging river of abyss. Anyone still drive an Olds? Anyone use a DEC computer? The word “Flash” is pretty old now and connotes many distorted meanings amongst devs.

Nonetheless, the iPad launch really did get me thinking about Flash’s future. No, I do not think it will fall off the face of the Earth. The fanboys can scream as loud as they wish; nobody hears them except other developers. However, since many programmers, especially at the top 1000 dot coms and ad agencies, use Macs to build things that run on Windows, and because they get to make extremely important IT decisions, we see less and less Flash today. Flash’s under-performance on OSX does not help the situation or bode well for Flash player’s continued success. I do not have the answer. Change the name “Flash” to something else? Not now, but perhaps if/when Adobe begins incorporating changes to Dreamweaver and Flash to support “HTML5”, it would be a chance for some kind of rebranding.

I’m sure there are many who would read this and say “What rock have you been under dude? Wake up, Flash IS dying and the writing has been on your Facebook Wall for two years!” Well, it is obvious that Flash is on its way out - in Appleland, a magical place filled with rabid loyalists making “phenomenal magical apps” that “make email fun and cool”. A part of me wants to barf but there’s a more practical and analytical side of me that thinks what Apple did was brilliant, albeit protectionist, and considering the circumstance under which this product was built, may have been one of the most insightful, savvy, selfish business decision ever made. Why? The iPad solidifies Apple’s 1-10% market share – a chunk they are admittedly happy owning for the foreseeable future – and potentially ushering in a “New World” paradigm, answering the question of “What comes next in computing?” . Whether that’s true is yet to be seen. I think he’s not giving our future computer users enough credit for knowing how to keep organized. But after all, is this not Steve Jobs’ number one priority as a CEO of a public company? This was his digital opus. He owed his shareholders a grand finale after his few SNAFUs with the SEC and the Board, and he delivered, big time. In one fell swoop of a product launch they staved off Google from permeating much further into its bread and butter base (this might backfire when the SEO aurora borealis strikes the app store), kept Microsoft out of their hair, Amazon and Kindle are at bay, Adobe is moot, and basically created a paradigm whereby Apple can likely only grow – not shrink, as a result of another Company’s triumphing innovations. Considering they pulled this together during the worst economic climate since 1939, and with Steve Jobs' illness, is exceedingly admirable.

I recall a quote from Jobs, saying this would be the most important product launch he’s ever worked on. At first, I almost dismissed this as consumer product hyperbole. Now that the dust is settling, I see why he was serious. Steve Jobs’ number one priority is to Apple the Company and its shareholders who saw the stock go from $200 a share to $82 and change. Somewhere way down the line is what he personally feels about the Web and the direction it should or shouldn’t take (semantic, open-standards, Flash, HTML5 etc…) The iPad is about Apple, the Company’s business plan. I would guess Steve Jobs likes Flash as a technology. I mean seriously - he pointed out an animated piece of paper unfolding in his Keynote, looked toward the audience and said “look at that, isn’t that cool?!” So, surely he must have had a similar reaction seven years ago when Flashers were doing that with AS1 and timeline masks.

Brands are not tangible. They are not something you can hold. They are intellectual property – how a consumer thinks and feels about your product or service. Apple masters this but Adobe needs help. Not that marketing alone would cure this anti-flash backlash…but it’s something worth thinking about.

Apple and its shareholders are safe now. They have a very solid, elegant, nearly perfect computing platform that consumers and developers, including me, will surely love. The iPhone has changed my life and perhaps yours too. It made the world’s information sitting in the palm of my hand USEABLE in a way never before, and that I had only dreamt about watching Star Trek or 2001Space Odyssey. I’m still in awe that these pipe dreams are now real and I applaud and thank all the tech giants out there for making this possible.

But the iPad is not revolutionary and its competition is already built and soon to hit store shelves in droves. This is very unlike the iPhone launch whereby Apple got a two year head start. Today they have no head start. I know I can and will continue to develop with the Flash Platform and target about a trillion devices for the foreseeable future until HTML5’s wrinkles are ironed out. It is my hope that Adobe finds a way to inspire the youth to want to use their technology and show Corporations how their solutions can save money. Not nickels and dimes: potentially billions in unnecessary cross-browser testing, hacking, QA’ing etc…Along with the freedom of creative expression with ‘dumb’ tools drawing, or programmatic nirvana – money saved is icing on the cake and should be more of a selling point along with ubiquity.

If I were one of these high-profile code monkey Flash bashers, I would watch who you piss off and maybe try to be less cynical and more thankful. If it were not for Flash you might not be working today. And trust me, when HTML5 is widely adopted, stable, and a major company needs to hire an agency or freelancer with finely tuned interactive design, UX, UI, animation, RIA, BT, Reporting, Gaming/3D, p2p Bluetooth viral experiences – we’ll be right there; leapfrogging you to the signed Contract. So, let’s all agree to disagree, move on and have fun!

Force IE7 Compatibility

I'm not a HTML dog so this may be old news to many people, and for all I know it's the way you fix issues with IE7 and IE6. Nonetheless, I've noticed many web pages are not rendering correctly in Internet Explorer 8 for me. There's a tiny icon in the right of the address bar (looks like a broken page...very appropriate icon). When you click it, it forces your browser into IE7 mode so pages built to be compatible with older browsers will still render correctly. And IE8 keeps track of that domain so you don't have to click it on every visit. Exactly what they changed and why, I do not know. I do know we'll be seeing a lot of this meta tag hack added to tweak the doctype/browser into believing you are using IE7. <meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=EmulateIE7" />

IE8 adoption is under 2% today but growing, of course, as it will be bundled with nearly every new PC. You can test your pages using the new Developer Tools that come with IE8 which are really nice (hit F12 to see) and then you can toggle between IE7, IE8 and IE8 Compatibility modes. Adding the meta tag above will make it so your users will not have to click the broken page icon or toggle between modes.

It's a Ad Ad Ad Ad World

I’ve spent many hours over the last month trying to figure out a way to have the flexibility to put any ad network’s tag I want inside my Flash RIA. I cannot because we use Google/DFP and that means I am forced to tell our advertisers “use DART Motif or else we cannot serve your differing and competing ad network’s ad tag inside our Flash application”.

I wish I was not in so above my head as far as creating a piece of software that would let me place ANY ad network’s tag in my Flash app via DFP(Dart for Publishers). Maybe this exists and I’ve just never seen it? If you know of a company trying to make this a reality, please let me know. If it does not exist I think Adobe should perhaps start working on it if they are not already.

My reasoning is this:

Over the past decade we’ve all watched Flash grow from simple web doodle beginnings into a mighty powerful application building juggernaut. The Flash Platform has rightfully claimed its stake as a standard medium, if not the de facto medium, for creating and displaying rich content and ads across a wide spectrum of industries and consumer electronic technologies: sports, movies, automotive, financial, network TV, mobile apps, set-top boxes, car navigation, kiosks, interactive learning, games, and the list goes on.

There is one element in the aforementioned, however, that if you took out – I think the rest may not have happened and I see this now as something to be pretty concerned about. That is advertising and tracking inside of Flash Platform based RIAs.

Ad agencies, publishers and Freelancers using Flash to create rich media advertising over the last decade have been a cash cow for Flash developers and Macromedia/Adobe - if not THE cash cow.

Although Flash itself is getting more powerful and the platform expanding daily– what has been principally stagnant for the past decade is the way in which we traffic and monitor ads. We are at a point now with RIA building where many enterprise projects are not getting done with Flash because monetizing it is simply too difficult. I run across this more and more with each passing day. A cross-ad-network system for integrating ad units into Flash does not exist as far as I know. If it does, please correct me. Now that we are moving toward a world of RIAs everywhere, I see more and more sites opting to use AJAX technologies simply because it integrates easier with their ad serving and tracking needs.

The point of all this? Flash RIAs need advertising trafficking help…badly. The problem is not so in our faces now, but give it a year or two as hopefully the demand for in-Flash advertising is requested for RIAs, games, mobile etc…, otherwise this could get ugly for Flash.

The companies that run the advertising show are not going to help Adobe. The company I work for created and sold Google a prototype of what is now their ad inventory management software. I’m sure if we were inspired enough we could pull off inventing a cross-network ad system - but that is so very far from our core business it will never happen. By the same token, Google, MS, Yahoo or XYZ ad network could open their network to any 3rd party rich media tags – ain’t gonna happen either.

It is very much an uphill battle in today’s world. Especially because so many big sites’ IT departments (including ours) are either .net or Java based and gladly choose something they understand out of the box (AJAX) over Flash any day especially when it comes to scalable advertising.

Hate to sound so glum, but I hate roadblocks and I can see the darkness at the end of the tunnel unless Adobe somehow gets down-and-dirty into the ad serving world. With each passing day I see another ad tag go into an AJAX RIA for amongst other reasons, the fact that it is too hard to implement granular metric driven advertising into Flash Platform RIAs. I see AJAX developers quite excited and anxious to use HTML 5 and Canvas. And why wouldn’t they be jazzed about this? It will enable them to do cool flash-like things with JavaScript and SVG. It will be slow as heck, buggy, force your browser to crash even more and not cross-platform for sure…however not enough seem to care about that anymore. Many developers are paid by the hour and usually people blame Flash for browser crashes anyway.

At the top of the advertising food chain there are now (after the many mergers) about 5-7 companies who dominate about 95% of online ads (Google/Doubleclick, Microsoft/Atlas, Pointroll, Eyeblaster, 24/7, Value Click and a small handful of others). Each one of these companies has a proprietary technology to deliver and more importantly, TRACK rich media ads so they can say to advertiser XYZ – “we delivered the x million impressions we promised you”, for e.g.. None that I know of really has any inspiration to make embedding advertising and/or tracking INSIDE Flash based RIAs easier – and certainly not for a competing ad-serving company’s tag. Some like Google and Microsoft actually gain a huge advantage to NOT make it easier.

Unless we can advertise cross-network in the Flash Platform, big RIA projects will continue to not be created in Flash. Why would Microsoft/Atlas make inserting ads into Flash easier when what they really want is Silverlight based ads via Atlas Rich Media everywhere instead? Why would Google help a technology that can compete with Doubleclick? I think the answer is an outside company like Adobe to make the ultimate cross-network rich media ad wrapper.

Yes, there are hacks and roll-your-own wrapper solutions that are very complex at best to build and retain the primary ad networks metrics, but this will usually be for only one ad serving technology. None of these technologies play nice with each other. Sure we can traffic an Eyeblaster ad through DFP, but not when it comes to Flash.

It does not look like an all encompassing solution will come out of any one company so I think Adobe needs to perhaps step up and either create a universal ad platform plug-in of sorts, or stir things up and make the case for a a consortium, standard, or something to make monetizing Flash Platform based RIAs easier. If you’ve made it this far, thanks for reading and I welcome your comments.

Another Flash CS4 review

First off:

Thank you Adobe, for continuing to provide amazing tools which incite and inspire me to be creative. I am sure there are many reviews out there so this is just my opinion; and I have learned that they are subject to change with time. For e.g. now I really like the new icons that sent me and many others into frenzy a while back. I think I likened it to the change of Coke to Coke Classic, fixing something that wasn’t broken. That was absurd of me and I apologize. Frankly, I’m still wrapping my head around AS3 design patterns, Gumbo libraries and complicated (for me) valueObject data models, but I know I am well qualified to talk about the Flash UI having started with Flash 3. This review is geared toward looking at the product from an Animator perspective rather than Developer - since when I'm developing code I don't use the IDE often. I am using the CS4 Master Collection on a Dell Precision 490 dev station with two dual-quad Zeon chips (air conditioned), 8 gigs of ram, Windows XP Pro and a snazzy graphics card. This box is 64 bit capable and I can use up to 32 gigs of ram, however, I am using the 32 bit version of the Suite.

Pros:

THE STAGE:

Finally, I can opposite-click an object on the stage and find in the library! I say ‘opposite-click’ because I use a left-handed mouse and although ‘right-click’ covers 80% + of users, is an inaccurate term. I’m over it - don’t fret. I have wanted a ‘find in library’ feature for a long time, added to the ‘wish list’ so thanks! I still do animation and prototypes in the timeline quite often so I am not always using Flex Builder or Flash Develop for AS only projects. I’d say I’m 50/50. I have found this feature does not always work though if you have assets nested folders in the library. I had to try a few times, close and re open the library to get it working when I was showing someone the feature.

SPEED:

Publishing is noticeably faster even with large, bitmap heavy and code heavy swfs. Kudos!

SEND:

Send To feature. This is great! File > Send pops open your email client and attaches the current FLA even if you still have it open (this surprised me that you can leave it open and not get a Windows error).

ANIMATION:

Of course the new 3d, bones, inverse kinematics, motion editor are fantastic. It takes bit of getting used to after doing it differently for so long but I like it and know behind the scenes there is a lot of heavy lifting going on that I no longer need to do. Perfecto!

LIBRARY ASSETS:

You no longer get the alert “Are you sure you want to delete these items from the library” because it’s undo able instead of a revert. That is great. However, I would like more control of the tabs within the library. I don’t use “how many times an item is used” and want to customize the library fields to remove that one. And not sure if anyone else got this before.. but when I used to import bitmaps they would come in at 75% and I'd have to change them. Now they are always 100%. Nice.

SCRIPT TIMEOUT:

Although 15 seconds was pretty generous…if you’re making Flex components or large scale enterprise apps this feature can come in handy.

LIBRARY IMAGE PROPERTIES:

Deblocking for jpgs. Sounds good, however, it does not seem to work for me. I do not get the option to click it and not sure why. Any clues?

PANELS:

Overall they are more flexible and that's good. Only wish I had to option to use the property inspector of yore insted of the new one.

CONS:

APPEARANCE:

I’m sorry but I really at this point do not like the visual appearance of the UI and the flat gray colors. Why? Because I cannot discern what the heck is what easily. The panels and windows just blend into one another and it’s frustrating. I understand the objective is to unify the UIs across other programs in the Suite, but the flat shades of gray are really slowing me down. If you click an object on the stage to see where it lives in the timeline, good luck. The ever so slightly grayed out single frame requires much visual hunting and that is not good. I can find the layer quickly yes…but the single frame where that object lives..not so much. I would love to see the Flash UI be more like AE/Premiere where you can adjust the visual appearance and add/remove gradients and adjust the brightness. I would like to change window colors in a perfect world.

PROPERTY INSPECTOR:

This is a bit too big for me (as in either wide or tall with too much unused real estate). I felt CS3 nearly nailed it and now I think we’ve reverted. I do not want to use drop arrows to hunt where to add a filter, or to change the alpha… I was pretty shocked by this change that slows down production. Between this and the Motion Editor,you really more than ever need two monitors for Flash. Don't love the scrubbys but I'll grow to accept them for x,y,h,w in the Property Inspector. I notice it now jives with the Flex Builder horizontal style x,y,h,w fields. I'll make a few hundred mistakes by inadvertently changing the X and Height instead of X and Y, but I'll learn. Side note, would be nice to be able to force Flash to place images on whole numbers only so I don't have to change 10.2 to 10. I often move elements using these boxes or now scrubbys. I'll actually probably never use a scrubby to enter the exact coordinates I want - would be far too slow.

MOTION PRESETS:

Although there are some cool features for quick and dirty blurry and bouncy animations… some of them really are dirty especially when it comes to adding these to text fields. Make that text field dynamic, add a hyperlink and watch what happens: The text becomes blurry and the size changes. If you use these presets on animated hyperlinked text and look at the generated source..there is a hyperlink entry for every single frame bloating your export file sizes. I'm sure there's an excellent reason for this I just do not understand.

SAVE AS CS3:

Still as annoying as last few versions. I’ll learn to deal with it.

MAIN and CONTROLLER are now pretty much useless.

I guess rather than fix what was obviously a problem docking the Main toolbar (the one with Save, Open etc..) they decided to just make it non-dockable now. I used to stick the Controller and Main pallets in the uppermost part of the UI but often it would magically appear at the bottom (bug). I liked it atop because I would rather click once to Save than two clicks File>Save or to lift my hand off my (left handed) mouse and use ctrl-S. Just an ever so slight speed differences but they add up over time. Double-clicking the Menu or Controller chrome as it’s floating actually throws an error for me “An Invalid Argument was encountered”.

LAYERS:

I would like to not have to use Guy Watson's tool extension to duplicate a layer. Nothing against Mr. Watson, of course, just think that should be standard at this point.


DOUBLE CLICK BACKGROUND TO OPEN A FILE:

I thought for sure this would make its way into Flash. In Photoshop, you can double-click the gray background to browse to and open a file. I would really like this functionality in Flash since it’s a time saver.


COLOR PALLETE:

Not sure if this is by design.. but I imported about 20 images into my library and the color panel made swatches of them all. Is this a feature or a bug?


LASTLY:

Amazingly, Keith Peters' bit-101.inviso button tool extension STILL works after all these years! I've disabled it for fear it could be the cause of some of the funkiness I've seen but it's a handy little sucker for quick prototypes.

FINAL ANALYSIS:

I do love It and I’m sure I’ll get used to the Property inspector and maybe even like it more some day soon. Perhaps I’ll grow to love the bland flat appearance that I find it hard to navigate.
I do enjoy the interoperability with other CS4 Suite products: AE, InDesign, Premiere. Keep up the great work Adobe and thank you.


If anything I've said is my own user error - please feel free to correct me.

Lisa Barone, please do YOUR homework

I was a bit stunned to read such a bizarre twisted emotional reaction to Adobe's announcement about Flash SEO today from Lisa Barone, someone with a lot of SEO clout. Why she apparently assumes this SEO announcement will spawn the return of 100% Flash, in-your-face, blinking, "click here to skip intro" sites that existed for about 14 minutes ten years ago is laughable.

http://www.bruceclay.com/blog/archives/2008/07/dont_build_your_site_in_flash.html

I encourage you all more versed in Flash SEO to comment directly on her blog.

Dancin’ by the Moonlight?

Looks like Novell (MS) released an Open Source version of the Silverlight plug-in for Linux named Moonlight.




The goals according to the site are:

• To run Silverlight applications on Linux.
• To provide a Linux SDK to build Silverlight applications.
• To reuse the Silverlight engine we have built for desktop applications."

Interesting they've come across some of the same problems of Flash player with their version of 'window mode' on Firefox. I do like the Known Issues from the project page:
Especiall this one "Microsoft's Silverlight plug-in is installed but it doesn't do anything"

It just partially funny really. I applaud them for having this be open source so users can create their own version of Silverlight Players, yet this particular version completely lacks most if not all multimedia playback. But I'm sure it will soon so I'll be keeping my eye one it.