March 29th, 2010 by admin

iPad is nearly upon us, and agencies and clients are planning their summer campaigns. How does the appearance of the iPad affect these plans? Well, the iPad is likely to have a major impact on the output of the big agencies this year, and that impact could be either really positive, or really negative.

The positive way is exciting and great for progressive HTML5 development. The negative sets the web back several years and gives rise to a frustrating year of innovation-free development. My work with clients and agencies in recent weeks has been full of iPad discussions, and to be honest it is still not clear which path this will take.

It should be noted that here I am referring to cutting edge rich & exploratory experiences, rather than interfaces for more functional sites and applications.

The approach that promises an exciting time for proponents of open-standards is where companies choose to deliver a solution purely for iPad, and another for the desktop. With this approach, the desktop is left where it is to use all of the richness and innovation that Flash & Silverlight already offer, and a completely separate experience is developed for the iPad community that uses the full potency of Canvas and other HTML5 features. Targetting the iPad specifically means developers will not have to take cross-browser compatibility into account, (particularly IE), and would be free to really go for the throat with HTML5. Developers have been champing at the bit to work on big-brand, high-profile applications with these things and go head-to-head with their Flash counterparts at the same time, and this would make for a potentially fascinating set of results to compare and contrast. The potential is there to make more progress than anyone could have dreamed with HTML5 development in 2010.

The negative represents a “lowest common denominator” approach where a single execution is developed which needs to look great and work well across both desktop and iPad. That limits developers to a world of HTML4 + js, and that means no Flash, (won;t work on iPad), and no Canvas, (won’t work on IE – 70% of the world’s browsers). Neither of these two advanced methods of rich development are available in this scenario, (obviously no Silverlight either, I thought that went without saying). So designers will have to design ‘down’ to a lowest common denominator level, throwing out ideas that need that advanced richness, abandoning innovative features and leaving us with less than mind-blowing results. A year of less than inspirational work, combined with the frustration of over-reaching with HTML4 + js with the all the frustration that cross-browser compatibility brings to a development project.

Now it would be easy to look at this and say “two executions? double the cost!”. Make no mistake about it, iPad has just instantly and quite substantially increased the cost of digital development, whichever way this goes. Why? Because if the positive approach is taken there are indeed the obvious cost increases due to dual development streams. But if one solution across all platforms is attempted, then we all going to find ourselves desperately trying to squeeze every ounce of richness from HTML4 + js where the best result would previously have been achieved with Flash, and then have to fix the hell out of it to make it work seamlessly and beautifully across all browsers. And everyone is going to find out how expensive that is, particularly when those used to Flash discover the paucity of tooling associated with such work.

So here we stand at a crossroads, and it all rests upon how agencies and clients decide to execute solutions for a tiny minority audience on one single device.

January 28th, 2010 by admin

Hello World.

I’ve worked in digital media, specifically in the area of rich user experience development, for over 12 years.  In that time I have worked with some of the best designers, developers, technical architects, project managers etc in the industry, for the biggest agencies in the industry.  I’ve lead teams developing for biggest clients in the world, using every technology under the sun to do it, from Director (RIP) to Silverlight via Flash, Ajax, HTML and Java applets.  I’ve worked with Adobe, Apple, Microsoft and Google in amongst all of this.  I’ve never kept a blog for my opinions.  To do so would inevitably compromise clients, strategic partners or colleagues at some point.

Lets face it tho, the internet right now is a mess.  Corporations are deploying technologies on their sites merely for strategic purposes, regardless of the impact on their users.  Paranoid developers on all sides look suspiciously at what ‘the enemy’ is doing, and seek to unsettle and defame it at every opportunity.  Debate is rarely balanced and constructive, and is more often biased and ill-informed.  Reaction over consideration, suspicion over enthusiasm, protection over collaboration.

So why am I here all of a sudden?  Well, I’ve found this abundance of misinformed rhetoric now affects the everyday conversations I have with colleagues, bosses and clients.  Quite frankly, it’s deeply irritating.  So I have created Confabulor as a platform for me to try to provide a balanced & informed opinion, (it is, after all, just my opinion), of where we are, where we ought to be, and what is going to emerge.

On the blogroll you will see people representing different positions and points of view, different technologies and approaches.   I don’t always agree with them and they don’t always represent my views, but I follow them anyway.  Alongside them are people I just like to follow because I like the stuff they dig up and they seem like good people.

So, am I a shining light in the darkness?  A voice for reason in the madness?  An area of calm in the eye of the storm?  Er.. no.  Just a guy in the UX trade, trying to create an anonymous space I can point people at and say “I don’t know who that guy is, but I agree with him”.

Confabulor.

ps.  I am not quite the pompous ass this post makes me out to be.