March 18th, 2010 by admin

I’ve just spent a few days in Las Vegas for the Microsoft MIX conference, which is their big UX gig. Now most people probably don’t attribute MS with great UX so it’s something of a stretch for them and most guys who attend are still developers rather than the design crowd. However, there were clear signs this year that this is changing and they are getting a foothold in the creative world.

The Microsoft brand is clearly suffering from the baggage of Vista and Windows Mobile, meaning they have to work very hard to get any credibility when they claim to come up with something exciting now. The risk for those of us in the industry is that if you ignore them you might miss some little gem that might be genuinely cool, and then you have to sit back and watch while someone else does something exciting with it and gets all the plaudits for innovation.

So what are they doing right? Well for starters I got my first look at the Zune HD courtesy of some people I met – it’s Microsoft’s iPod Touch. I have to say it is a beautiful piece of product design, smaller, lighter and thinner by far than the Touch, and the interface is sweet to use – slick, fast, a really nice UI. Now being the iPod Touch type of device, it seems to me to be really positioned as a prelude to the Windows 7 Phone. If indeed the Phone UI experience is akin to that of the Zune HD then Microsoft have got themselves a true surprise contender, and I’d expect to see them coming up hard on the rails of Apple, Google and Blackberry, (MS still being a trusted name in the business community). The ability to use XNA to develop games is massive, as is Silverlight for apps – a proper “right tool for the right job” approach.

On the subject of Silverlight, I think it’s become quite clear what Microsoft’s true strategy for Silverlight is. I don’t think MS are particularly interested in competing with Flash – they have really created their own proprietary rich interactive develoment technology to enable themselves to build self-contained ‘products’, such as Bing Maps, Photosynth, Pivot and Deepzoom.  I fully expect Office online to be built with Silverlight, otherwise why bother?  MS are clearly deeply committed to Silverlight, and when I look at the products they are developing with it I can fully see why.  The fact that they can also enable the developer community to develop and deploy Silverlight apps is something of a welcome by-product for them in my opinion, that helps drive plug-in penetration.  Imagine how that penetration will explode if Office online does indeed have Silverlight functionality.  MS are encouraging developers to work with these products in a creative way – it’s worth checking out AKQA’s UX presentation at MIX to see Bing Maps & Photosynth fully integrated into rich experiences.

IE9 is more of a mixed-bag.  On the one hand Microsoft need to be seen to be committing themselves to open standards, and as such have incorporated a lot of HTML5 elements into the new version of IE, with more to follow.  This does enhance the capabilities of the browser, while enabling MS to proudly boast HTML5-supporting slogans on their slides.  The big “however” is their complete avoidance or even mention of either canvas or webkit.  Canvas especially is the tag which truly allows some rich graphical effects, and without it the browser is hamstrung in this area.  This strategy makes perfect sense for MS, as this is the area where Silverlight is making such strides – why would anyone expect them to tread on their own toes?   I can see IE9 having a lot of attention and take-up, and it’s lack of canvas will extend the time it will take for HTML5 to be used to develop Flash-esque or even Silverlight-esque experiences.

Great to see Grant Skinner presenting at MIX too – tho I didn’t catch his presentation live I will watch the video.  It shows that MS is not afraid of embracing the Flash developer community, a smart move.  Being a genuine influencer of that community, if Skinner is truly interested in Silverlight then he is bound to bring an element of his followers and supporters with him.

So, are Microsoft back up and running?  Not quite, they still have that baggage to contend with, and opinions in the digital community tend to be very entrenched, driven by politics and very hard to shift.  However, they are most certainly doing a lot of very interesting things and I would not be surprised to see them challenging hard by the end of the year.

March 2nd, 2010 by admin

So, some things have happened in the past week which cast a very interesting new light on the iPad/Apple/Adobe debate.

Recently, as anyone who has read anything of these pages will know, I’ve been following with great interest the heated ‘debate’ being carried out amongst the world’s web developers around the future of HTML5 and Flash, which was initiated by Steve Jobs comments when launching the iPad. That debate, (or ‘flame war’), has rarely surfaced above the level of playground sniping, with posts such as “Why HTML5 Will Kill Flash”, “Why Flash 10.1 WIll Kill HTML5″ and “Why The Web Does Not Need Flash” amounting to little more than “My Dad Is Bigger Than Your Dad”. I haven’t linked those posts, but you can find numerous examples if you feel the need, they are linked in previous posts on this blog.

But something has changed. Now, rather than developers and their own petty grievances, the world of big business has seen fit to pass comment. This is far more significant, as it is not the developers of the world who will determine the future of rich experience on the web and on devices, it is both the consumers, who know nothing of the politics involved, and big business, who will be spending the money. Where businesses choose to spend their money will determine what experience consumers get, influence what their competition does, and therefore shape the future of rich experience.

So some businesses have spoken – what did they say? Well, first up, Steve Jobs paid a personal visit to the Wall Street Journal, to demonstrate the iPad to them, and to trash Flash technology and encourage them to switch to HTML5, and obviously develop for the iPad. Now personally, I have massive respect for Steve Jobs and my expectation would be that when he speaks, people listen – whatever he says. I was wrong about that. Here’s the Guardian Tech Blog write-up of the visit, and of the Wall Street Journal’s response.  You have to subscribe to the WSJ to read the full article, but you can see where it’s going.  I would regard this as something of a blow to Jobs and Apple.  Anytime a business wheels out it’s biggest gun it must do so in the full expectation of a positive reception to his message.  For Jobs to personally visit the WSJ and have his message rebuffed in this way cannot have been taken lightly.  His statements are no longer being taken at face value, but analysed for validity and found to be wanting by the very audience he is trying to court.

The second interesting stance is that of Conde Nast. As you can see from their site Conde Nast are something of a giant of the publishing world, and as such are at the forefront of Apple’s drive to redefine publishing around the iPad. Wired is a publication of Conde Nast, and you may be aware of their work with Adobe in creating a full-featured application for the iPad, using Flash.  Conde Nast already has an iPhone app, and are going to be porting this and their other publications’ iPhone apps to the iPad, (just giving user’s the iPhone experience on the larger device).  According to this article however, featuring an interview with Conde Nast CEO Chuck Townsend, they are most certainly not going to be developing the full experience for iPad as demonstrated by Adobe for Wired any time soon, and the reason is purely that Adobe is not supported by Apple.

What Conde Nast do plan to do is to go into ‘R&D mode’ thru October, to give themselves time to decide how to move forward.  This seems eminently sensible.  I would guess that much of their competition may choose similar paths.  This means that the early apps for the iPad may be far from the ultimate user experiences that user’s of the device might expect, as big business sits back and waits to see what develops.  As will we all.

February 22nd, 2010 by admin

Ok, so here we go again…

So, an Adobe developer today posted this.  In a nutshell, (and please do read it yourself, I’ve no wish to misrepresent it), the article posits that Flash will never work on the iPad, or any other touchscreen device, because of rollover behaviour.  We’re all aware of rollovers right?  Buttons which highlight when you mouseover them, controls which appear/disappear depending on the presence of the mouse?  Good.

Rollovers are necessary on a device with some kind of remote pointer, (such as a mouse), as they clearly show where the pointer is, providing instant clarity and position.  They are a key part of interface design online.  On a touchscreen, they are completely unnecessary, (we know where our fingers are right?), and they don’t really wok anyway, as there is no contact with the screen until you press, (or ‘click’).  So, there are things which are different between touchscreen and web interfaces, and we, as developers, have coped with this before when adapting web applications for touchscreen kiosks.  In my experience, most have transferred with no amends necessary, the rollovers are present but irrelevant, never seen and not missed, and the experience is just fine without them.

However, the article also points to some uses of rollovers which have transcended the “where is the pointer” use, such as when you have a video player and the controls appear/disappear dependent on the presence of the pointer.  It makes for a slicker look & feel, and saves real estate.  Now it’s true to say that this implementation needs an amend before it will work on a touchscreen, but it’s hardly a killer to change.  That goes for tooltips as well, and the other examples of non-click interaction.

The very idea that the fact that rollovers don’t work on touchscreen devices renders an entire technology stack redundant is patently absurd.  The writer suggests that developers will create solutions with other technologies, but fails to recognise that the issue effects all technologies equally – rollovers are by no means exclusive to Flash.  The ‘rollover issue’ is not a technology issue, it’s a UX issue.  UX designers have determined that rollovers are good methods for accomplishing certian things on the web, and it’s worked well.  Now they will need to think of another method to accomplish the same things on touchscreen devices.  And the methods they come up with will be equally as available to Flash developers as they will to developers using any other technology.

Mike Chambers posted this response, but really you should take a look at this video from bytearray, to see Flash 10.1 running on the Google Nexus One.  It performs beautifully, much better than I expected, even with the 3D.

I’ve personally seen large Flash experience websites running on Flash enabled phones and a variety of touchscreen devices, large and small, with no alterations, and been excited by the results. I can also think of many examples where alterations would be necessary to make them work seamlessly in touch environments. And that also goes for sites and apps developed with non-Flash technologies.

The fact is, the way interfaces are designed will evolve to meet the new ways of interacting with them. It will be a gradual process, and in the meantime some content will work as-is, and some won’t. But it’s not down the technology, and no technology will stand or fall as a result.

February 1st, 2010 by admin

Since the UX world exploded into activity following Steve Jobs rant at the expense of Google & Adobe it has been interesting, and a little sad, to follow the ‘debates’, (if one may dignify much of the vitriol with such a name).  Several well considered and informative posts on the subject were submitted over the next few days by people who have a good understanding of both worlds, such as this from Richard Leggett.  However, the arguments still raged.

Posts such as this one from Crunchgear go to show that misinformation can come from the most seemingly authoritative sources.  The writer is referencing Sketchpad, a very good piece of work developed with HTML5.  It goes to show just how far HTML has come, and provides a glimpse of it’s future.  It’s impressive.  However, it is not “the death of Flash” and to suggest as much is to show a genuinely surprising lack of awareness of the whole subject matter.  Yes, Sketchpad is impressive and should be lauded as a benchmark for where HTML5 currently is, and as a signpost to it’s future.  Hopefully you’ve had a look at Sketchpad now.  So now have a look at Aviary.  That’s Flash, and it’s Creative Suite 4 to Sketchpad’s MS Paint.  It was developed mostly in 2007 and released in early 2008, so it’s not even particularly recent.  Now don’t get me wrong here, I am not having a go at HTML5 or Sketchpad, I am merely trying to put them both in context.  HTML5 is on a journey.  It currently allows a developer to do things he was able to do with Flash a couple years ago, but it’s getting there and it will gradually become the best practice means of deploying a lot of things which are developed with Flash purely because there’s no better option.  That’s progress.

Right now tho, and looking at Sketchpad as “the Flash-killer” – well, Sketchpad doesn’t run on the majority of users’ machines, due to browser compatibility, and lastly – take a look at the code.  Is that how you see a multi-developer team writing complex applications?

Celebrate the HTML5 achievement, but do some research before making very hasty proclamations about Flash.

January 31st, 2010 by admin

There is a debate raging in the rich UX industry right now about the future, or lack of one, for Flash.  Personally, in 12 years of major agency work in this industry I’ve never seen anything quite like it.  The arguments vary from glee-filled ranting predictions of the death of Flash to postured futures where the AS language and associated tools are used to publish native applications to the various platforms, and occasionally calm, balanced and objective opinions.  The latter appear to be quite rare tho, unfortunately.

The debates circle around separate but inextricably linked subjects:

• Apple’s anti-Flash stance and the lack of Flash on the iPad
• HTML5 vs Flash
• Flash’s future: plug-in or native

Below are a selection of highlights.  It’s always a good idea with these to assess the biases as best you can, (some of these guys are from Adobe, some wear their anti-Flash leanings like a badge, but some are harder to spot, either way).

John Gruber on Apple’s distaste for Flash
Aral Balkan on his view of a native apps future for the Flash tools
A debate at a Flash user group between Aral and Mark Doherty of Adobe
Lee Brimelow attacking the lack of Flash on the iPad, while simultaneously apologising for a slightly risque post on his blog…
Steve Jobs makes his views abundantly clear at an Apple Town Hall meeting
John Nack of Adobe with a something approaching reasonabless
Ryan Stewart, again from Adobe, with a pageful posts on Flash, iPad & HTML5
TUAW, an Apple blog, on Adobe’s reaction to the lack of Flash on the iPad
Adobe Flash blog puts their case on a number of issues, (somewhat less clumsily than some of their evangelists personal blogs)

I read that Grant Skinner is preparing a post on this subject.  I’m expecting him to see some kind of positive future for Flash, given his vast experience and celebrity in the Flash community, but it will be interesting to see whether he puts his faith in Adobe’s vision of a future for the plug-in or something more like Aral’s (and others) vision of a future where we publish native apps developed with Flash.

I would expect the Silverlight community to be watching this debate closely, because really Adobe are representing the proprietary plug-in based future, and that includes Silverlight.  If Flash falls, you’d have to expect Silverlight to fall with it. Personally I’ve acheived a lot of things with Flash, but I’m in now way tied to it. When Director was clearly going to be usurped by Flash a few people I know clung on to it with white knuckles and left themseves with a lot of catching up to do – there’s a lesson in objectivity if ever you needed one. One thing feels clear – Adobe are not happy people at the moment, the fear is almost tangible.

I’m preparing an entry on my own thoughts as to what the future of rich UX is, but to be honest there are so many variables involved when you look at the bigger picture that although I’ve written a fair bit, I have yet to reach a conclusion.  In the meantime, all I can do is keep reading, learning, and sifting thru the information – same as everyone else.