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.

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.