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.

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.