Flash Player 10 = Platform Ubiquity?

Just saw the news about Flash Player 10 64bit Linux, 64bit FreeBSD and 32bit FreeBSD come across the wire. At this point it looks like Tinic is actually not a human. Can we get him on the iPhone player pronto? Loan him out to Apple or something…tell him he can’t do it or threaten to make him watch synchronized diving on Silverlight… ;-) Really, is there a Tinic beer fund I can contribute to? How about a live web cam feed of him coding–nerds would dig that.

Flash Player has long enjoyed ubiquity on the dominant desktop operating systems, but this news means Flash is pretty close to having ubiquitous platform penetration. Any comments from the Adobe crew? Can’t wait to hear what the actual release plans are.

Dear Adobe – A Lesson On Lowering Transaction Costs

Another great snag from Twitter (make sure you click on the “love it”, “hate it” , “more bitching” links).

There are a few things to mull over here. First off, Adobe should buy the site and integrate it prominently into adobe.com. In fact, every company should have one of these pages. It should be a place for short, heartfelt and funny commentary from customers. No more hiding behind obscure support pages and difficult to find / use feature request and bug pages. I love the simplicity. There’s just a single-line text field and a submit button (one of the reasons I don’t often use the “feature request” pages is because there’s way too much form data they’re forcing me to jump through).

The bigger takeaway is the strong reaction against bloat and complexity. Even pros crave simplicity. Now Adobe is in a really tough spot. They’ve got a mature software suite that’s been enormously successful and that means lots of disparate and often competing interests. Users who have invested the time in learning the software will often resent any changes which force them to restart the learning process while pros will continue to demand more and more features. They’re also chained to a revenue driven product cycle with all the pressures that marketing and sales bring to bear. This scenario usually results in paralysis and continued bloat.

Essentially we’re looking at the classic innovators dilemma. A successful, mature offering that’s consistently moved further and further up the consumer food chain chasing higher payoffs from the so called pro / enterprise market. There’s a huge opportunity here for Adobe to lower the transaction costs of learning and using their software, but maybe at the cost of some of their entrenched users. What’s been increasingly clear over the last year or two is that Adobe is looking to fill the “low transaction cost” void with consumer oriented web applications spun off of their successful desktop offerings. Based on the “Dear Adobe” campaign it doesn’t look like this will be enough.

Poor Planning – The Bane Of Software Development

Dear Rands, you are an asshole. You’re too funny and keep stealing all of my most private thoughts and posting them on twitter. ;-)

Seriously, I get so tired of all of the agile consulting gurus peddling their snake oil. Nothing makes up for having a game plan, knowing your market and customers and having refined and reasonable goals. Get that mastered and you can you use any development philosophy and be successful. In fact, you’ll likely find people who are willing to work night and day to deliver for you.

Synesthesia, Gestalt And Visual Communication / Learning

As any hardcore gamer will tell you, GPUs rule and it turns out our brain has one monster GPU feeding it data and forming impressions. The importance of visual communication / learning was reinforced when I stumbled on a little something, something called Gestalt psychology (everyone’s seen Gestalt tests of some sort and I remember very briefly touching on this in my one college psyche class, but man was it was either early in the morning or one boring professor).

Of course the bit about the the brain being holistic and self-organizing immediately brings to mind the way popularity is distributed within human social networks.

As it turns out, there’s a pretty substantial body of academic work that looks at visual design, communication and learning through a Gestalt lens. One interesting idea is that the parallel processing employed by the brain lets sense impressions be related between disparate senses (synesthesia). So for instance an activity such as typing may appear to be mostly tactile, but is actually mostly visual. Through visual learning we shape our expectations of keyboard interactions and then if possible / needed we map our visual interactions to other senses like the sound of a key being pressed or the feeling of the keyboard (actually all of these stimuli reinforce each other and are used in parallel).

To me this explains why the iPhone’s lack of tactile response is more than made up for by visual and audible cues (the audio is actually a bit over the top for me and I turned it off after the training wheel stage).

In fact visualization is so important that we may actually map our other sensory input to our visual mental model. When we listen to music or read a book we often envision ourselves inside the story or a visual narrative of our own devising. So in some respects most learning may in fact be visual. This has obvious implications for rich media. It’s the core driver behind video on the web and things like screencasting, slidecasting, and annotated screen capture.

And that brings me to what I like to call jingtations–annotated screen capture citations created by Jing. It’s my belief that taking a snapshot of an article fragment and then annotating it by highlighting passages or adding arrows and callout commentary is often a superior way to quote and communicate with people. A jingtation provides context, narrows focus, adds emphasis and provides stylistic relief. It takes someones original thought, adds emphasis, then wraps it up in a visual bow for easier digestion. Its something we all ought to explore, regardless of the tool used, as we seek more efficient ways to communicate clearly and concisely with each other.

Hype Meets Reality: Silverlight Finally Reaches The Olympics

Holy freak, the Silverlight Beta 2 plug-in install is 17 MB.

I’m assuming things will get optimized down a bit for the final release, but it sure doesn’t look it will ever be a skinny plug-in. On the plus side, the plug-in for both Safari and Firefox was included rather than having two separate installs which is nice, but I didn’t expect an install anywhere near this size.

The install process went much better than previous Silverlight installs have gone. For once, Safari didn’t trip up the detection script.

I’m a little underwhelmed by the video players that MSNBC has rolled out. The branding is heavy handed. Do I really need to be reminded that I’m using Silverlight after I’ve already installed?

Standard video player on MSNBC:

Larger video player on MSNBC:

The Olympics are definitely a cool and unique opportunity to push a technology. Taking advantage of disruptive events is something I expect to see more and more energy spent on in the tech world. Sure not all of us have the deep pockets that Microsoft has, but we can all ride the wave.

It would be fascinating to see what events actually propelled people to install Silverlight. Was it general interest in staying informed or was it a particularly special moment? For me it was seeing Jason Lezak hunt down Alain Bernard in the 4×100 free relay. What an incredible sporting moment!

A few things I just don’t get. Why is there no fullscreen? This is supposed to be the opportunity for VC-1 video to shine, but we aren’t able to check out fullscreen, high quality video? Seems a bit bizarre. Also, every time I push the replay button on a clip I’m forced to watch a commercial. That’s just plain annoying and greedy. I’m watching a progressively served video (I believe since its not a live stream), so why do I get punished every time I replay the video (I’m not even leaving the page)?

This was just a quick initial reaction. I’m interested, as a sports junky, how much I actually turn to the MSNBC coverage. I’m getting an HD feed piped into two rather large screens at home, so the web coverage has to be pretty compelling to compete.

*Update*

Apparently I’m a bit late to the game with my criticism of the player. If it helps anyone out, I arrived at my conclusions independently and hadn’t read the previous articles / comments on the subject.

http://newteevee.com/2008/08/10/does-the-olympics-video-suck-for-you-too/

Ryan Stewart also just posted some links to viewing data which is an important consideration if you’re watching the space.

http://blogs.zdnet.com/Stewart/?p=896