Category Archives: internet

gaming, internet, software, software development

Flash, Silverlight the future of video games?

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According to the BBC, gaming giant Electronic Arts is fed up with having to code the same game three, four or five times over. That’s the downside of the console wars – several incompatible systems.

The article says that streamed server-based games will be increasingly important.

A few observations. First, the PC is the nearest thing to an open platform right now, and it’s interesting that PC games typically cost around 30% less than those on the top consoles. For example, the hot new FIFA 08 typically sells for £40.00 on PS3 or Xbox 360, £25.00 on PC. It’s cheaper on DS or PSP, but must be considerably cut down on these low-powered devices. The Wii is somewhere in between.

Second, I’m writing this after seeing the amazing things being done with Flash. Microsoft’s Silverlight is also interesting in this context, as is Canvas 3D – OpenGL running in the browser.

That’s still three separate platforms; but since they are all cross-platform, there would be no necessity to code for more than one of them.

Third, Flash games are already very popular. If you calculate market share by time spent playing, I guess Flash games would already show a significant portion (I’d be interested to see those figures).

Fourth, the success of the Nintendo Wii proves that although geeks care deeply about who can shift pixels and calculate transforms the most quickly, the general public does not. All they want is a playable and enjoyable game.

All this suggests that the business model behind Microsoft’s and Sony’s console strategy is flawed. The idea is to buy market share by subsidizing the hardware, then profit from the software sales to your locked-in users. What if users can get the same games by subscribing, say, to a hypothetical EA Live, and play the games on a variety of devices? The money is still in the software, but there is no hardware lock-in. Prices could fall, and game developers could spend more time being creative and less time re-implementing the same game for different platforms.

Flash is actually in the PS3 and PSP, but appears to be an old version. If Microsoft isn’t thinking about Silverlight for the Xbox 360, then it should be. But if my logic is correct, then the investment Microsoft and Sony have put into game studios is actually more valuable, long-term, than the money they have put into hardware.

That said, the online experience is not yet good enough to threaten the consoles. I doubt it will be long though. A key point is hardware acceleration in the Flash player. H.264 video will be hardware-accelerated in the forthcoming Moviestar release of Flash 9. I am confident that a hardware accelerated gaming API will not be far behind.

internet, multimedia

The Who: another take on how to sell music online

The rock stalwarts in The Who have come up with their own scheme for selling music in the Internet era.

Fans are invited to join a subscription scheme from November 5th. For a fee of $50.00 per annum, you get an exclusive live CD, access to an online forum, streaming video of concerts “from every Who generation,” and access to the band’s entire back catalog online:

Every Song on Every Album (b-sides too!) … As a Wholigan, you’ll be able to listen online to Who tracks, then add them to your mp3 player, if you like. (This feature will be available in 2008).

We are not told key details like in what sort of quality these media files will be delivered.

Is this a winner? If you consider that Radiohead is asking more than $50.00 for its (currently) internet-only CD and LP package, the Who’s deal is not bad, especially if the downloads are of good quality. It strikes me that some fans will join just for one year, to get the CD and to download songs they do not already own. It is a better deal that David Bowie’s similar arrangement with Bowienet – free double CD and site access for $64.99 , but no videos or back catalog access.

Even so, this kind of arrangement is only going to work for a small niche of diehard fans. It is implausible that music lovers would stump up $50.00 or more per year for every artist they enjoy.

I’m glad though that artists are experimenting with different ideas for distributing their music, and not letting Apple call all the shots.

internet, java, linux, multimedia, software development, web authoring

Adobe: friend or enemy of open source, open standards?

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I’m sitting in a session at Adobe Max Europe listening to Senior Product Manager Laurel Reitman talking about what a great open platform Adobe is creating. She refers to the open sourcing of the Flex SDK; the open bug database for Flex; the ISO standardization programme for PDF; the donation of source code to Tamarin, the Mozilla Foundation ECMAScript 4.0 runtime project, and the use of open source projects such as SQLite and Webkit within AIR, the Adobe Integrated Runtime which lets you run Flash applications on the desktop, and the fact that AIR will run in due course on Linux, though the initial release will be Mac and Windows only.

So is Adobe the friend of open source and open standards? It’s not so simple. Adobe is more successful than any other company in promoting proprietary standards on the Internet. It ceased development of the open SVG standard for vector graphics, in favour of the proprietary Flash SWF. Adobe’s efforts may well stymie the efforts of John Resig and others at Mozilla to foster open source equivalents to Flash and AIR. View the slides of his recent talk, which include video support integrated into the browser, a canvas for 3D drawing, HTML applications which run from the desktop without browser furniture, and web applications which work offline. Why is there not more excitement about these developments? Simply, because Adobe is there first with its proprietary solutions.

Adobe is arguably more a consumer than a contributor with respect to open source. It is using the open-source Eclipse for Flexbuilder and Thermo, but as far as I can tell not doing much with existing open source projects within Eclipse, preferring to provide its own implementations for things like graphics and visual application development. It is using SQLite and Webkit, and will no doubt feedback bugs and improvements to these projects, but they would flourish with or without Adobe’s input. Tamarin is perhaps its biggest open-source contribution, but read the FAQ: Adobe is contributing source code, but not quite open-sourcing its ActionScript virtual machine. The Flash Player itself remains closed-source, as do its binary compilers.

Like other big internet players, Adobe is treading a fine line. It wants the world to accept its runtimes and formats as standards, while preserving its commercial advantage in controlling them.

My prediction: if Adobe succeeds in its platform ambitions, the company will come under pressure to cede more of its control over those platform standards to the wider community, just as Sun has experienced with Java.

internet, multimedia, software, software development, web authoring

Adobe shows how anything can be a web application

The closing session here at Adobe MAX Europe was a series of “sneak peeks” at forthcoming technology, presented with a disclaimer to the effect that they may never appear commercially. I am not going to do a blow-by-blow account of these, since it was mostly the same as was shown a couple of weeks ago in the USA, and you may as well read one of the accounts from there. For example, this one from Anara Media, if you can cope with its breathless enthusiasm.

So what was interesting? Overall, Adobe is doing a good job of challenging assumptions about the limitations of web applications, and I am not just talking about AIR. A few years ago you might single out something like Photoshop as an example of something that would always be a desktop application; yet this evening we saw Photoshop Express, a web-hosted Photoshop aimed at consumers, but with impressive image manipulation capabilities. For example, we saw how the application could turn all shades of one colour into those of another colour, so you can make a red car blue. Another application traditionally considered as local-only is desktop publishing, yet here we saw a server version of InDesign controlled by a Web UI written in Flex.

The truth is, given a fast Internet connection and a just-in-time compiler anything can be a web application. Of course, under the covers huge amounts of code are being downloaded and executed on the client, but the user will not care , provided that it is a seamless and reasonably quick experience. Microsoft should worry.

We also got a glimpse into the probable future of Adobe Reader. This already runs JavaScript, but in some future version this runtime engine will be merged with ActionScript 3.0. In addition, the Flash player will be embedded into Adobe Reader. In consequence, a PDF or a bundle of PDFs can take on the characteristics of an application or an offline web site. A holiday brochure could include video of your destination as well as a live booking form. Another idea which comes to mind (we were not shown anything like this) is ad-supported ebooks where the ads are Flash videos. I can see the commercial possibilities, and there are all kinds of publications which could be enhanced by videos, but not everyone will welcome skip-the-intro annoyances arriving in PDF form.

This was a fun and impressive session, and well received by the somewhat bedazzled crowd of delegates.

internet, microsoft, multimedia

BBC to use Flash, Adobe streaming for iPlayer

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Adobe’s Chief Software Architect Kevin Lynch announced today at Adobe MAX Europe that the BBC will use the Flash runtime for its iPlayer application, which enables UK viewers to download and play broadcasts for up to a week after their initial airing. In a short announcement, he said that the BBC will use Adobe’s technology end to end, from streaming to the cross-platform player on the client.

This appears to be a setback for Microsoft, whose technology is used in the controversial iPlayer currently in beta. It is unfortunate that the existing iPlayer is based on Windows Media Player components, rather than the new cross-platform Silverlight component which would be more suitable. The BBC has endured a hail of protest concerning iPlayer, based mainly on its Windows-only implementation, but also on installation hassles and annoyances arising from the Kontiki peer-to-peer technology which it uses. See here for my own experience.

However, Adobe’s press release suggests that the Microsoft iPlayer is not dead:

The BBC iPlayer on-demand streaming service will complement the download service currently available.

On the other hand, its seems odd that the BBC would use both a Windows-only and a cross-platform player technology. My hunch is that if the Adobe solution works as smoothly as the Flash player usually does, then the Microsoft-based service is likely to wither. I’ll be teasing out more detail on this later today.

There are a few more clues in this BBC story:

The BBC has also confirmed that users of Apple Mac and Linux machines will be able to use its TV catch-up service from the end of the year.

The broadcaster has signed a deal with Adobe to provide Flash video for the whole of the BBC’s video services, including a streaming version of its iPlayer.

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internet, software, software development, web authoring

How much “branded desktop presence” will you put up with?

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We saw a lot of AIR applications at this morning’s keynote here at Adobe MAX Europe. AIR lets you take either Flash applications, or Javascript/HTML applications, out of the browser and onto the desktop. The additional richness you get from running outside the browser is currently rather limited – we saw lots of drag-and-drop, because that is one of the few additional things you can do. However, AIR has a huge advantage for web vendors, because it puts their application and/or their content onto the user’s desktop. A great example is an Allurent-developed online shopping catalog called Anthropologie, which we saw this morning. Here’s a quote from the case study, headed “Branded desktop presence”:

“The idea underlying our Adobe AIR applications is to enable retailers to push relevant content to the consumer and let the consumer consider it from the comfort of their desktop,” says Victoria Glickman Hodgkins, vice president of marketing at Allurent. “The retailer avoids mailing a circular or catalog to promote special items, and the consumer can interact with digital catalog information in highly engaging ways.”

Right. Now we realize how the web browser has actually protected us from intrusive commercial presence on our desktop. The beauty of browser-based applications is that they completely disappear when you navigate away from the page, with only perhaps a Favorites shortcut to take us back there when we choose. An AIR application by contrast installs into our machine, probably puts an icon on the desktop, can run minimized and fire system notifications.

This isn’t a bad thing in itself, provided the user remains in control. But how many such applications will you want to install?

Put another way, AIR developers will need to exercise restraint in their efforts to inflict branded desktop presence on hapless users.

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internet, multimedia, web authoring

What’s in Flash 10?

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At the keynote here at Adobe MAX Europe we were shown some of the upcoming features in Flash 10, codenamed Astro. First up is a new text engine which supports bidirectional script. This is great if you want to, errrm, embed some right-to-left text within some left-to-right text; it will all word-wrap correctly. The next feature was more interesting to me: editable multi-column text which flows correctly and allows sane text selection across the columns. Does Adobe plan to take over more and more of the role of HTML within our browsers?

The other Astro feature we saw was new 3D imaging APIs. You will be able to rotate and transform live video – now where have I seen that before? Astro will also support a graphics programming language called Hydra, which you can use to create custom effects, transformations and blends. You can try out Hydra by downloading the Adobe Image Foundation Toolkit, available as a technology preview. The same technology is used in After Effects.

It seems that  the Flash team is determined not to be outdone by, you know, those other guys.

internet, web authoring

Adobe MAX Europe and its annoying web site

I’m heading out to Barcelona for Adobe Max Europe, for what I hope will be some in-depth presentations on what I guess we should call the Adobe Platform – Flash, Flex, AIR, Livecycle etc.

I wish Adobe would fix its Max Europe web site though. Follow the link, and a Flash movie plays automatically – with sound. I’ve learned to hit the stop button ASAP, but it is truly irritating. Worse, the web page has no memory of your preference, so I have to repeat this exercise every time I visit. This is the kind of thing that earned Flash a bad reputation in its early days. Imagine the embarrassment if you are working in an open plan office and hit this kind of problem. OK, so you have the sound turned down at work. So do I, normally, but I then I have to transcribe an interview or something, turn the sound back on, and get caught out.

Still, the event is apparently sold out so perhaps there are people out there who actually like this kind of thing. Alternatively, they realize that there is good technology underneath that is worth investigating despite this example of how not to do it.

I’ve also got some interviews lined up at MAX, of which more later.

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blogging, internet, software, software development, web authoring

Matt Mullenweg’s less-is-better approach to software quality

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Interview with Matt Mullenweg in the Guardian today. This was done at the Future of Web Apps conference. I enjoyed meeting him. He is open and articulate. I had not appreciated until now that WordPress.com took the opposite decision from Google over the issue of being blocked in countries such as China which are less permissive than the USA about what can be published. He found out that by blocking certain words and tracking certain people the site could be unblocked:

Google had the same decision, and they decided that being there was less evil than not being there, ultimately. For us, we decided that being there under those circumstances isn’t worth it. We’d rather not be there.

A blogging site is not the same as a search engine. It’s arguable that both sites made the right decision. Not easy.

I was also struck by Mullenweg’s espousal of an Apple-like minimalism in software design. He says WordPress has too many options. He was particularly critical of Open Office:

If you open up Open Office, look at the preference screen, there are like 30 or 40 pages of preferences. Stuff that you and I will never care about and should never care about.

I accept the main premise – software should just work. I understand the further implicit argument, that adding options tends to diminish software quality, by adding complexity to the code. But it would be interesting to analyze some of the options in, say, Open Office, and find out why they are there and who is using them. Is having all these options tucked away really a bad thing, or this really more about user interface design?

internet

Charles Fitzgerald: Oracle will buy Salesforce.com

I enjoyed this thoughtful post on Fitzgerald’s Platformonomics blog. I am personally guilty of thinking too much about technology and not enough about the bottom line; this kind of analysis is a useful corrective, though bear in mind that it comes from a competitor to both companies.

It is true that Salesforce.com is an Oracle company at heart, a point that has been made to me several times when I have talked to its spokespeople. It is a platform for database applications, and the database is … you guessed.