May Mobile Portland

Adobe's Side of the Story: Flash, Air and Mobile Devices

I have been to a lot of roll outs and demos of software in the past twenty years or so. The visit to Mobile Portland by Adobe software evangelist Renaun Erickson was pretty much the norm for these kinds of affairs except for a subtext (or if you want to cliche ridden, an elephant in the room) of the current chilly state of relations between Apple and Adobe. It has been big headline news lately that Steve Jobs is emphatic about no Flash or Air on the IPhones or IPads. What became clear in this meeting is that there is far more to the current world of mobile devices than Apple.

I appreciate and have a lot of admiration for Apple. They bring creativity and a quality of execution to personal electronics in a game changing way, but they have also almost been brought down to their knees by what can only be called hubris, and that flaw of cosmic pride is almost always a cosmic affair, but here the god is named Jobs, not Jove.

Well, enough Olympic ponderings for now. Yet when we have another 35 years to look back on the past 35 years, I believe we will see that the Cupertino crew will be credited with being at the vanguard of revolutions -- personal computers, portable media, feature-rich communications technology. The current revolutionary cycle fountain-headed by Apple is mobile and tablet portable. To my mind, the WebVisions presentation by Mobile Portland organizer Jason Grigsby and the Mobible Portland Adobe Flash and Air demo underscore this notion further.

Probably the most overt reference to the elephant in the room was made by Erickson hen he showed a screen full of logs of the company's collaborative partners. The screen was filled with the likes of Intel, Google, Nokia and Cisco. "Pretty much everyone except one company is on board."

If one was being catty about evaluating professional meetings they could keep score on how well the media presentation was executed. Sometimes such declarations are justified, but this evening's shortcomings were kind of charming. Renaud apparently was in Portland for more than roadshow business and the Portland Incubator Experiment site did not have an Elmo or other doc cam device. So improvisation was in order. He tried to display his phone by holding it up to the presentation Macs camera, but it was nearly impossible to get the orientation and quality correct without a rearview mirror. After a while a member of the audience took charge and volunteered to hold the Mac while Erickson looked at the screen sideways.

Despite this strange looking jerry-rigged presentation method, one of Steve Jobs' major points in April's seemed to be made moot. "Flash has not performed well on mobile devices. We have routinely asked Adobe to show us Flash performing well on a mobile device, any mobile device, for a few years now." Erickson showed both a Kongregate Flash game and an amazing 3D animation game that Verbatim has on their website, both apparently using Flash Player 10.1 and both looked like they were running pretty darn well to me

As I said, despite some Apple sideshow noise, Erickson's presentation was pretty much a standard kind of software demo one would expect to see with a factory rep or product evangelist. There were the standard product slides illustrating the different types of products that are a part of the Flash platform. The two products that were showcased were Adobe's were Adobe Flex development environment, the new 10.1 Flash Player and latest developments in Adobe Air, which is an environment for developing browser independent applications. He touted the new Flash player's improvement in handling multiple SWF (small web files, the foundation for Flash) and Flash's new improvements in device detection. Erickson also demonstrated with a fair amount of pride work he did on a microphone application for Adobe Air that allowed one to manipulate speed and effects in playback.

The evening ended with Erickson creating a small application in Air and playing it back on a phone he had. Basically it was a couple of buttons and he utilized a library to create it. Since programming and app development is not really a part of my skill set, I found it hard to keep up with all that was happening, but the Mobile Portland crowd seemed pleased.

Here is a link from Adobe Labs that is filled with information on Adobe Airand how it is used for developing Android phone applications. And another from Adobe Labs that features a pre-release download on the latest version of Flash Player and information regarding that software.

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CSS3 Night at Refresh

Josh Clark on Web Designers and CSS3

Some themes are emerging from the sessions I attended at the WebVisions conference, my first week of experience with the IPad, and two professional meetings I attended at the Portland Incubator Experience. They all seem to be dealing with parallel and intersecting tracks of mobile computing getting "bigger than than the government" (to quote Erykah Badu) and web and application standards in a very interesting time of transition. Refresh is a likely place to see this intersection at work. There are almost seventy Refresh groups around the world all dedicated to "refresh the creative, technical, and professional culture of New Media endeavors in their areas. Promoting design, technology, usability, and standards."


The hour spent at the Portland May meeting featuring a presentation by Eugene web developer Josh Clark certainly echoed the overriding mission statement of the group as well as their manifesto's aspirations to share knowledge, talent, and ideas. Clark focused on CSS3, the latest emerging standard coming out of the W3C for cascading style sheets usage. Many CSS3 features are already supported by web browsers, but, as I already had heard in WebVisions sessions, a big holdout is compatibility for Internet Explorer. Unless one is forced into a MS IE environment in your worklife (as they are at Intel) or a user who has not discovered the opportunities that Firefox or Safari have to offer the user, one might not be aware of the power that MS still wields in the browser world. In otherwords, there is still a heck of a lot of IE out there, and a lot is in the older versions.

Clark takes a pragmatic but a kind of assertive approach here. He feels that attempting to style to universal display should not be a full on modus operandi for the web designer. He states that the notion that all web pages need to be created to look the same in all browsers is impossible and will never be attained. Additionally, he believes that CSS 3 will never be fully implemented as a standard, in fact, CSS 2.1 has never been implemented in a visual fashion. And he doesn't believe that web developers should wait for the W3C, which he describes as "a political nightmare."

So what are the how and why guidelines for the web developer believes wants to start utilizing CSS3 declarations for border radius, transforms, transitions, animations and so forth? Clark provided two sets of thoughts in this regard, the ideas for many he credited to presentations by web standards gurus and advocates like Andy Clarke and Dan Cederholm he attended at A Event Apart

First he laid out four benefits designers and developers should consider by going ahead and moving forward towards CSS3.

• Good implementation allows us to leverage technology without killing the experience of our browser


• CSS3 rewards standards compliant browser use by enriching the experience


• Allows us to move towards the future of the web


• Cheaper production costs

Browser adoption of CSS3 is going to get better instead of worse, Clark says. Three browsers (Safari, Chrome, Firefox) already do a good job of adopting CSS3 standards. He sees designers playing a role to leverage the browser manufacturers to adopt more quickly or "provide and upsell push towards compliance. Production costs will also be impacted because of economic CSS3 code will put less push on the server and browser.

The designer, of course, has the primary responsibility of meeting the needs of their client. Yet Clark pointed out that a designer/developer can Clark then pointed out what he felt are the four strategies a designer can take in using CSS3.

• Use CSS3 however and whenever
  
  But Clark underscored the fact that this approach will work best for experimental web sites and for audiences who are mainly using browsers supported by the WebKit browser engine.


• Never use CSS3
  
  For a website that will see a large amount of Internet Explorer browser traffic, this may be the best approach.


• Use CSS3 appropriately and responsibly
  
  This approach is stated by Clark as "the logical conclusion." He is very supportive of sites that have nice interactive features and a sense of whimsey, but don't detract from the experience that users may have that are not using the most CSS3 friendly browsers. He gave two examples the Sliding-vinyldemonstration at zurb.com and the interactive features promoting Andy Clarke's For A Beautiful Web DVD tutorials.
  

Clark also talked about the concept of graceful degradation when it comes to browser standards and web designs. He promotes the idea the practice where the design community will "use our best designs with the tools we have available. Build what we are are going then deal with the IE issue." He promotes the concept of "hardboiled design" that is developed by Andy Clarke taking on an attitude in design similar to that of detectives in pulp novels. Clark can see both sides of this issue, having had more freedom as an independent designer where he interacted with smaller companies and non-profits to where he needs to be more conscious of designing for the IE base with his work as a designer for a software developer. But he showed that CSS3 can be incorporated without impacting one's IE experience.

Clark concluded the formal part of his presentation with code examples for tranforms, transitions, and animations as well as examples of how they are used in sites like Things We Left on the Moon But most impressive was the discussion portion of the evening. There were about a dozen folks in the audience and all made some kind of contribution to the practice and conditions of CSS3 usage, including a long discusion about Microsoft's slowness in transitioning to CSS3 standards.

If nothing more, one left the session with the same answer to "Do Websites Need To Look Exactly The Same In Every Browser?"" that one would have when they click on the link for the question raised by that domain name. But Answering the question in practice is one that the designer/developer needs to ponder with each project they work on.

The IPad User Experience I

James Keller at Mobile Portland: 4.26.10

The Mobile Portland group and this meeting would not have been on my radar if not for recent interest in my workplace in developing a program to prepare folks for a career in the field of application development as well as discussion in how the IPad is going to fit into all of this. This is the second program Portland Mobile has had this year with the IPod as a primary topic. A video and a summary of the February meeting were posted. That meeting w deas filled with speculation on what the IPad was and what its impact would be. The April presentation was more like early returns on election day if the pundits were usability designers.

James Keller works at Small Society, a Portland company that creates mobile application. She (no typo here, James is a woman) presented her assessment of what the IPad and its application have done right so far in regards to the user experience. She began by emphasizing that we are all still learning what the IPad is. She cited Lev Grossman's Time Magazine article of April 1, Do We Need the iPad? as helping to contribute to that discussion of definition. "Apple took a computer, chopped off the keyboard and squashed it flat...let's just say its somewhere between a IPhone and a netbook--towards the netbook end" Keller also mentioned that Steve Jobs has described Apple as a mobile device company. Grossman talks about how tablet computers and digital music players were developed by major companies long before IPad and IPod. "Jobs likes nothing better than frolicking in the graveyard of other companies' dead products."

But because it is Apple building on the IPhone revolution says Grossman with resources like great engineering, display and multitouch display, the time is now where it wasn't for Bill Gates when he touted tablets as being a next wave at Comdex 2000. Grossman sees its portability becoming the first home computer, a peripatetic whose location will move from room to room, becoming almost a member of the household. In Keller's presentation she showed how her cat used as a place for napping and how the cat could also serve as providing just the right angle to serve as a display stand for the device.



Keller's analysis studied how well the device (so far) is successful or is inventing itself among five areas: reading, play, learning, travel, and work. The results were mixed, intriguing, even more so as I write up this dispatch after having opportunity to download apps and explore one for myself. The questions that Keller and lots of folks looking at the impact and influence may have (as Apple has had in past with its three major prior i products of mac, pod, and phone.) Were the Kindle and the Barnes and Noble Nook rehearsals for the way the Mac will revolutionize ebooks? Will the IPad replace laptops for work and travel?

The She-James says that for her the IPad is not yet a laptop killer. Her company this out a recent business trip by leaving laptops behind (mostly.) Traveling with the IPad underscores its primary role as a network device. You can't stream a movie on a plane. I don't recall her ecstatic about iWork for the IPad, but if Dan Miller's April 1 Business Week article is any indication, there are still iterations to go and promises to keep. Getting files on and off the device, according to Keller is still a real challenge. Still it should be noted that she did give her presentation on an iPad using Keynote

Keller saw a lot more accomplishments and headway in reading. She feels the iBook app has some definite advantages over Kindle for looking and feeling more like a book. One simple feature is that Apple has left the pages blank between chapters if a work is organized that way. She talked about the need to lock the orientation so it doesn't get fussy between landscape and
And speaking of the IPad in bed, she referred to this April 24 Los Angeles Times article about how our sleep habits may be impacted by bringing the device to bed.

She weighed in on the user experience of the first wave of reading apps. She had problem with messy display on NY Times contact and questioned the business decision by the Times well designed Whitman sampler of news, NY Times Review. She liked how USA Today preserved the notion of a fold in their design. She thought reading blogs in Safari was a good experience. I am so far impressed with the way that comics display and can be navigated in the IPad and would like to see what Keller would say about that. She did talk about the way that her reading experience of Winnie the Pooh where words were highlighted as it was read which must be likely seen as a great teaching learning opportunity for a mother with young children

Gaming is another area that Keller was very enthusiastic about, especially where social gaming is concerned. She is very positive about We Rule, as many are. Godfinger and Words With Friends, a multi-player scrabble game also got high marks.

Overall, Keller had praise for the simplicity, contextual control and rich design of the IPad. She doesn't know how the design work with physical metaphors needs to play out and that it is a concern that a support for universal binaries are not utilized yet, and the constant switching of the devices orientation is a kind of madness. She still wonders about its value when it is offline, and has concerns about the obfuscatory file management experience of the device. As a prediction she feels the contextual controls will get better, she believes that the Chrome browser environment could make an impact when it comes to the IPad. But, probably, most notably, it has passed the nightstand test as a device that one bonds with and has a need to have close by.

Darin Richardson, a partner with Refresh Media, took another approach focusing on the Apple Developer guidelines which I will expand into another post because if you are reading this on an IPad, your fingers must be getting a bit cramped from scrolling down.

Tango for Lunch

Midday Pleasure at WebVisions

Meester and Meester is the group 3 Leg Torso without the bass and percussion elements. Accordianist Courtney Von Drehle and violinist Béla Balogh sounded great, transforming Exhibit Hall D into a nice bistro. If there had been a food vendor in the Convention Center open more folks would have gotten a chance to hear them. I'm glad I brought my sandwich.

Design with Heart

Afternoon Keynote

@ Web Visions Day 1

I have only been to maybe three or four of the WebVisions conferences that Brad Smith and his team of organizers have put together over the past decade, but I have experienced enough of the events to know that they are a kind of annual examinations of the web media. It is multifaceted. The descriptive blurb on the conference website clearly states the scope of WebVisions when it describes itself as concerned with "the future of Web design, technology, user experience and business strategy." That's a full order for certain.

Today started out with a British academic guy, Luke Williams, who also works at the renowned firm Frog Design. talking about Dispruptive Design, which seemed like a super obvious view of the topic. For instance, he played the When They Were Kings interview with Norman Mailer where he talks about how Ali's psychological strategies changed the outcome of the Joe Frazier Zaire fight. I later saw an onstage interview with Williams and came away appreciating his passion of a teacher dedicated to getting folks to look at the world differently; an objective and avocation I share.

The closing keynote was by New York designer Agnieszka Gasparska. She talked about the derth of web pages now available and wondered about the role of design in a world with so much content. "Content is going to always engage people
but what is the role of the containers we create?" Beauty and emotion were words that came up often. Her design firm's motto is "Design with Heart" and the name of that firm is Kiss Me I'm Polish. (And, of course, national pride is one of the deepest of all passions.)

Her questions continued. "Can design be beautiful, can it create emotion?...Design is about communication, but can it be more?" A bit later in the speech she declared that user experience should be more about interaction and less about visual style and beauty. She declares balance as being the key to form not trumping function. Our attraction to good design is similar to our attraction to other people, we like to be around a balance of personality and looks. Good design has a similar balance between creativity and structure stressed Gasparska.

Gasparska believes strongly in bringing a "rich and visual playful creativity" to design work and showed how she tried to develop this sensibility in her work. She showed some of her early work for a firm called Funny Garbage back in the days of dot-com glory that was formative in this pursuit. A Flash web site for the band Fischerspooner, still accessible via Wayback Machine is an example of what she calls doing more with more. The band has a developed sense of style and a visual vocabulary of their own that she worked on translating to the web. She says her firm still follows the practice of working with clients in developing their visual identity, often in the form of a book of imagery.

Fischerspooner's site is the kind of job is a labor of love for a designer with strong artistic sensibilities, but she also showed work she had done for the likes of bloomberg.com that puts forth their individual need and message as well. Doing more with more is, I believe, Gasparska's way of classifying work that puts the designer under a more centralized and highly visual position.

Another category of design work she displayed was about doing more with less, finding the right container for the message for sites that are rich with content, but not stressing the designer so centrally. To this end, she showed three of her Kiss Me I'm Polish clients (is this the first design firm with the same name as a bumper sticker or teeshirt?) all of which were projects that lasted nine months or so. One was the coffee table type website for the Lincoln Center Jazz Hall of Fame. A pair of publication design make overs she was involved in, Thrillist, a men's online newsletter and Good Magazine also illustrated rich and well-executed design work that had been transformed through multiple iterations.

She also broached on a third category, doing less with less but it was less engaging and examples were less enticing. What she was getting at with less with less seems to be getting back to use of white space on clean typography to counter the most content littered of web presences. I was great to revisit last summer's Wired magazine extreme makeover of craigslist. At one point Gasparska riffed about the idea that the overstuffed architecture and content of site like craigslist might actually encourage interaction. McLuhanesque notions switch on in my brain over that one. It may be time aking the hot and cold media model to the web and mobile media to see how we interact in the 2010 global village.

In conferences like WebVisions, a discussion on the aesthetic aspects of the web seems like a good counter to the necessary emphasis that needs to be made on technical and commercial aspects of the field. Gasparska gave folks a few takeaways to consider and is simplistic as it seems, maybe her echo of that old Damned Yankees song should not be dismissed: "You Gotta Have Heart."

Defining Values in Design

Rick Robinson At CHIFOO: 5.410

Rick Robinson’s presentation provided a kind of widescreen meta look at the world of design research full of challenges to established models and assumed best practices associated with that discipline. Robinson is a developmental psychologist who came into this field by accident encountering the “weird people in design” 18-20 year ago. During his career he has been involved in design projects ranging from women’s shavers to the BMW 5 series. “From The sublime to the ridiculous” he said without defining which of these projects were one or the other.



Robinson didn’t come in armed with conclusions, but with ideas and questions for considering how design research can be thought about differently and improved. His slides were not filled with words and bullets but often sketches and models that were intended to provoke thoughtful ideas and additional questions. His presentation is based on a work in progress which can be viewed through his website athttp://www.thinkpulp.com/work-in-progress/good-work-in-design-work-values-process-and-understanding. Those who were at the May meeting will find his latest draft online to be useful to clarify or expand upon many of the points he made.

“One has to be comfortable with the idea that research does not provide definite answers to particular questions” in the development of design research according to Robinson in his paper. At CHIFOO he expanded on that often stressing limitations of ethnographic research and some practices associated with it. “Talking to someone in their home does not really deal with context. For instance he stated that research design requires the observational and that conversation is more useful than an interview. As for field work “user is the expert but you have to expertise too, you can’t be naive.”



The working definition of ethnographic research given by Robinson is “A description, of a system, activity, belief, setting, culture, etc. and interpretation—not just a summary - of that description toward an end both salient and instrumental within constraints - of site, setting, time tools, materials, and solution spaces.” He gave special emphasis on the words and phrases description, interpretation, towards an end and within constraints. Robinson also stressed the responsibility that designers had and the importance of values when being involved in the design process. “Once you accept that you are putting into the world and how it will create change, then that means that the developer has an almost moral responsibility about how it will make the world different.” A child’s toy doesn’t start out to be evil but choices along the way (such as materials) can lead it to become a bad thing. In a brief and similar example he showed a slide of the Nuremberg rally stating that Speer and Riefenstahl were very talented designers but, well, the client they worked for…

Robinson’s talk was also peppered with references to works of others that seem well worth checking out further. Among these are the work of Cambridge anthropologist Danny Miller, whose titles include Stuff, The Internet: An Ethnographic Approach, and The Comfort of Thing, writer Louis Menand, New Yorker writer and author of the recently released The Marketplace of Ideas, and Hugh Dubberly who has contributed greatly to the literature of usability and design in the Interactions journal and elsewhere.

Ultimately references to these individuals, discussions of how disciplines like behavioral economics can be useful to design research, and the too numerous to mention frameworks and models lead to his conclusion that design could very much benefit by the development of a “values-oriented, systemically scaled experience frame design.”

This conclusion reflects his original presentation title of “Explicit Values for Better Design Research” and his work in progress title Good Work in Design Work: Values, Process, and Understanding” The title slide for the May presentation, however, was “Building Elephants: the Aims of Design Research".

And although he challenged the value of the perhaps too-oft used metaphorical tale of the blind men each with a distinctly different perspective in describing and elephant when applied to design. (there’s not even an elephant there to unearth and discover. Ironically, the evening’s response and Q & A question his presentation was reminiscent of that tale as CHIFOO members saw interpretations and applications of his work applicable or like or unlike architecture, web development relating somewhat to mission visions and values development, etc. Yet most, I believe would agree with an affirmative yes, as Robinson did to the last question of the evening where someone asked him if he is trying to do something big here. Big, just like an elephant with lots of parts and in this case lots of inspirations and influences.

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