The Universal Desktop

August 27th, 2008

Mozilla Ubiquity: Is Mozilla building out a different kind of RIA platform?

Posted by Ryan Stewart @ 10:37 am

Categories: Mozilla

Tags: Ubiquity, Rich Internet Application, Mozilla Corp., Channel Management, Web Browsers, Marketing, Internet, Ryan Stewart

Ubiquity for Firefox from Aza Raskin on Vimeo.

I watched the Mozilla Ubiquity video last night and it struck a chord. The crew over at Mozilla Labs is doing some very cool, forward thinking stuff. In the process, I think they’re evolving what the browser is into something more of an RIA platform. Rafe over at WebWare makes a couple of good points about Ubiquity and IE8. What’s happening to web pages? It seems like they’re going away and I think that’s a good thing.

The web’s page-based model has been slowly dying for a long time. We just don’t interact with the web as pages any more. Sure there’s a lot of infrastructure built up around that model but we’re seeing more and more applications reside in the browser and fewer and fewer actual pages. What pages we do see are mostly related to SEO or content. So why should those static, boring pages continue to exist? Legacy? All that matters is the content on those pages. That’s what’s so compelling about Ubiquity. It takes those static pages, grabs the content, and allows you to do something useful with it. I’m a huge fan of Microformats and Ubiquity is kind of like Microformats and Greasemonkey on steroids. You get content when and how you want it and you can interact with it in a meaningful way.

As a developer, I think what makes Ubiquity a platform is that people are going to want to create content for it. I don’t see they how they could abstract or generalize something like the Yelp example. Just like a lot of startups today are looking to create AIR applications for the desktop, I see the same phenomenon with Ubiquity. You’re going to want to expose your content like that to the user. And Ubiquity seems like the closest thing we’ve got.

So props to the Mozilla Labs team. You’re definitely pushing the envelope and I think you’re doing a lot to help move the web in a good direction. The more we can abstract the data, the better, richer experiences we can build around that. For some that may be the command line, but it’s not hard to see other applications popping up that would put a GUI face on the Ubiquity infrastructure.

August 26th, 2008

How the world watched the Olympics online

Posted by Ryan Stewart @ 4:33 pm

Categories: Rich Internet Applications, Microsoft, Adobe, Flash, Rich Media, Online Video, Silverlight

Tags: China, Olympic Games, British Broadcasting Corp., Video, Flash, Corporate Communications, Marketing, Ryan Stewart

Much has been made of NBC’s Olympic numbers, which had the rights for online video in the US, and what that means for Silverlight. I thought the app was solid, the video quality was good, and all in all it was a win for Microsoft and RIAs. In that vein, I’m pretty impressed with how Adobe did across the rest of the world. The BBC in the UK and CCTV in China were both big Flash users. There were a number of other countries using Flash as well (and a couple using Silverlight). I think the numbers show that there’s worldwide interest in rich media and strong adoption of Flash.

In fact, the majority of online video for the Olympics was delivered in Flash. There’s a great blog post up by John O’Donovan, the Chief Technical Architect at the BBC about their Olympic numbers. For Beijing they streamed nearly 40 million videos with up to 5.5 million Olympic videos watched each day at an average of around 3 million. In total there were 6.5 million hours of video delivered using Flash by the BBC. What those numbers don’t include are streams from the BBC iPlayer or the mobile platforms. It’s all Flash in the browser. Compare that to 72 million videos in the states, and it shows that in a country much smaller than the US, online the Olympics was a hit.

More importantly, the numbers out of China are fantastic. In the first 10 days CCTV’s website streamed Olympic coverage to 100 million people according to the New York Times (registration required). CCTV used an innovative system which combined Flash Media Server with their own P2P technology which made it easy for anyone in China to watch the Olympics regardless of bandwidth. So in China we’ll have 2,900 hours of Olympic content backed up and ready to watch with Flash Video.

What’s also interesting to see is how the BBC got more comfortable over the course of the Olympics with their video content. By the end of the Olympics they were actually putting the live video stream on the front page of the BBC News homepage as the lead story. That’s pretty impressive and I think it’s a very good sign that rich media is creeping even more deeply into a role as a primary way to consume content.

August 25th, 2008

Updated: Democratic National Convention site requires Silverlight and Move

Posted by Ryan Stewart @ 12:31 pm

Categories: Rich Internet Applications, Microsoft, Rich Media, Silverlight

Tags: Microsoft Silverlight, Plug-in, Democratic National Convention, Move, Ryan Stewart

There was a lot of buzz around the fact that Silverlight was going to be use at the Democratic national convention for video (my post here) and off the heels of the Olympics, it seemed like a good thing for Microsoft to get into and I was really looking forward to a good RIA experience for the convention. The application was built by Hard Rock Deep Zoom demo. With a great agency that can show off the technology, it seems odd to me to add Move to the mix.

Update: Got a note from Eric Schmidt, Director Media and Advertising Evangelis about the Move plugin:

The DNCC chose to use Move as a means to tackle their live high definition streaming needs. The Move install is part of any Move experience (Silverlight or Flash).

We are leveraging Move’s CMS system to manage content and Level 3’s CDN infrastructure to deliver the video to the Silverlight player. The Move “plugin” hands video frames to Silverlight for compositing, etc.

Last year Microsoft and Move announced a partnership which would allow Silverlight content to be used on top of Move’s dynamic streaming technology. At the time I didn’t think the Move plugin would be required, but if they’re using that for the DNC site then it looks like it will be required. Or this could be a helper to Move to get more plugin distribution.

Anyone have more info on the reason or purpose of the Move plugin?

August 24th, 2008

5 Photosynths that let you jump into another world

Posted by Ryan Stewart @ 11:09 pm

Categories: Rich Internet Applications, Microsoft, Design

Tags: Photograph, Photosynth, Ryan Stewart

Photosynth launched last week to a lot of fanfare and it’s definitely one of the coolest things I’ve seen come out of Microsoft. It’s also one of the more interesting RIA examples out there. It provides a really great user interface and a level of richness for photos that the web hasn’t ever seen. A week after launch there is a decent collection of “synths” out there which show off the technology pretty well. I found 5 that are unique, interesting, and will absolutely take you away from whatever you’re doing and put you in another world. I can’t wait to see more people use this (and to see it available on a Mac). So put on some music and get ready to jump around the planet.

Boats by Chihuly
Chihuly has always been famous for his glasswork. In this Photosynth you get to see it like never before. You can zoom around the boat, and drill into detail. It’s a perfect example of how art and technology can blend to provide a really great user experience.

Climbing Aegialis
Not only is the scenery good, but making a person the focal point of a synth makes for a very interesting visualization. As you click through different views you can watch the climber move along the rock. As the background changes you almost get the sense that you’re the one doing all the hard work.

Halo 3 Zanzibar
Played Halo 3? Then this level will be familiar. Using screenshots of the game we’re able to jump into the middle of the Halo world like it was any other place on Earth. It’s got a bunch of photos and it’s really cool to zoom out and watch the 3D shapes form.

Stonehenge
National Geographic did a bunch of Photosynths and I thought Stonehenge was one of the best. They took more than 400 photos of the ancient monument which gives the user complete control over what and how they want to see it. It’s one of the more complete synths on the site and you can spend hours crawling over the rocks and stones.

Scoble Family Room
Yup, Scoble synthed his family room. But in doing show he proved that Photosynth is also great for small spaces and family memories. With only 50 photos, Robert was basically able to recreate his room which makes for a great way to share with friends and family (and the entire Internet). But the small space means it’s easy to move around and is a great demo for showing how well Photosynth can stitch together basically anything.

August 23rd, 2008

Demanding users: good news for RIAs, bad for “tech pros”

Posted by Ryan Stewart @ 6:53 pm

Categories: Rich Internet Applications, Rich Enterprise Applications

Tags: Software, Rich Internet Application, Worker, Tools & Techniques, Management, Ryan Stewart

I’ve always taken two things as given. One, RIAs provide a far better experience for every day users and make them more productive. Two, that it was difficult to convince companies to spend money on that kind of prodictivitiy. That’s why I was interested to read about the opinion of Rebecca Wettermann at Nucleus Research. She says that increasingly workers and their technology needs are being paid more attention to by companies than they used to:

There was a time when IT departments could get away with forcing employees to use complicated and hard-to-use software. The average worker didn’t know that better alternatives were out there. But as workers gain experience with consumer-focused software – either in their personal lives or at the office – they’re starting to realize that software can be easy to use and quick to get started on. It started with productivity boosters like instant messaging and collaboration software, but it’s crept into the realm of software that’s traditionally the realm of IT departments, such as sales automation.

She’s got a good point. As users spend more time with complex RIAs on the consumer side, they’re making the obvious leap that some of this technology could make their jobs easier and themselves more productive. Hopefully that means that more companies will spend the bit extra on creating an RIA solution that works for their users as opposed to stuffing bad user experiences down on people.

August 22nd, 2008

Gears’ new GeoLocation API is very slick

Posted by Ryan Stewart @ 2:34 pm

Categories: Google, Ajax

Tags: Mobile, API, AJAX, GPS, Advertising & Promotion, Internet, Software/Web Development, Web Development, Web 2.0, Consumer Electronics

Dion Almaer blogged this morning about the new GeoLocation API in Gears. As a Geo-nut, I’m pretty impressed with how well it’s implemented. The API is clean, and as Dion notes, with the community working on the W3C Geolocation spec, we could see a lot more geolocation on the web soon.

The mobile version appears only to work on Windows Mobile devices but the API uses a combination of GPS, cell towers, and WiFi/IP information to get a fix on where you are. It works anywhere that you’ve got Ajax as Dion’s example shows.

The release comes as part of Gears 0.4 which in addition to the Geolocation API, also provides onprogress events for HTTP downloads and uploads and some localized dialogues. the onprogressevent will be a big deal for anyone doing large uploads in the browser.

August 18th, 2008

NBA looking to stream live games

Posted by Ryan Stewart @ 5:09 pm

Categories: Rich Internet Applications, User Interface, Advertising, Rich Media, Online Video

Tags: Web, NBA, Channel Management, Games, TVs, Tv & Home Theater, Marketing, Personal Technology, Home Entertainment, Ryan Stewart

Rich media on the internet could be getting another big win if the NBA decides to go through with its plan to stream games to people in local markets. The NBA isn’t the first sports league to stream live games, MLB offers a streaming package and the NFL is going to stream some of their national games that are slated for NBC, but this is the first time that local games would be streamed. Traditionally local games are the crown jewels of local television stations because they’ve basically got a monopoly.

Just as with the Olympics, this could be an interesting experiment to see how a blend of traditional media and new media can affect ratings. As we saw with the Olympics, traditional media still rules the advertising roost. It draws the most viewers, it pulls in the most money, and it isn’t going away any time soon. But increasingly content seems to be moving to a “consume it how you want it” model where big content creators (if you can attach that term to the NBA) offer a variety of ways to consume content. I’ve called these “touch points” in the past but always talked about them in terms of the web. Now big media companies are getting into the touch point game.

In the end, this kind of thing is great for the web. It’s the first step in blending the TV and web experiences. A lot of people focus on interactive TV as a next step, but it seems to be moving more in the web direction. People like their TV the way it is, but with the technologies on the web, you can create that interactive content and increase the granularity of your analytics. I think the web-based TV experience will end up being superior than the general TV experience because of RIAs and better data. Keeping it on the big screen is still important but ultimately the web provides better platforms with which to make the most out of video content. I hope other sports leagues follow suit.

August 18th, 2008

10 reasons to love Silverlight and 10 reasons to hate it

Posted by Ryan Stewart @ 1:59 pm

Categories: Rich Internet Applications, Silverlight

Tags: Apple Macintosh, Microsoft Silverlight, C#, Microsoft Windows, .Net, Programming Languages, Desktops, Development Tools, Software Development, Software/Web Development

I won’t add much commentary to Tim’s excellent post up on the Register because I work for Adobe and I don’t want to get into a bunch of nonsensical arguments about Flash versus Silverlight. But I will say that Tim Anderson is one of the very few tech journalists who really, really gets the RIA space. He knows all of the technologies from the major companies and how they’re meant to be used.

The last one in Tim’s hate list is the one that kills me: You have to develop on Windows. This is particularly a problem for the Expression design tools, since designers have a disproportionately high number of Macs. I know Microsoft sells Windows and that’s how they make money, but I’ve been doing some C# development lately and it really sucks to have to go into VMWare to load up my development environment. If anyone has any good tips on doing C# development on a Mac, let me know. Mono seems halfway there but I haven’t found a great tooling option yet.

August 14th, 2008

Metadata in Flash Video

Posted by Ryan Stewart @ 11:36 am

Categories: Adobe, Flash, Rich Media

Tags: Video, Beet.tv, Corporate Communications, Marketing, Ryan Stewart

Beet.tv has a post on the news that Adobe is going to be adding voice-to-text functionality inside of Flash video that will be added to the video as metadata. What basically happens is that any speech in the video will be converted into text which would then be accessible in a number of different ways. Beet.tv was the first to mention the news back in July and it sounds like it’s getting closer.

This comes at a good time. With the improvements in Flash search this would expose all of that video data as text to search engines. It would make searching video easier as well as drilling down into specific parts of the video based on content.

I still hate that everything boils down to text and that video and audio haven’t become first class data on the web but text is still the name of the game. The easier we make it to shoehorn rich media into the text world, the easier it will be to insert them into more core parts of the web. It still feels hacky to me, but hopefully it’s a good first step.

August 14th, 2008

Flare data visualization library

Posted by Ryan Stewart @ 9:35 am

Categories: Rich Internet Applications

Tags: Data Visualization, Databases, Enterprise Software, Software, Data Management, Ryan Stewart

I’ve been playing with Flare, an ActionScript library for creating basically any kind of visualization you want from graphs/charts to interactive graphics. It’s a great example of being able to use an RIA technology for exactly what it excels at - powerful graphics. What’s great about Flare is that it’s open source and plugs into any Flash application pretty easily. Taking a look at the samples will take you on a tour of various animated visualizations that are a great way to show off almost any kind of data.

Even if you’re staunchly in the Ajax/HTML camp, data visualizations are a great way to incorporate some plugin-based functionality into your applications. As far as HTML and JavaScript have come, they still can’t come close to this kind of valuable data visualization. It looks like there was even some interest by Dojo in creating a JS interface to Flare.