Most of the time I forget that I’m 32 years old and not a kid anymore when I’m living my life spending time with my wife, working and going out with friends. If feels like it I was just learning HTML at Webmonkey.com with Dreamweaver 3 and reading the thick manual for Flash 4 (back when they made print manuals for software).
When I’m teaching my web design course at FIT on Thursdays, that feeling goes right away. I’m the old dude, they’re the kids and it doesn’t bother me in the least.
I’m actually fascinated by their opinions and view of the world. We adults all tend to make assumptions and generalizations about kids – what they care and don’t care about. What they know and what they’re ignorant about. Nothing clarifies those assumptions like firsthand discussions in class with them.
Sometimes I’m surprised by the answers I get.
For instance, their thoughts on the future of (print) media and the iPad. I heard a few students talking about it so I jumped in and asked them what they thought about it. I instigate these discussions because their concentration is on traditional print design and advertising and if you haven’t noticed, there’s some serious shit happening in these industries.
I don’t feel it’s enough to merely teach the curriculum I’ve been given. These students need to be prepared for what lies ahead.
I found out some of them were scared about the future of print media, magazines and books. I expected them to be excited about this new device and the potential it has to redefine how we create and consume media. Some (not all) of their opinions were surprisingly old school and traditional. Some were afraid print was going to die, that there wouldn’t be any more magazines. Things were ending and they didn’t know what to expect.
I told them fear should be the last feeling in their heads. It’s an exciting time to be a designer and they’re going to be defining (if they rise to the challenge) how we experience media in this new format. I also explained that print wasn’t going to die, but we are going think much harder on what we want to have printed.
I’ve referenced it numerous times before and will continue to. The key to success in designing and creating media is being agile:

It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent, but the most responsive to change

—Charles Darwin
My students are not obligated to design content for the iPad, but if I can teach them to be agile in their careers, then they’ll be great.

Saving Sony: CEO Howard Stringer Plans to Focus on 3-D TV

But after a few minutes of playing Wipeout with Hirai, whipping my hovership around curves and caroming off hyperrealistic guardrails, I have to stop. The experience is ridiculously intense — maybe too intense. I’m worried that I might vomit. Sony has studied physiological responses like mine, and executives seem to be unconcerned. After a period of adjustment, most players adapt to the experience without ill effects, they say.

So Sony is betting on another hardware format, is that correct? Have they learning anything from their “win” with Blu-Ray over HD-DVD? Is Sony reaping the benefits of Blu-Ray?
Not only does media want to be free from hardware contraints, but our hardware devices that play said media need great software. Sony still doesn’t seem to be understanding that.

If I’d asked my customers what they wanted, they’d have said a faster horse

—Henry Ford
Seems Nokia is asking it’s customers to help it build a faster horse. They’ve set up a Design By Community website that is, “… is capturing the collective thoughts of Conversations readers to define the ultimate concept mobile device.”
On the site you use sliders to customize the attributes of the phone. There’s going to be several rounds that focus on different parts of a mobile device like: Display and UI, Size and Shape, Materials, Operating System, Connectivity, Camera and Enhancements. The scale for the sliders ranges from ‘Not Ambitious Enough” to ‘Way to Out There’. If your customization is ‘Way to Out There’ it won’t let you submit it for consideration.
?
Talk about a recipe for mediocrity.
I’m not sure what amazing insights Nokia expects to glean from this experiment, but whatever it’s going to be, it’s not going to be innovative. The only output I see coming from this is some sort of mutant mobile device who’s DNA resides in the iPhone and the competitors it inspired like all the Android Devices, the Palm Pre and the Blackberry Storm.

Senator Pat Geary: Mr. Cici, was there always a buffer involved?
Willi Cici: A what?
Senator Pat Geary: A buffer. Someone in between you and your possible superiors who passed on to you the actual order to kill someone.
Willi Cici: Oh yeah, a buffer. The family had a lot of buffers!
—The Godfather: Part II

Adam Richardson over at frog design wrote a post last week, Microsoft Finds its Innovation Mojo.
He argues that the new crop of products that are either out or being put out by Microsoft are proof that ‘they’re back in the game’.
Richardson writes:

They have been able, to an extent, to systemetize an approach to innovation that began (it seems) with the Xbox team. The Xbox, especially the 360, established a fresh, distinctive approach to development that had been lacking at Microsoft. Innovating on behalf of customers rather than by linearly extrapolating what they say, consideration of a whole ecosystem, and then taking responsibility for the whole Human Experience in that ecosystem.

and:

We see threads of this Xbox approach showing up in most of the new generation of products – Bing, Windows Phone 7, IE9, and Courier.

If it were true that Microsoft has found the secret formula for extra-tasty innovation mojo, then we’d be seeing very different numbers for Microsoft R&D in this chart (via
Gizmodo):

Apple spends less than 4% of their revenue on R&D and Microsoft spends about 17%, yet despite spending 4 times as much, Microsoft it’s not making MS anymore innovation than Apple.
As I’ve written before, an innovative product is one that makes money for the company who created it. Apple didn’t create the concept of the mobile application store (I was downloading Palm applications from the CNet Palm page 10 years ago), but through their Human Experience, design and SDK, they were able to innovate within that space and thus become profitable from it.
The examples Richardson gives are not innovations. WinMo7, IE9 and Courier aren’t even being sold or used yet. We don’t even know if they’ll sell well.
I’ll accept XBox 360 as an example of a commercially successful and innovative product by Microsoft, but unfortunately for Microsoft, it’s a loss leader (via BusinessInsider):

And finally, when it comes down to it, Microsoft really doesn’t understand consumer products (save for it’s XBox division). As Mark Anderson was quoted as saying in the NYTimes, “Phones are consumer items, and Microsoft doesn’t have consumer DNA”.

Remember when compact discs cost upwards of $20 each? I’m talking back in the early ninties days of long boxes.
Well, Universal Music has some news (vis iPodNN):

Universal Music Group on Thursday said it would cut the prices on most CDs to $10 or less. Known as the Velocity program, it would see album prices range between $6 and $10. The label would count on sales volume, as well as costlier deluxe versions, to make up for the lower 25 percent profit margin.

The irony is that CDs should have cost between $6-$10 dollars twenty years ago.
We were squeezed for years by the record labels with their enormous profit margins.
Now they can get the squeeze.

via Modern Mechanix

We’re kicking off ux and design for an iPhone application at Roundarch, and I happened to come across a very insightful post by the infamous Jakob Nielsen on iPhone UI design.
Love him or hate him, he makes some solid points, some of which are obvious, some aren’t. Here are a few that I dug:

A very strong conclusion from our iPhone study is that people install many more apps than they actually use.

If you’re designing a “serious” business app that you think offers real benefits to your customers, you might feel above the fray of rude-bodily-noise apps. But you’re not … Your website is part of the Web ecosystem, and your site’s usability is dictated by the overall Web Human Experience, which is dominated by the sum of all other sites people visit.

Registration can certainly provide added business value and added usage convenience to your customers. But this is true only if people actually complete the registration. Sadly, if you push registration at users before they’re sufficiently convinced of your app’s value, many will simply back right out of the app and never try it again. You’ve then lost the one chance you’ll ever get at making a first impression (actually, any impression).

Continuing my thoughts from last month on the Unified Mobile Platform.
I’ve been thinking about standards and standardization, theory vs practice, and relevance.
Ok, first off, let’s think what would happen if we took the premise of the Unified Mobile Platform (if you want to know what a world of ‘unification’ looks like, check out that beautiful site) and moved it to another industry, say – automobiles.
Suppose all the car makers in the United States banded together ‘for the common good’ in order to create a standard car-type and engine-type. An ‘open ecosystem’ in which all car makers could create cars that whose parts would be compatible with all the other car makers’ parts.
Yeah. It sounds great but it’s bullshit.
It’s bullshit not only because it would never work, but it’s also extremely boring and flies in the face of how innovation, art and expression happen.
Sure, a world full of ‘Ferrari-types’ sounds great, right? Everyone is driving different ‘flavors’ of Ferarris. That’s the ideal scenario, but if this were to really become a reality, and if we know anything about US car makers, we’d most likely be stuck with a country full of Ford Escorts.
Do I really have to say this? Variety is the spice of life. (UGH)
The truth is, even if we lived in a world of Ferraris some people would still be unsatisfied. That’s why we have Lamborghinis and Audis and Porsches and Bugattis and Toyotas and Volkswagens and Jeeps and Chevys and Fords and the dozens of other makes.
Even when we do have alliances and open standards, things don’t always hold together like people envision. Case in point – WebKit. WebKit is the ‘engine’ that power MobileSafari on the iPhone as well as the browsers for Google’s Android OS and Palm’s WebOS.
Actually, here’s a list of browsers that use WebKit. If you notice from that link, the only browser that passes the Acid3 test 100 percent is MobileSafari. So even when you have adoption of open standards, things still diverge and become customized. That’s how humans work. Think about our workspaces. We surround ourselves with plants and lights and figures and pictures and books. At least those of use who are creative do that.
Depending on your point of view, open systems can fall victim to fragmentation, as some say is the case with Google Android …
OR
Open systems can mutate and evolve into different ‘flavors‘, as is the case with the open source operating system, Linux.
The only way to ensure a system neither fragments nor mutates is to have it controlled by one company. Case in point: Apple’s iPhone OS as well as their proprietary DRM technology formerly used on music and currently still in use on their video content. Like it or hate it, Apple has succeeded in creating a completely consistent and stable operating system with iPhone OS because they control (and don’t license) the technology as well as the hardware.
What we’re seeing with the Unified Mobile Platform isn’t a initiative done out of good will and progress, but one done out of fear.

Bloomberg has teamed up with MLB.com to create Bloomberg Sports Fantasy Tools.

I’m like a kid, if you want me to take interest in something, just turn it into a game. Like my addiction to Wii Sports, Push Ups Dojo is a another game to get me off my ass.
Case in point: Push Ups Dojo
The gist: put your iPhone on iPod Touch on the floor in front of your face and tap your nose to the screen as you do push-ups.
It might sound silly, but it makes the push-ups I’ve already been doing for 9 months that much more enjoyable. I don’t have time to go to a gym, nor do I want to pay for a gym membership.
My only complaint is that there looks to be only 4 levels to unlock on this and not to pat myself on the back, but I’ll have the 50 reps level unlocked by Wednesday.

Giving a linkup to my boy Victor’s impressive 2010 portfolio redesign. I first linked up to Victor’s site in 2007 while I was working at Schematic. Two weeks after my linkup, by sheer coincidence, he’s interviewing with my design team and gets hired. Fast forward 3 years and we’re good friends and working together at Roundarch.
So what’s so impressive about this redesign?
Well Vic has managed to tame the beast that is @font-face so you should see custom fonts throughout the site for all the headers, titles and global nav. Mind you it’s real HTML text, and it’s not being rendered with sIFR.
In addition, he’s unified his blog and portfolio on a custom install of WordPress. Sure, this trend might not be new, but he’s taken the time to treat every section of his site differently, in a way that’s appropriate for the content type so the only section that feels like a blog is the actual blog section. A lot of big agencies haven’t even gone that far with their own sites.
…and, he’s also working on some great generative art experiments in Flash.
Big ups.

I don’t have the luxury of being able to write on as much as I’d like so many times topics and theses on my mind end up scattered into separate posts and tweets.
So back to my proposition that Adobe take Flash to it’s logical end and have it function as the core operating system for their own mobile device(s).
It’s important that Adobe make this move because the best examples of Flash are not mere videos players on otherwise HTML-rendered sites. The best examples are those that take over the browser and go fullscreen, where Flash controls the seemless experience from beginning to end. Take a look at the amazing commercial and personal sites on theFWA to see what I’m talking about.
The artists, designers and developers that make the most out of Flash don’t treat it as a plug-in – they treat Flash as their medium.
It’s been very easy for Adobe and the rest of the tech press to point fingers at Apple and their control freak tendencies, claiming that Apple is going to cause Flash’s demise.
It’s in times like these that companies like Adobe need to stop crying like fucking babies, strap a set, and change the rules of the game. Whether or not Steve Jobs called Adobe lazy, I’ll have to agree. Adobe has great opportunities in front of it. Make no mistake that if Adobe does decide to build their own Flash-powered phone, they’ll be taking a huge risk, but a risk well worth the time and money invested.
With so many companies still not understanding that it’s all about having great software, it’s Adobe’s time to shine and not try to compete or try to beat Apple, but just to provide a great product and platform for people to develop for.

I’ve been reading, thinking and talking a lot about the iPhone and iPad and their lack of Adobe Flash. My problem, as always, is that I see both sides of the argument.

The Argument Against Flash

First, I see Jobs’ point of view – Flash is processor hog, buggy and hasn’t been optimized for mobile devices. I also can’t think of one Flash site that would work well when viewed on my iPhone. Youtube helped Apple launch a ‘Flashless’ video application for the iPhone in 2007 so the most popular place for online video was covered from the start.
The other online content not viewable on the iPhone is Flash games, and there are a lot of them. But to that I say native iPhone games are far superior to Flash games. They take advantage of all the native hooks and hardware that Flash games can’t like accelerometers, multi-touch, and OpenGL.
For the past 2 years of owning an iPhone I’ve never had one instance of wishing I had Flash installed. The way I use my iPhone is much different that how I use my MacBook Pro. Obviously Apple has shaped what I view to be a ‘superior’ mobile web experience, but I would argue that even if Flash were installed in Safari from the start, I wouldn’t be trying to view rich, Flash film sites or FWA winners.
The plug-in, a group to which Flash and Java belong, is dead as far as mobile web browsers. Sure, Flash 10.1 is coming to Android, but it’s still not going to be included on the upcoming Windows Phone 7 Series. Flash is actually not on very many mobile units at all (If you want a good laugh, see the amazing non-smart phones that support Flash Lite on Adobe’s site).

What Mikey’s Missing

Now as much as I might not want Flash on my iPhone, I’m also an interactive designer and developer. For the last 11 years, Flash has let me create websites that combine time, sound and motion that ultimately result in an emotional reaction and connection with the viewer. You can’t achieve this with just HTML and CSS (even if you add in JavaScript).
So now that Apple has kneecapped me, making it impossible to create immersive experiences without learning how to use their SDK, what am I do to? The whole beauty of Flash was that it let inexperienced designers create interactive animations, interfaces and applications without having to get a PhD in computer science.

Enter the Adobe Phone

This is the logical next step for Adobe. Over the years, they’ve gradually been giving Flash more and more robust functionality, expanding out from the mere animation realm and into the world of 3-D environments and applications (through Flex and AIR)
Why would Apple ever in their right mind allow Adobe onto their iPhone and continue on this trajectory?
Adobe wants people to continue to make Flash applications and Flash games and be able to deliver them via the web to as many people as possible – and they should, but if they want to see this dream become a reality, they’re going to need to build their own phone.
Over 28 years later, The words of Alan Kay are ringing more true than ever:

Remember, it’s all software, it just depends on when you crystallize it …People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware.

—Alan Kay, Creative Think (computer industry seminar), 1982
We’re seeing this with all the major mobile players now – even Microsoft is cracking down on how customizable their new mobile OS is, and how particular the hardware requirements are.
I don’t know about you, but I can picture the Adobe Phone. It’s a phone that lets Flash have complete access to all levels of the unit, runs smooth, fast and doesn’t drain resources because it has no longer been relegated to a mere plug-in.
The Adobe Phone would also let interactive designers like me design, test and deploy our creations without application submissions and approval processes. I’ve been doing it for years on my own as a web designer with an FTP program and web browser. It shouldn’t be any different for mobile phones.
Apple has proven when you build a great platform, great things are possible from the community that adopts it. Adobe should know this first hand from the millions of people who create amazing games, applications and experiences with Flash – why not leverage that community on their own phone with their own platform?
The solution to the problem lies within the problem itself. Adobe, you don’t need the iPhone or the iPad to be a success. Make your own platform. Make your own phone. It could really be awesome.