Category Archives:

Foresight

Posted on August 21, 2007 by Avi Flax

Moviestar: Big Step Towards Flash on iPhone

I've believed for a while now that Flash is coming to the iPhone, sooner or later - emphasis on sooner. Today's announcement and beta release of Moviestar make me feel even more certain.

Here's why I think Flash is coming to the iPhone:

Apple wants it. Steve Jobs has referred to the Internet experience with the iPhone as "The Real Internet". For better or for worse, today that means Flash content. Until Flash is built-in to the iPhone, it only offers most of "The Real Internet". If it's not the same experience you can get with Firefox, IE, or Safari, it's not "The Real Internet". (Can you tell that I don't love that phrase?) Jobs knows this. Flash on the iPhone = more iPhones sold.

Adobe wants it. Flash's reach and market penetration are a bragging point, and a source of clout. They want people developing Flash sites and apps for the iPhone, so they can sell more copies of Flash and Flex Builder and so the patina of the iPhone rubs off on them. Everyone wants piece of the iPhone pie, and adobe isn't immune.

Apple and Adobe are tight. Their goals are aligned, and they know how to work together.

Walt Mossberg says so.

At launch, the iPhone version of the Safari browser is missing some plug-ins needed for playing common types of Web videos. The most important of these is the plug-in for Adobe's Flash technology. Apple says it plans to add that plug-in through an early software update, which I am guessing will occur within the next couple of months.

The technical hurdles are fixable. The primary hurdle is CPU usage, and along with it, battery life. This is fixable. H.264 encoding goes a long way toward fixing this, because the iPhone includes a hardward H.264 decoder. Hardware decoding is way more efficient than software decoding, and video is a large portion of usage of Flash in today's web. MobileSafari's JavaScript engine also demonstrates that some minor tweaks to a scripting engine can help prevent badly coded scripts from sucking precious watts. I wouldn't be surprised if Adobe made similar modifications to Tamarin for the iPhone.

The Flash player dev team is on a roll. Version 9 is a huge success, and ActionScript 3 is a great language. They haven't rested on their laurels either: since v9 was released for Mac and Windows, they've released a bevy of improvements, such as full screen support, today's H.264 support, and support for other platforms, such as Linux and the Wii. Do you really think it'd be a big deal for them to dev a iPhone build with some CPU-saving customizations? I think not. The iPhone, after all, is essentially a Mac running customized versions of OS X and Aqua and some novel hardware. For an example of the competence of the team members, see Tinic Uro's What just happened to video on the web? or Mike Melanson's blog Penguin.SWF.

Apple's Customers Want It. This is last because I think it's actually the least important - for better or for worse, Apple doesn't have a great track record of implementing features just because customers ask for them. Anyway, people who buy the iPhone so they can use "The Real Internet" are going to be annoyed when they find that some sites just don't work, or work partially, or look different. (Regular, non-geek people, that is. Geeks already know Flash isn't supported, so while they may be disgruntled, they aren't surprised.)

If there are so many reasons why, you might be wondering: what's taking so long? The basic answer: it's important enough to both Apple and Adobe that they're taking the time to do it right. While I've already explained why I think it'll happen, and why the hurdles are jumpable, I'm not saying it's easy. Apple in particular has a lot to lose. They need to tread lightly with iPhone stability and battery life. It's a phone, not a computer, and people have very high expectations of stability and availability for a phone - far more than a computer. One risky software update, a couple of hundred phone crashes, and the media could jump on the issue in an iFeedingFrenzy. (Yes, I know the iPhone technically is a computer, I use it here as it's used on the street, to mean a general-purpose system, which are historically not completely stable.)

So that's my prediction. And who knows, after Flash, we might even see two-click application installation on the iPhone with AIR.

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Posted on January 29, 2007 by Richard Ziade

RIA's & Revolutionary Design

Desktop. Web. Web Desktop. Portals. Widgets. Gadgets. Pageflakes(?). Sidebars.

It's as if we've taken the content and applications on the web and run them through one of those made-for-TV slice and dice contraptions.

It's an exciting time for software development and more importantly...experience design. There are two clearly distinct experiences today for the great majority of users: the desktop and the web. As we trend away from this distinction the possibilities really take off.

At Arc90, we're investing a lot of our brainpower on Adobe's Flex platform, and we're excited to see how nicely our investment will pay off on the desktop with Apollo - Adobe's cross-OS runtime. It brings the power and ubiquity of Flash to both Windows and Mac desktops. Apollo isn't publicly available just yet, but the buzz is already building.

While it's cool to think up new and neat ways to deliver web functionality on the desktop, that's just the tip of the iceberg. To really leverage zero-installation platforms like Apollo, we need to start thinking in a new paradigm. A paradigm that blows away notions of URL's, install packages, and that critical line between "application" and the "assets" or "currency" that application helps us manage.

With RIA's like Apollo, the distinction between delivering that currency or what we commonly recognize as "data" and the application itself are blurred. The technologies to deliver functionality and end-user experiences right along with the payload are finally arriving. For designers and developers, this challenges us to rethink how we design and deliver this new breed of software.

To date, the critical barrier of adoption of tools today - especially collaborative or communication tools - is the daunting "setup process." Download this, save it somewhere, install it, and shift how you think and work around it. Web apps address this to a large extent, but web apps have their own baggage: they're limited to your browser's walls.

With this new frontier, we're able to do a few things differently. At the risk of sounding...spooky: we really don't need to "release" applications anymore. Applications can seep into people's desktop experiences, thus drastically reducing the work people often put into dealing with new applications. Furthermore, applications can and should evolve over time. The days of major bundles of functionality packed into "major" releases can give way to gradual, incremental augmentation.

Adobe and others have taken care of the technology part of the equation. Now that we're armed with this new platform, the real challenge is learning to truly treat it like a new way of doing things, and not just as an evolutionary step for the web or desktop.

The more I think about it, the more I'm convinced this isn't about exposing some API in a new skin or widget. It's about taking a look at this new landscape and inventing something truly new. Something that, had we not had this new technology, we would've never been able to pull it off in any of the ecosystems we have today.

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Posted on November 1, 2006 by Richard Ziade

Taking The Beyond-The-Browser Leap

[I]t's not Ajax or Java - it's Flash. Flash continues its march towards world domination, if it's not there already.

That's Techcrunch talking about Scrybe, the hot new calendaring tool. It's a very slick looking tool with an elegant interface. It's also a glimpse into where we think things are headed.

Continue reading "Taking The Beyond-The-Browser Leap" »

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Posted on June 1, 2006 by Richard Ziade

The Spirit Of Web 2.0

For the past couple of months, we’ve been grappling with how best to market what Arc90 actually does. Are we a design firm? Are we a “web shop” (*shudder*)? Are we all about strategic consulting? It’s hard to distill all the different angles of what we do into a few words (or some sort of “process diagram”).

Luckily, we have a blog that allows us to ramble on and (and on) about all the different aspects of Arc90. After some debate, we begrudgingly agreed to slap the “Web 2.0” label on ourselves. Now, there isn’t an agreed-upon Web 2.0 definition out there. And we’re not only about a laundry list of technologies like tagging and RSS. As a “Web 2.0” consulting firm, I think we’re more about the spirit of Web 2.0 than anything else.

Which of course leads to the next question: what in Sam Hill is the spirit of Web 2.0? Well, for us it’s about:

  • A strong emphasis on good, intuitive, simple, user-centered design.
  • A willingness to question and defy common ways of solving problems.
  • An overriding passion about technology – from design to architecture to development.
  • Having the guts to not only meet client needs, but help guide them to bigger and better things (this is a side-effect of the whole “passion” thing).
  • Evangelizing the notion of “architectural readiness” – helping companies ready themselves for changes to come, and not just react to them.

What excites us about Web 2.0 is that it is a truly organic creation. It’s not borne out of some standards body or anointed by some big corporate behemoth but just sort of sprung out of the intelligence, curiosity and enthusiasm of a widely connected community. RSS. Ajax. Simple APIs. They’re not just technologies but powerful statements against bloat, over-use of technology and beuracracy.

It’s an exciting time to be in technology and we’re glad to be in the middle of it.

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