Russell Wark

Saviour.

Mon, 01 Feb 2010 19:29:00 -0500

Steve Jobs did an interview session after the Apple keynote last week where he covered, amongst other things, his attitude to Google and Adobe Flash. The man didn’t mince with words, branding Adobe as “lazy” and Google’s “don’t be evil” mantra as “bullshit”. I have a lot of respect for him, but I must admit to being disappointed with his comments.

Apple’s enmity with Google is somewhat understandable, what with Apple firing Eric Schmidt from their board of directors due to conflicts of interest, and Google entering the smartphone market with the Android OS. But their problem with Adobe is considerably more unfathomable – it can be argued that Adobe saved Apple when they were at their lowest ebb.

Adobe was Apple’s saviour for many years. Historically, many people bought Macs because it was the better platform for using Photoshop and Illustator, and the Mac became known as a “designer’s computer” because of it. These are the people who still bought Macs during their struggling, Jobs-less years in the mid-90s, and when the man himself made a comeback and announced the iMac, Power Mac and Powerbook ranges, they were the first in line to buy them. Apple obviously tries to occupy the “good for everything” space these days, but they can’t be biting the hand that feeds them – many current Mac users are long-time platform loyalists, brought to the platform because of the superior Adobe application experience. And since Adobe’s acquisition of Macromedia, Flash has joined the fray – almost every Flash designer and developer I know works on a Mac, again for the superior user experience.

Flash occupies a unique space in the fabric of the Web – a proprietary, third-party plug-in that has almost universal penetration. Adobe claims 97% penetration amongst Web users, and, from what I can tell, they’re not lying. Sure, many people deride Flash for allowing people to design horribly bloated animations, clunky user experiences and valueless “eye candy”, but for every one of these, there’s a YouTube, Google Maps (street view) or Hulu – sites that make full use of Flash as an enhancement to the user experience. Much of what these sites do simply cannot be done any other way. It’s not a bad platform, it’s just that some bad designers and programmers have taken advantage of it, just like every other platform. HTML5 may be the future, but until it allows you to do all the things you can do with Flash, and do them in a user-friendly fashion that doesn’t require someone building a simple Web animation to be a Javascript guru, and until it gets mainstream support from Microsoft in Internet Explorer, it’s still going to be some time before it can take up Flash’s mantle as the preferred rich media technology on the Web. And, looking towards the future, some of the things that have been done in the augmented reality space in Flash, as well as in the realm of 3D, cannot be replicated with any other online technology.

Since its introduction as FutureSplash Animator in 1995, Flash has come along in leaps and bounds as a technology platform. Initially just an animation platform intended to replace the venerable animated GIF, it has evolved to have its own powerful programming and scripting language in ActionScript, hugely powerful animation support, incorporating elements such as inverse kinematics and physics, and simple and powerful video support that powers almost all video on the Web. Also, its abilities as a platform for rich internet applications are unrivalled – just check out any car manufacturer’s website (specifically, their “car configurators”) to see what can be done with it. What’s more, it does all this in a platform-agnostic fashion, meaning any site you build with Flash will render identically across all platforms, bypassing all browser compatability issues. There’s also the fact that it can be used to develop and deploy platform-agnostic desktop applications using Adobe AIR – this is the technology that powers the likes of TweetDeck.

Yes, I am a Flash apologist (not to mention a Macromedia Certified Flash Developer). I think it’s a great technology, and, what’s more, I think it’s the best route into a career in programming for young people. When I was a spotty, nerdy 10-year-old, I learned to program using BASIC on my Sinclair Spectrum. It was right there on the computer, enabled me to do “cool” things (well, “cool” being relative – this was 1982) and gave me a good grounding for the career I now enjoy. Computers these days don’t come with built-in programming languages, let alone anything that enables you to do something relatively “cool” with not too much work. For the most part, nowadays, if you want to learn to program a computer, you have to go to college. You could always install Visual Studio on your PC, or Xcode on your Mac, but you’d quickly learn that it takes many lines of code just to open a window and display, “hello world”. Plus, you have to worry about compiling, linking, dependencies, stack pointers and all those kinds of things. So, as a 13-year-old who likes computers and thinks they might like to do something a bit more ambitious than playing video games and going on MySpace, what do you do? You quit the application and fire up World Of Warcraft instead, because it’s more fun and doesn’t have a stupidly huge learning curve. Plus, in this increasingly social online world we live in, a window showing “hello world” isn’t exactly something you’d want to share with your friends. How about a technology that enables you to do fun animations with easy interactivity, all without doing loads of hard coding, then being able to output it in a format you can embed right on your MySpace page? And, if you do want to get cleverer, you’ll be using ActionScript, a programming language that, being an ECMAscript-based language, gives you the much of the knowledge you’d need to program in all the commercially desirable languages (C++, Java, Javascript, etc), and which is also a career path in itself.

As far as Apple supporting Flash on their mobile devices, Adobe, on the surface, seems a bit stuck for options, since I’d imagine asking Apple to incorporate the Flash Player is like banging your head against a brick wall. However, there has been some progress – a very clever chap called Tobias Schneider has written Gordon – a version of the Flash runtime ported to Javascript, thus enabling a very limited degree of Flash support. It’s slow, it’s missing quite a few features, but it works. Safari 4 (including Mobile Safari, the iPhone and iPad browser) and Google Chrome have made huge advances in the processing speed of Javascript recently, so I think Adobe’s tactic should be to provide a feature-complete version of the Flash Player implemented in Javascript, therefore bypassing the whole plug-in architecture entirely. Mr. Schneider’s work might not be feature-complete, but it’s a very good proof-of-concept. In technical terms, you could have some sniffer code that detects if a browser is HTML5-capable, then sets up a custom

People, including the eminent Mr Jobs, should stop fighting Flash. In fact, I think Adobe should make deals with Microsoft and Apple to provide a version of the Flash IDE on all new computers. You may deride it, but the Web would be a much more boring place without Flash. You wouldn’t have YouTube, Hulu and FarmVille, for a start.

Gamechanger.

Thu, 28 Jan 2010 00:00:00 -0500

So, yesterday was the big day. Mr. Jobs came out, did his “reality distortion field” thing and announced the Apple iPad. On the surface, it’s a typically technolust-worthy Apple device with a ton of cool features. But is that enough? I must admit, I’m somewhat on the fence about it. It’s certainly a beautiful object, as is almost everything designed by Jonathan Ives, but what will be its niche?

There are a bunch of missing features that the blogosphere has exploded in a paroxysm of discontent about – namely, the lack of ports, the lack of Flash support in the browser, the lack of a camera, and the lack of multitasking. Will these things cause the iPad to be stillborn, or is it not even aimed at these people? Did we set our expectations too high?

Let’s investigate their complaints a bit more closely. Firstly, lots of people are lamenting the lack of SD card and USB slots on the device – this, to me, is the least of its problems – for a start, Apple are offering USB and SD card adapters, and you can always sync to your desktop for any situation where this won’t work. It’s not a device designed to be used in isolation. It’ll function autonomously, but you’ll still need a desktop or laptop to make the most of it. In this regard, it’s like the iPhone. Meaning, those who are used to the iPhone will be right at home.

Now, Flash support I have a bit more of a problem with. Apple have thus far refused to support Flash on the iPhone – given the size and limited processor power of the device, this is somewhat forgivable. But on a device with a decent-size screen that claims to be the “best” way to surf the Internet – not good. I have previously posted on here about the wonders of the HTML5/CSS3/jQuery triumvirate as a way to implement rich media – Apple are obviously hoping that things move in this direction and are doing their best to nudge things that way, but until it is fully supported by Internet Explorer (which still, alas, has the lion’s share of the browser market) it’s going to remain a niche technology, requiring you to essentially develop your Web site twice. Apparently Flash has 97% market penetration, so, for now, it’s still the rich media technology of choice. Apple have definitely missed a trick here. They need to kiss and make up with Adobe, fast. And get them to do a version of Photoshop for the iPad while they’re at it.

Next, the lack of Web cam and multitasking. I’m going to group these together, as, in my experience, people tend to use messaging apps such as iChat, Windows Live Messenger and Skype while they’re doing other things. On the iPad, this isn’t possible right now. You chat or browse the Web, not both at the same time. The platform is perfectly capable of multitasking – you can listen to music using the built-in music player while browsing the Web, for instance, but Apple doesn’t allow for it in their software development kit – they’re keeping it to themselves. Multitasking functionality has already been enabled on the iPhone by the hacking community – it’s something that those people who have been brave enough to “jailbreak” their iPhones have been able to have for a while now. Official support for multitasking is something to hopefully look forward to in the forthcoming iPhone OS 4.0 (which may well hit before the iPad goes on sale), but, for now, it’s not happening. So, for those of you who were hoping to use the new iWork software while listening to Pandora and IM’ing your friends, you will be disappointed. The actual lack of a camera was probably done to keep down the price point, to compete with the Kindle DX, but it would have been nice to see the higher-end, 3G-equipped models with a camera. The other reason I can see why Apple are discouraging multitasking is that, despite the iPad having a decent amount of storage space, it doesn’t have much actual system RAM (memory) – if you run multiple things at the same time, they all have to live in RAM, so by disallowing it, they’re enabling developers to make better use of the available memory. But, for many, this won’t be a dealbreaker, especially if they’re used to the way the iPhone works. In fact, in terms of Web cam functionality, I wouldn’t be surprised to see Apple come out with an external Web cam for it at some point.

The other thing that Apple wasn’t clear about in their presentation was the capabilities of iWork – it offers that kind of hands-on document processing experience I was hoping for in my last blog post on the subject, but will people find it useful? On the surface, sure. It looks great, has a funky user interface, and can be used with an external keyboard. But will it save Word and Excel documents? They said it will open them, but will it save them again? According to the Apple Web site, it’ll save documents only in iWork and PDF formats. This will most certainly be a dealbreaker for many, many people who use Microsoft Office. The desktop version of iWork is a great and successful attempt at making a more user-friendly office suite, but it only has a fraction of the market penetration that Microsoft Office has. Apple knows this, hence the desktop version of iWork quite happily exports Word and Excel files, so it’s perfectly possible to do – hopefully this won’t pass them by. There are apps on the App Store that allow you to create, edit and save Microsoft Office files, so even if Apple don’t do it, someone else will. Also, Apple have broadened the scope of what they’re letting programmers do with the device – for instance, the new iPhone/iPad SDK, has opened up the possibility of using VoIP (voice over IP) apps over a 3G connection, hence it could be used as a phone if you really wanted to (not that I know anyone who’d want to hold something the size of a big, thick magazine up to their ear in public).

The main bone of contention seems to be, what can the iPad do that a netbook can’t? Netbooks have Flash, can multitask, can play media, often come with Web cams and aren’t subject to the software restrictions of the App Store. To be honest, in terms of actual tasks, yes, you can do more on a netbook, for less money. But that’s not really what the iPad is about. A netbook is, at the end of the day, a small laptop. The iPad isn’t – it wasn’t designed to be. It seems to have been designed to fill a narrower niche – primarily as an anytime-anywhere media consumption device, with some additional productivity functionality. Think back to when the iPhone was first announced – some people were underwhelmed with the hardware, some thought it was too gimmicky and some just downright thought it was crap. But nobody could have foreseen the impact of the App Store and how ubiquitous the device has become. Every mobile phone nowadays is trying to be the iPhone. That’s because Apple offered the iPhone as a platform, rather than just a device. What made the iPhone was what people did with it. So let’s see what the app developers out there can come up with. They have a whole new platform, new form factor and a new operating system that makes the most of them to play with, and, based on what they’ve done on the iPhone, I have faith in their creativity.

The best summary I’ve read so far of the iPad launch and people’s apparent ambivalence to it is by Stephen Fry, the British master of wit and wisdom, comedy partner of Hugh “House” Laurie, and dedicated Apple fanboy. He attended the launch, and has some very reasonable comments about the device’s pros and cons, stated far more eloquently than I can manage. Basically, the device isn’t aimed at people like me – it’s not designed to be a laptop replacement heavy on the geek credentials. I already own a MacBook for all that stuff. Think of it more as an appliance, like a portable TV, and it starts to make more sense. This is something your grandma could use while relaxing on the sofa – she could do some basic Web browsing and e-mail, read a Barbara Cartland novel and listen to some easy listening music in a way that she’d probably get utterly lost with on a regular computer. Am I going to get one? Maybe. It’d be an ideal device to help make those 7-hour flights back to the UK pass more quickly. Let’s see what software those clever people out there in programmer-land make for it by launch day – it’s the software that will sell it to me.

Software.

Sun, 24 Jan 2010 00:00:00 -0500

The intertubes are awash with speculation regarding Apple’s big product announcement next week. Will it be the fabled tablet? Will it be some other paradigm-shifting innovation of earth-shattering, elephantine proportions? Maybe. But, let’s be honest here, none of us know for sure what it’ll be. But, if it is the tablet, it’s not like it’s something new. So, for the sake of this blog post, let’s assume it is.

Tablet-style computing has been available for a while now. From the nascent days of Apple’s own Newton (pictured at left), through the Palm Pilot and the briefly popular UMPCs, to today’s touchscreen laptops, it’s not a new technology. What’s going to sell Apple’s tablet will be the software. In order for Apple to succeed with a tablet, they need to come up with something that you can’t do on any other form factor.

The problem with tablet computing is, nobody’s managed to actually make it make any sense. What would you actually use it for? Why would you use it instead of a regular laptop? As any iPhone owner will attest to, using a touchscreen keyboard to actually do any work with isn’t easy. In fact, it’s downright frustrating. Ever tried writing a blog post on an iPhone? I have. No keycaps to feel, so no touch-typing, no tactile feedback… so, let’s assume that it won’t be targetted at the word processing or blogging fraternity. What if you’re just a regular Joe or Josephine who only wants to browse the Web? Again, as the iPhone has proven, a multitouch-enabled browser can work well, but again, what additional utility would a tablet have in this regard over a netbook with a proper keyboard? And then there’s media. A tablet would work very well as a video player – the screen’s big enough to actually watch a film on without hurting your eyes. But there are dedicated devices for that already, or you still have the option of a netbook or laptop. Same goes for e-reader functionality, and so on.

If you dare to think outside the box, there’s loads you could do with a multitouch interface that would be difficult or impossible with a regular keyboard/mouse combo. For instance, a 3D interface controlled by both hands, where you can grab, move and manipulate objects onscreen. Or even a game that works like this? Or, for classic productivity applications, a document processor program that fully supports manipulating page content with multitouch controls. How about a file manager (in Apple parlance, the “Finder”) that functions like a real-life set of document folders, where you can use multitouch gestures to actually manipulate them? This could even be the ideal interface for navigating the mythical 3D Web that we’ve heard so much about over the years but never actually seen. I mean, to date, has there been a computer-based touchscreen program that can actually contribute to your productivity over and above what you can do with a keyboard and mouse? Short of using a Wacom pad with Photoshop, not really.

It’s not that the technology doesn’t exist for something like this, it’s more that nobody has built an operating system to take full advantage of it. No other device, with the exception of the iPhone (or, perhaps, the Microsoft Surface), has been built around this kind of technology. Windows 7, while supporting multitouch, is still built around the notion of being used with the traditional keyboard/mouse combo. Even Apple’s own Snow Leopard OS, while supporting multitouch gestures via the funky trackpads on the MacBook range, or, more recently, the even funkier Magic Mouse, doesn’t have any intrinsically useful multitouch functionality to offer, since the Mac still has to work within the familiar WIMP paradigm, not to mention that most Mac legacy software doesn’t support it. If you have a new computing device built around the whole concept of a multitouch touchscreen, with no considerations of having to support legacy software, all of a sudden your boundaries open up.

Apple has proved, time and time again, that they can innovate like no other technology company out there. Look at the Mac. The iPod. The iPhone. They’ve all set the standard for virtually every other device that’s followed them. Every mobile phone nowadays is compared to the iPhone. Every portable music player is compared to the iPod. Every computer is compared to a Mac. Apple isn’t afraid to “think different”, and, come next Wednesday, us fanboys aren’t going to be let down, whatever it is they announce. But will it be the game-changer we’re all hoping for? We’ll know on January 27.

Mobile.

Sun, 29 Nov 2009 11:44:37 -0500

It’s been the clarion call for the technology industry for a few years now - “the future is mobile”.

It does indeed seem to be the case, with the stratospheric growth of smartphones, netbooks and mobile broadband, but there are still so many missing links. It seems none of these devices is really the “catch-all” that their makers want them to be. They’re close, and getting closer all the time, but still not quite there yet. This is a result of throwing everything but the kitchen sink at these devices and seeing what sticks.

Take the most fundamental usage of these devices - being a mobile phone. Does this new generation of smartphones do this better than the previous generation? Not really. Battery life is worse, call quality seems to have been sidelined and the user interface hasn’t been tailored to that application. It’s just one more thing these devices can do. My old Nokia 3310 that I used nearly 10 years ago had better call quality and far, far better battery life than an iPhone. The phone navigation was intuitive (you could easily operate it without even looking) and it had a tactile quality these multi-purpose devices lack.

What we have to bear in mind is that my old Nokia was a product of evolutionary development - as far removed from the likes of the old Motorola DynaTAC as the iPhone is from the Apple Newton, with multiple generations and innovations coming to fruition. The current generation of mobile über-devices is still at an early stage of evolutionary development, and, fantastic that they already are, still have a level of maturity to reach. With the advent of haptics, soon these devices will have the tactile feedback we’ve gotten used to with our old phones. New battery technology (possibly even fuel cell technology) will address battery life concerns, and 4G mobile broadband technologies should address concerns about call quality and data speed, not to mention other innovations that we haven’t even conceived of yet.

Sure, I could carry around a mobile phone, a netbook, a 3G USB modem, a GPS sat-nav, a portable video player, a digital radio and an iPod, but I’d rather not weigh my pockets down with so many gadgets. I’m all for just having the catch-all device, and the day will come when we look back on the iPhone the same way we look back at the DynaTAC now.

Essential.

Sun, 29 Nov 2009 11:43:53 -0500

For many businesses, the killer app for introducing computers to the workplace was e-mail. Nowadays, we all take this most ubiquitous of communication methods for granted - it has supplanted telephones, regular mail, fax and even in-person meetings for many applications, and, yet, this technology hasn’t significantly changed since its birth at MIT in 1965.

If you look at almost every other aspect of electronic communication via the internet, they have all evolved at a rapid pace - the World Wide Web of 1999 looked and functioned far differently than it does now, not to mention the huge growth of instant messaging, IP telephony and social networking. So, why has e-mail stayed so resolute in its resistance to change? And what, if anything, will it evolve into?

Firstly, e-mail, and its associated protocols, is now so ubiquitous that any significant change to its functionality and capabilities would still have to cater to a huge “lowest common denominator” audience, and would require huge (meaning, in business terms, expensive) infrastructural changes. Just look at the difficulty many businesses and users have had with such a seemingly simple task as migrating away from Internet Explorer 6! E-mail facilitated the internet, it came first, and the internet is built on the foundations that were put in place for e-mail.

Secondly, it’s simple. Really simple. My 64-year-old mother can send an email, yet she knows practically nothing else about computers. Its ease of use and accessibility is probably responsible for many people buying their first computer. How else are they going to receive regular doses of unfunny jokes, amusing cat pictures and “male enhancement” pill adverts?

And thirdly, what would you upgrade it to, or replace it with? E-mail, as a technology, is showing its age. It’s not the most secure communications medium, its support for rich media is spotty, and the phenomenon of “spam” is a constant irritation. But, despite these shortcomings, for general electronic communications, nothing else is as widespread, nor works as well. Various other technologies have threatened it, most recently with the likes of Facebook and Twitter, but these are basically still niche applications, tailored to a particular method of communicating and restricted to a particular channel, and therefore not as universally useful as e-mail.

The nearest thing to a real contender that has emerged recently would be Google Wave - the best description of which would be “collaborative e-mail”, mixing the functionalities of e-mail, instant messaging, status updates and wiki-style collaborative document editing into one open platform. If Google can get traction for this technology, then traditional e-mail may have a fight on its hands, but it will be an uphill battle to make this happen. I wish them luck - if anyone can achieve this herculean task, it’s Google.

Even in this constantly changing technological world, with many early adopters of new technologies, many things are still entrenched. And e-mail is one of the most entrenched of all. Why? Well, to appropriate an Apple catchphrase, “it just works”.

Cloud.

Sun, 29 Nov 2009 11:43:20 -0500

In their constant (and winning) battle to be the leading ambassadors and evangelists of cloud computing, Google upped the stakes yesterday with their announcement of Chrome OS.

Chrome OS is a very lightweight operating system designed specifically for netbooks and other such devices, and basically consists of nothing but a browser (a variant on Google’s own Chrome browser), with all applications and data storage moved to the cloud. This makes the OS extremely lightweight, and a machine running Chrome OS will boot from cold in 5-7 seconds. Google has specified a specific hardware platform for it too - it will only run on machines with solid-state hard drives, and with certain specific display hardware, in order to optimise the experience. Since the OS allows no other installed apps other than the browser, right now you would be somewhat limited with what you could do with a machine running Chrome - there’s currently nothing online that can replicate the functionality of Photoshop, for instance (Adobe’s Photoshop Online doesn’t really count, since it only offers a fraction of the functionality of even their most basic desktop offering, Photoshop Elements). But, for many users out there, all they will want to do is browse the web, check their e-mail and occasionally edit a document in Google Docs, so, for them, it will probably be more than adequate.

Google’s strategy is apparent - they want to encourage developers to create online equivalents to popular applications, eventually offering all the functionality of common desktop apps. They have the right browser for it - Chrome (the browser) is, by far, the fastest current-generation web browser, capable of running web apps significantly quicker than the competition. It also fully supports the latest web standards (HTML 5 and CSS 3) that Google is hoping developers will adopt and use to make the experience of using a website to do your work slicker and closer to the desktop experience. Already, Google’s own cloud apps (Google Docs, Picasa, Gmail, Google Maps and the forthcoming Wave) have made inroads into the enterprise market, and with greater adoption of the Chrome OS, this will only grow.

Google’s ambitions for Chrome OS are impressive, but it relies on one aspect that is central to its existence - you will need internet connectivity to do anything with it at all. Now, great strides have been made with so-called “ubiquitous” internet access, with widely available public wi-fi, 3G modems and so on, but by no means is it even close to being “ubiquitous”. There are many areas where 3G connectivity is not available (especially outside places such as North America and Western Europe), and, while “wardrivers” can usually scout out an area and find an unencrypted wi-fi connection to abuse, your average user won’t have the slightest idea how to do that. Also, what about people who travel a lot? Travellers are part of the core market for netbooks, and users may want to work or be entertained while on a plane or bus. You can’t access YouTube or Pandora without an internet connection, since, without the facility to store audio or video locally on the machine, that’s all you’d have available.

What we have here is something essentially from computing history - a thin client, also known as a “dumb terminal”. Back in the day, computer “terminals” did nothing except provide a way to access the computing power and storage of a big mainframe somewhere else. This is a modern, internet-connected version of the same thing, and will enable hardware manufacturers to make lightweight, cheap and simple computers geared to nothing except internet access. Finally, a netbook running Chrome OS might be the computer your grandparents have been waiting for - a safe, secure browser, no spyware or viruses to worry about, and an idiot-proof user interface that is virtually self-maintaining. The day will come when we will all have ubiquitous internet connectivity, and I applaud Google for pushing technology in this direction, since it’s basically inevitable that eventually everything will be in the cloud. I just don’t think the world’s quite ready for it yet. But, when it is, Google will be waiting.

Google have been able to shape the internet in their image, thanks to their sheer pervasiveness, who’s to say they won’t do the same with Chrome OS?

Competition.

Thu, 29 Oct 2009 11:56:45 -0400

It takes significantly more effort to engage the imagination of a thirty-something than it does of a twelve-year-old, that’s for sure.

That’s probably why I don’t play video games as much as I used to. Combine that with meatspace responsibilities such as work, the time constraints of other hobbies and pastimes and, of course, spending quality time with your significant other, and gaming can get seriously sidelined. I couldn’t get away with doing what I used to do - staying up all night playing Millennium 2.2, then turning up for school the next day a bit bleary-eyed, coasting through the day, then returning to where I left off when I got home. Yet, when I did play that game, I was in that world. Very few games these days make me feel that, and I think that’s more about me than about the games. I think my capacity for imagination has waned over the years, and that’s sad.

I need an imagination kickstart.

I used to be full of good ideas, original thoughts and drive to achieve them. I want that back - I liked having that. Maybe if that does happen, I might actually be interested in games again.

Adulthood.

Wed, 21 Oct 2009 13:31:00 -0400

It’s time to join the ranks of the adult population, finally, 37 years on from the womb. I’m going to be a dad next year.

All that real-world stuff about being settled, security, finances, responsibility and stuff is staring me in the face like it never has before. Some people believe this to mean you have to change everything about your life - but I think you can work around it. No way am I giving up on the things I enjoy. I’ll still play music, I’ll still enjoy a drink or ten, I’ll still go to gigs… there’s time and energy enough for everything. No way am I going to be a boring dad.

Like someone much wiser than me once said, you always grow out of childhood, but you need never grow out of immaturity.

EDIT: Fatherhood is no longer impending. I’d got rather used to the idea too.

Accumulation.

Sun, 11 Oct 2009 23:51:24 -0400

It’s amazing the amount of assorted detritus you accumulate over the years. When I first moved out to the US in 2005, I pretty much threw almost everything I owned into a bunch of cardboard boxes, shipped them over here, then promptly forgot all about most of it.

So, today I decided to break open some of those boxes and sort through some of the stuff I’d gathered over the years. Wow. Just, wow. I found my 18th birthday card from my mother, as well as almost every birthday card from her since. I found two old filofaxes, one of which chronicles my old demoscene days, complete with a long list of “contacts”, and the other documents much of my college days, complete with London travelcards circa 1991. There was loads more too - a huge stack of old photos, various old cassettes (including a much-liked mix tape someone made for me quite a few years back), a heap of stuff relating to my old bands (including a one-off 10” single we did), hundreds of old gig tickets, and loads more.

It’s hard not to take a saunter down memory lane when you unearth this sort of stuff. So I did. And what I came up with was quite surprising.

The amount of people who have come and gone through my life is quite staggering. People who you were once inseparable friends with, and now you can’t even remember their surnames. People you have annoyed and alienated without really knowing why or how. The things you have done that, although fairly significant at the time, have faded into irrelevance.

I miss my old bands. I miss some of my old friends and some of the old places that I used to go to. But things move on for a reason, and, despite some good memories, there are things I have no interest in revisiting, other than keeping the occasional keepsake.

My “old” life was good. But so’s my new one. And I intend to make it keep getting better.

Demonstration.

Mon, 17 Aug 2009 00:36:01 -0400

Back in the dim and distant past (well, 1987 to be exact), I was a spotty, chubby, geeky teenager, and I got into something somewhat different to most other spotty, geeky teenagers of the time.

While they were all off getting drunk for the first time, desperately trying to lose their virginity and generally being all teenage and obnoxious, I was part of the Amiga demoscene.

This scene contained some of the strangest, yet most intelligent people you could have ever met. It was a world of computer hardware manuals, bad fashion sense, worse haircuts, social awkwardness, and probably the only place where someone’s two favourite bands could be Iron Maiden and Erasure. We were all misfits, but brilliant misfits.

The demoscene was born of the software piracy scene - basically, lots of guys in Germany and Scandinavia acquiring games and other software before its release in the shops (by somewhat shady means) and distributing it via the post and old-school BBSs (and the blazing speed of the 14.4kbaud modem) to the world. “Zero-day warez” was their battle cry. Demos were a statement of intent by these groups - showing everyone else in that scene how good they all were at programming, graphics and music, and at pushing the hardware of the computers of the time to their limits. These groups inadvertently destroyed the market for Amiga software, but also later gave the interactive entertainment industry some of their most gifted people.

Many of these programmers, artists and musicians later found employment within the video games industry - the very industry they were subverting by pirating games. Oh, the irony. But these people had honed their skills in a competitive environment, trying to outdo every other upstart demo group with ever-more-impressive displays of programming acumen. This gave them the edge over the more pedestrian, school-educated programmers and some of them went on to great things. For instance, several of my former group-mates had huge successes in the games business - one of them runs the company that makes all the Lego games, others programmed Micro Machines for Codemasters and worked on Tomb Raider for Eidos. Hardly small-time stuff.

Sure, we could have been out there sniffing glue, but the kids who did this wouldn’t have wanted anything to do with us - we were far too nerdy. So we gave ourselves pseudonyms, and carved out our own brand of coolness. We were nobodies to the so-called “cool” kids out there, but we were heroes to some. “Legends in our own raster-time”, we used to say. We made ourselves into characters in a digital soap opera - complete with the requisite dysfunction and feuding, all played out through the medium of the “scrolltext”. A ubiquitous and essential component of any demo, the scrolltext conveyed the personalities of those involved, provided “greets” to their friends (one of the earliest forms of digital kudos) and “fuckings” to their enemies, all in brightly-coloured, sine-scrolling characters.

I know I wouldn’t have the career I have today if it hadn’t been for my time in the Amiga demoscene. Through knowing some of these special people and being a part of many of these demoscene productions, my enthusiasm for computing (and an early example of interest-related social networking) was piqued and I’ve never looked back. Many of my former groupmates look back on this time with similarly fond memories, and as a wonderful thing that we all helped mould. Though the Amiga has long since vanished into obsolescence, its spirit lives on in those of us who used its unique abilities to shape our own fantasies.

Future.

Thu, 06 Aug 2009 11:48:09 -0400

Back when I was a kid, I used to read a magazine called Insight - it was basically a guide to everything futuristic, all the latest developments, and with an optimistic eye towards what was to come. Basically, everything pointed towards an atomic-powered utopia, cities with gleaming spires where there was no crime, no poverty, a benevolent world government, everyone travelled using jetpacks or in rocket-powered trains that ran inside vacuum tubes, where spaceflight was as common as getting on a bus, where science was the new God, where people ate pills instead of meals, wore form-fitting jumpsuits (or, if you were a girl, a miniskirt with a huge oval silver belt buckle), had anthropomorphic domestic robots to do the chores, relaxed on plastic sofas and spent their free time exercising and watching their wall-sized televisions. This was the 1970s vision of the 21st century.

Boy, how wrong they were.

Sure, they got some of it right. They predicted the mobile phone and the internet, some medical advances and the wall-sized tellys. Oh, and the domestic robots, although the Roomba is hardly anthropomorphic. But now, nearly ten years into the 21st century, and we’re not really any closer to most of what was predicted. In some ways, we’re closer to some of the dystopian futures predicted by doom-mongering sci-fi authors. Orwell’s 1984 and Huxley’s Brave New World have never seemed so real and so pertinent.

I can live without the jumpsuits and pills, but where’s this bright new atomic age? Where’s the jetpacks? Where’s the lack of crime? Where did we lose our way?

Nobody’s saying that the 1970s vision of a 21st-century utopia should have been correct, but it was envsioned with a sense of hope and progress on a huge scale, with technological revolution instead of evolution. It was exciting - I couldn’t wait to live in that world. We seem to have lost that vision, that sense of embracing the bigger picture. The quest for endless, clean nuclear energy has stalled, the drive to conquer space seems to have hit a wall, and, most fundamentally, it seems the drive for people to better themselves has diminished.

Maybe it could have happened. Maybe not. But it’s something to strive for, and it seems less and less people are doing the striving these days. We’ve all lost that hope.

Realism.

Sun, 19 Jul 2009 01:42:00 -0400

In the eternal (and occasionally futile) quest to reinvigorate my interest in video games, I do regularly keep my ear to the ground regarding new developments. And, as I read the press releases for the next big new game, they always boast about “ultra-realistic graphics”. That’s all well and good - watching someone play FIFA these days, you could easily think that you were watching a real football game - but there’s a part of me that thinks that games companies are rather missing the point.

It seems that the quest to improve the graphics processing capabilities of computers and consoles seems to be driven by this drive for greater realism. That’s all well and good, and it has resulted in some amazing hardware and some incredibly realistic games. But there’s so much more you can do with a tool as versatile as a computer. For instance, FIFA looks amazing, but you can still quite easily go and watch a real football match, or (deity forbid) go out, buy a football, and play the game yourself. Sure, I would love to drive around the Top Gear test track in a Nissan GT-R, and the forthcoming Gran Turismo 4 will offer me a virtually photo-realistic chance to try that, but it’s still rooted in real life.

A computer is capable of creating environments and experiences that are simply impossible in the real world, without the constraints of physics, and only limited by the imaginations of those who create them. These are experiences that cannot be had by any other means, which are unique to the medium. Worlds where causality doesn’t apply, where even time can be meaningless. A totally new paradigm. These are the types of experiences that would draw me back to gaming. And I don’t mean games with fantasy or futurist elements - the bulk of these experiences are available in real life, with a little imagination and capacity for make-believe. The experiences of which I speak can’t.

This used to be a much more common thing, back when computers were utterly incapable of creating realistic graphics. The programmers and designers of the time had to work with what they had, and, in the absence of realism, imagination took over. A game that stands out in my mind that was very much of this ilk was Iridis Alpha for the C64, created by one of the few games programmers who can actually see past the whole quest for realism - Jeff Minter. The game was essentially a side-scrolling shooter, but that incorporated various “invented” laws of physics as essential components in the gameplay. Your ship was capable of shifting between two dimensions (each shown as a separate horizontally scrolling slice onscreen), and part of the gameplay was that you had to shift dimensions regularly, as you were incapable of existing in one for very long (a mutated law of “entropy”). Also, the visuals were in no way even attempting to be realistic (although that’s not to be expected, given the capabilities of the C64) and the whole experience was somewhat on the “trippy” side and required some tangental thought to play. Happily, Jeff is still busy creating his own psychedelic takes on classic genres, and the industry needs (and has always needed) more people like him.

But no. People want to play virtual football, cast spells on virtual trolls and shoot virtual aliens, so games with this degree of vision probably wouldn’t sell.

Doesn’t stop me wanting to see more of it though. Maybe, coming back to my previous post about the revelation that is small-team development on the iPhone, we might be able to see more of this sort of thing in the future.

Games as art? Perhaps. That’s when you know that a craft has outgrown its medium and can stand on its own.

Photo

Mon, 13 Jul 2009 23:01:10 -0400

Toilet.

Mon, 06 Jul 2009 16:12:17 -0400

I’ve just had a moment of clarity about the UK.

Much as I miss it there, the lifestyle I had, the musical opportunities, the friends… I have come to the realisation that almost everywhere I lived over there since I moved out of my mum’s house was a toilet. I may moan about the US (and, believe me, I restrain myself when I’m online) but the places I’ve lived over here have been far nicer, cleaner and safer.

I mean, flats with mould growing under the sink, with junkies’ needles in the back garden, with paint coming off the ceilings, with chav arseholes living upstairs, with burglars around every corner… it was not good. In fact, sometimes, it was downright scary.

I shall retain my rose-tinted spectacles regarding friends, music and lifestyle, but not regarding the place itself.

In other news, diet starts today. I’m going low-GI - want to lose 3 stone by the end of the year. Also, IUI is happening tomorrow, so daddy-hood may be impending. If we’re successful, that will open up a whole new set of decisions and questions…

Control.

Mon, 25 May 2009 13:19:00 -0400

I actually sat down and used my Xbox 360 for its intended purpose the other night - playing games. Most of the time it sits there relaying videos from my computer to the big TV in the living room and streaming movies from Netflix, and nothing else.

Now, I do enjoy video games. When I was younger, I was a bona fide addict. It took 3 years working at a games company to break this addiction, and it’s remained broken ever since. This stint at a games company also coincided with the demise of the home computer games market, and the rise of consoles, which, in turn, coincided with the rise of the control pad, replacing the good ol’ trusty joystick. And not the type of yoke-style joystick that flight sim afficionados think of - I’m thinking of the classic, arcade-style stick that I grew up with. Specifically, the likes of the classic Competition Pro joystick.

And it’s the death of the joystick as a mainstream game control device that I must blame as one of my reasons for losing much of my interest in gaming. The little D-pads and analogue sticks on game control pads are imprecise, fiddly and utterly unsuitable for many types of games (in my experience). You just can’t play Street Fighter or Gradius with a control pad. They weren’t made for it. Granted, it’d be hard to pay Halo 3 with a proper joystick, but I’d love to try it. There’s something about having something to grab old of (oo-er), with clicky microswitches and positive feedback that makes the gaming experience better, for me.

I’m ordering one of those USB CompPros - it’ll make MAME and other emulator-based gaming so much better and more authentic. In the meantime, I guess I’ll muddle through Halo and Bioshock with the dull old control pad.

United.

Sun, 17 May 2009 02:07:22 -0400

The Holy Grail of web development is a language and development environment that unites client-side and server-side programming into one. There has been progress on this front - ASP.NET (using Visual Studio) is probably the best-known, allowing HTML page elements to be directly accessed from the server-side as server controls. It’s a shame the language has so many development overheads, and is, to be blunt, rather bloated, and, of course, being a Microsoft product, requires proprietary server technology. And we like open-source solutions here at Ego Id (as well as solutions that run on a Mac).

So, what do us open-source and Mac advocates have to play with? Well, there’s the new kid on the block, Ruby On Rails. It’s an impressive framework that makes prototyping website features incredibly quick, but, again, we run into that lack of support on the server side. There aren’t many hosts that support RoR yet (our own hosting certainly doesn’t), and there’s still a question of scalability. That leaves us with some of the new PHP-based frameworks, such as CakePHP, Symfony and so on. In some ways, they’re great, combining client-side AJAX functionality and server-side code nicely. But the code you need is still quite messy, non-intuitive and smacks of trying to squeeze extra functionality into something that wasn’t designed for it. Not to mention, if you try to use features from more than one framework, you run into compatability issues. It’s almost easier to hand-code everything.

The truth is, right now, there is no single solution that takes care of both the client and server sides. So we have to settle for a system that simplifies the interface between the two as much as possible. So, I’m forced to conclude that the Holy Grail for this sort of thing is staring us in the face, and, apparently, all us so-called “proper” web designers and developers are supposed to hate it.

It’s Flash.

Flash, on its own, offers the web developer pretty much the ultimate in customisation straight off the bat in terms of user interface design, and AJAX-style out-of-band functionality has been available since Actionscript first reared its head, and you were able to do a “tellTarget” to any Flash element. And, of course, provided you’ve got the Flash player installed, there’s no issues with browser compatability. With the introduction of Flex, Adobe have a full user interface development environment that ensures you can make the most of this customisability. What’s more, all the SEO arguments against Flash have now been silenced, since Google can now index SWF files, and server-size integration is easily achieved, since only the data layer really needs to be on the server-side. Flash sends a variable to a PHP page, the PHP page returns XML, which Flash interprets natively. That’s it.

Sure, Flash is closed-source, but the player is now so ubiquitous that it’s almost irrelevant. All we need now is for Apple to allow Adobe to release the Flash player for the iPhone. Oh, and while they’re at it, a version of AIR would go down well too - imagine how easy iPhone apps would be to develop if the iPhone supported AIR!

Colour.

Sun, 17 May 2009 00:48:40 -0400

Over the years, I’ve had to deal with cultural differences in many ways. Firstly, and most obviously, as a British citizen in the US, there are plenty of cultureshocks to be had - on the surface, there’s a lot of similarity between our two countries and cultures, but there are also many, many differences that I have to navigate on a daily basis (note my spelling of “colour” in the title there, for instance!).

In terms of work, I’ve also had to deal with different cultures - I worked for a company a few years back who specialised in developing sites for the Chinese market. Now, what we accept as good design sense here in the West isn’t necessarily the case if you go east - colours have different meanings, people expect different things in terms of layout, and so on. For example, the use of the colour red in Western design usually denotes assertiveness or possibly even aggressiveness. In Chinese culture, red is a very friendly colour, much as we would interpret pink, although less gender-specific. Also, in terms of design, the trend here in the West is towards the minimal - conveying only essential information. Over there, they like it when every inch of the screen is full of content - something that might be considered far too busy for our tastes, but the connotations are different there - it shows you have a lot to offer. Go to an international news stand and pick up any Chinese-language paper - you’ll see every inch of every page is packed with information, and the same is true of their website preferences.

There is also definitely a culture surrounding programming. In many ways, it’s like a microcosm of “real life” culture, but with some significant differences, differing depending on where you go and what you do. The boundaries aren’t necessarily national either, they’re more based on the type of work environment you have, and the technologies you work with.

On one side you have the archetypal “geek” culture, usually espoused by individual programmers and small companies, and, on the other end of things, you have the “corporate IT” culture, usually found in large organisations. The innovations usually happen at the “geek” level and filter up to the “corporate” level, where they’re expanded and adjusted for purpose. For instance, the notion of “agile” development was an innovation from the small compay side of things, primarily those working on iterations of open-source software projects in order to streamline the development process. This approach was sequestered by the corporations, and now many large companies use agile development practices. In my experience, it rarely works the other way around - there’s not many corporate concepts that have filtered back down to the “geek” level. Other differences I have noticed is that smaller companies are more innovation-driven, while larger companies are more market-driven. You only have to look at Twitter to see the impact an innovation-driven team can have, and MySpace to see what a burgeoning corporate culture has done to a formerly innovative company.

As with “meatspace” cultures, some people in one culture often look down on people in another, there’s many differences in philosophy and application, and so on. This aspect sometimes makes it difficult for programmers of different cultures to work together - in many ways, it’s like two different worlds. I’ve personally worked in both environments, and they are like chalk and cheese.

But, also like many aspects of “real-life” culture, there are many similarities, things that unite us instead of dividing us. As programmers, we all speak the same language - the language of code. Programming and mathematics are probably the only two universal languages - you’ll find people in Calcutta, Beijing, Sydney, New York, Paris, Cape Town, Lima, Barcelona, London and Dar Es Salaam all communicating in the same terms, understanding, creating and implementing the same concepts and sharing something beyond their cultures. This degree of transcendence is a great thing that, in my opinion, can help us all to transcend our real-life cultural differences as well. And, as a microcosm of real-world cultures, it also gives us a reference point for understanding them better.

Better living through programming? Maybe not (well, not yet), but it’s a start.

It’s nice to see that a game I worked on 12 years ago is still appreciated today!...

Thu, 14 May 2009 12:58:54 -0400

It’s nice to see that a game I worked on 12 years ago is still appreciated today! http://bit.ly/pVf12

Gadget.

Wed, 29 Apr 2009 14:49:40 -0400

The iPhone is pretty much the ultimate gadget. But it’s not just a gadget, it’s a game changer.

The release of the iPhone initiated a paradigm shift in internet connectivity. All of a sudden, there’s this device that is universally useful - it’s a phone, a full-featured internet browser, a GPS, a games console, a book reader, an email and text client, a camera… the list goes on. And, in the short time that the iPhone has been available, it now accounts for over 50% of all mobile internet access. With the forthcoming 3.0 system software, it’s all set to get even more impressive - cut & paste (yay!), turn-by-turn GPS satnav, peripheral access and many more new features.

But, the real revelation of the whole iPhone experience is the App Store. The quality and variety of apps are now driving sales of the iPhone itself, even to those who wouldn’t usually consider getting such a thing. As a means of distribution, it’s yet another paradigm shift. It’s streamlined, cheap, straightforward, not to mention a cash cow for those who can successfully sell their app, and has brought back small-team and solo development in a big way. This makes me very happy.

Before I got into the whole web design and development spiel, I worked for a video games company. I always wanted to be involved in the video games industry, ever since I programmed my first game in BASIC in 1983. The hot technologies at the time were the original Playstation, the N64 and the PC (in the nascent 3D PC gaming days, when the original 3Dfx card was king). Even then, with such comparatively humble technical requirements compared to the games that are produced now, the teams working on the games were already 20-30 people, not including project management, QA, etc. From my friends who are still in that industry, I’m told teams of over 50 people aren’t unusual these days, with some big games having teams of over 100 and development cycles measured in years. I can believe it.

This is a far cry from the early days of computer games (and, indeed, all software) development, when it was often just one or two people in a bedroom or basement, and, often, the software was better for it - leaner, more focussed, usually more original, unconstrained by market and brand influence, and developed by people who obviously have a passion for what they do. Some of these early coders became bona fide cult superstars - people like Sid Meier, Andrew Braybrook, Archer Maclean, Jeff Minter, David Braben, Lord British, Matthew Smith and many others were revered by 8- and 16-bit fanboys the world over, and with good reason - these people developed their games single-handedly, including all programming, graphics, sound, gameplay and level design. I realise those days are more or less gone, but, even so, Rolando, one of the biggest-selling iPhone games to date, was largely developed by just one person, with two other people providing input on graphics and sound.

This brings out the enthusiasm in me, as well as those long-repressed bedroom-boy coder instincts. The fact that Rolando made a fortune also helps - with low development overheads, an easy distribution model and only three people to divide the loot between, for those who can get in on iPhone development, the rewards can be huge. Certainly more than my first game on the Sinclair ZX Spectrum that I wrote in 1985 - I made the princely sum of £200 (about $300). A fortune for a 13-year-old (it paid for the BMX bike I wanted at the time), but not much in the greater scheme of things!

Guess what… I’ve got the iPhone development book. I think this is something that any self-respecting agency should get in on - the potential is HUGE. Good work is possible on this platform with small, adaptable teams, and it’s only going to get bigger. Thanks, Apple.

Multilingual.

Tue, 21 Apr 2009 21:17:41 -0400

Well, I think the time has come for me to learn a new programming language. We’re having a bit of a slow month at work, so I have my boss’ blessing to use some of this time to learn some new skills.

So, I’ve narrowed the list of things I want to learn down to four things:

Ruby On Rails
JSP
iPhone development
Adobe Flex

I’m leaning towards RoR, as it seems reasonably straightforward to get into. I haven’t got a clue where to begin with JSP - Java development is a huge, sprawling and utterly unfathomable thing to me. Do I need to learn full-on Java to do JSP? What are Struts and all these other buzzwords? I’ve taken a look at the iPhone development book too, and, on one hand, it seems relatively straightforward, but it’s also “proper” programming, having to pay attention to memory, stacks and stuff like that, and I haven’t done stuff like that since my Amiga days! Plus, Objective-C, Apple’s preferred programming language for the iPhone, is weird - lots of strange syntax that I don’t entirely understand. Now, Flex I have a bit of a headstart with, since I’m reasonably well-up on Actionscript. It’s a bit of a different paradigm for Flash development though, and that might take a while to get used to.

Any and all suggestions are welcome…