Around this time last year, Adobe open sourced its Flex framework for rich internet applications. Today Adobe announced the Open Screen project, which encompasses a number of things, probably most importantly, the removal of the license restrictions on the SWF file format used by Flash. The other aspects of the announcement relate to Adobe’s Flash Player, and while they are steps towards openness, Adobe’s player will remain closed. The importance of opening Adobe’s player has decreased because dropping the file format licensing should make things easier for the Gnash folks. The worry then is that we’ll end up with incompatible versions of Flash, which is in almost nobody’s interest. That’s probably the next problem that needs addressing.
Archive for the 'internet' Category
Earlier this week Mark Nottingham wrote about CardDAV and DAV based protocols:
All of this led me to mutter ‘DAV WTF?’ at the IETF APPS Architecture Workshop the other week. Do we really need to give folks the opportunity to mint more application-specific methods and headers?
Interestingly, Lisa Dusseault — one of the core folks in the DAV world — blogged about this the other day;
Were I to propose CalDAV today it would probably be CalAtom — some things would be easier, some harder, but it would catch a wave instead of drifting in the tail of something that was never much of a popular wave. Oh well, we needed something then, and WebDAV gave the most leverage at the time.
I gave a big sigh of relief when I read that, and I hope that the CardDAV folks take this to heart. Some parts of WebDAV (e.g., properties; see Yaron and Larry on this) deserve to be taken out back and shot — although, as Lisa says, they were necessary because of the state of the art at the time. That doesn’t mean we can’t do better now.
Almost as if in answer, yesterday Google announced the release of the Contacts API, which is AtomPub/GData based. Unlike CardDAV, it’s not based on vCard, which is both a blessing and a curse, since lots of popular contact systems (like the Mac address book) know how to export vCard information, and because vCard provides a very rich model for information about people. I’m not sure whether this is progress or not.
So Cote thinks that it’s time for organizations and companies to aggregate Twitter:
In theory, this whole pulse idea could be packaged up to be as easily deployable as ‘planet’ sites. Here, ‘pulse’ is the operational brand-name of aggregating Twitter accounts, where as ‘planet’ is the tried and true operation brand-name of aggregating blogs.
Last time I looked, There was an RSS feed for every person on Twitter, and the code for Planet is available (I’m pointing to Sam’s Venus version). About the only thing missing here is a nice web based UI that lets you put in people’s Twitter user names….
I’ve been using Photophlow a fair amount over the last few days - It’s been pretty fun, although the real value will come if we manage to use it for shoot planning or review, which hasn’t happened yet.
One thing that I’ve noticed is that having Photophlow open in a browser while I’ve got other webapps running tends to make the overall experience a bit less nicer. So taking a page from Travis Vachon, I created a Prism (Webrunner) application for Photophlow. This lets you run Photophlow as a standalone application, in a container which is essentially a custom version of Firefox. You can get the webapp here. You will also need a copy of Prism to make this work.Last night, Scoble mentioned Photophlow on Twitter. I went over to see the site and then begged and pleaded for an invite - and got it. Photophlow is kind of like an IRC customized for dealing with Flickr photos. There is a global chat room, each user has his or her own chat room, and there is a chat room for every Flickr group. Within a chatroom, people can search Flickr photos and the room can follow along to see what they are searching. You can select photo out of the search, which will be transmitted to the room. There are some other features, like turning off the following of other people’s searches and turning off people’s ability to see what you searched for.
The Photo 2.0 angle
People like David Hobby and Chase Jarvis have been talking about (and living out) “Photography 2.0″, where there is massive sharing of photographs and photographic information. One of the things that I’ve often wished for is the ability to talk (in real time) to someone to get/do a critique of a photo. I think that this is something that happens best in real time. You could do that via IM and hyperlinks. You might even be able to do that via IM group chats, if all the people in the critique were using the same IM system. (It’s 2008, IM vendors). The value that I see in Photophlow is having a realtime way of talking about photos in a group. It would be even better if there was a way to annotate the photo being broadcast at the moment, so that you could focus attention on particular parts of a photograph. We’ve been doing some interesting group photo stuff here in Seattle lately, and I definitely think that Photophlow is something that could really help with some of the things we have done, as well as some of the things we are thinking of doing. Besides annotation tools, I would also like an easy way to log/archive a whole chat session or parts of a chat session.
The Web 2.0 angle
Photophlow is technically interesting for a number of reasons. It’s an app that’s built entirely on top of another web applications’ API. And it’s pretty substantial. There’s a lot going on here - a lot of AJAX, and API calls to Flickr. The app feels kind of pokey because it’s pushing the limits of what can be done in Javascript. Indeed, if I run Photophlow in Safari 3 instead of Firefox, the performance is noticeably better. This is a situation that we also see in Chandler Server. It’s going to be interesting to see how well this is able to scale up.
Photophlow is also pushing the limits of how some people think of using a web application. It’s designed to be used a lot and in a highly interactive fashion. I know that I would probably keep chat rooms for my personal group, the Seattle Flickr Meetups group, and the Strobist group open all at once if I could. The designers have also built in bridges to IM notification and to allow you to Twitter from within Photophlow. Too bad their isn’t a way to get a Twitter stream instead of an IM notification - but that’s more a limitation of Twitter than of Photophlow.
I bet that you could do some of what Photophlow does with a custom IRC bot. But I also bet that it would be substantially less accessible to people who are photographers first and computer users second (or third, or what have you). Then again, maybe here’s another opportunity for VOIP…
If you haven’t gotten into the beta yet, there’s a short tutorial video.
Technorati Tags: photography, photophlow, flickr
Ben Laurie has posted some initial information about the Caja (Capability Javascript) project that he is leading at Google. The code is going to be open sourced under the Apache License (with Ben running it, that’s no surprise). Caja is based on the work that Ben did on CaPerl a few years back. I saw CaPerl when we were looking at how to improve Python security for Chandler Desktop. Ben was interested in doing some capability stuff for Python, but the stars never aligned for it to happen. I’m glad to see that his work will live on - it’s not like JavaScript couldn’t use some security help. People worried about yet another version of Java/ECMAScript should go read Ben’s post before they complain.
A few days ago I signed up for the new TripIt service. I didn’t have very high expectations, and I’ve already planned the rest of my trips for the year, namely my trip to ApacheCon. That trip was booked by a regular travel agent, and the form in which I got the documents was unlikely to be parseable by Tripit, so I just entered it by hand. I was really impressed by how much Tripit knew about my plane flight. I wish that it was similarly informed about my hotel. The itinerary management is pretty compelling for my uses.
There is also a social networking component to TripIt, which allows you to coordinate travel with other people, and you can generate a location stream and calendar feed. If TripIt can do what Doppr does, which is tell me who else will be in a location during the same time range, then I’d say that Dopplr should be pretty worried. Actually according to the TripIt blog, they are planning to do just that. They are also planning to do restaurants, which means that they might be able to act as a kind of evite/renkoo for groups of people looking for restaurants to eat at while traveling together. Yow. Call that the “Greg Stein feature”.
During the bar conversation after the Saturday Seattle Strobist Seminar, a bunch of including James Duncan Davidson and Eric Soroos were talking to David Hobby about full feeds on the Strobist site. In particular, we pointed him to John Gruber’s experiment with full feeds on Daring Fireball (preliminary report on John’s experience). So I was very happy to read that David has decided to try a full feed for Strobist as well.
Since David wanted some more power user full feed info, here’s my take on David’s situation.
The argument for full feeds is that it allows a reader to be more efficient because they can digest more information per unit time. At least that is true for me. The other big benefit is that it allows people who want / need to read offline to do so. The question is, “Doesn’t reader efficiency come at the expense of the publisher”? My answer is, no, not if your content is good. In fact, if your content is good, reader efficiency works in your favor. If your content is good, then you as the publisher doen’t want me to have to break my workflow (by switching to a browser, browser tab, or NetNewsWire tab) to determine that the content is good. If I have to break the flow, there’s much less chance that I will do command-shift-P (in NetNewsWire) to pop the your post into Ecto where I can quote it as part of my post (which ought to generate some additional traffic for you). There’s less chance that I will hit command-1 to pop your post’s title and permalink into Twitterific, where it can get pumped into the realtime information junkie network. And there’s less chance that I will hit command-control-’ to pop your post’s permalink into Pukka where I can quickly tag it and stick it into del.icio.us, where it can be immortalized as important, seen by my del.icio.us network, and pumped into my blog and tumblog. In other words, you make it hard for people like me to help you. Now you might not care about that, and that’s a completely rational choice. But since just about everything in the blogosphere (after your good original content) is about getting flow (which doesn’t just mean inbound clicks) from other people, it seems like a short sighted thing to make it hard for flow to happen.
There are a few other dynamics which I think are relevant to Strobist, which don’t apply to all blogs.
1. Strobist is not just a blog, it is a source of reference materials. If you metered my accesses to the Strobist site, you would see that I access the site much more as a reference site than as a daily blog. I read the daily blogs, but since I am learning something that requires practice, trial and error, and so forth, I am always pulling up old posts (and those Lighting 101 and 102 pulldown menus) are a godsend for that. Which you have to go the site for. Dropping the 1 click that you would have gotten by forcing me to follow from the partial feed is just noise compared to the other volume
2. The advertisers on Strobist aren’t getting the value from the ads. If you make me go to Strobist in Firefox, Adblock pwns you. I never even see your ads. If you want to get value from Strobist, do something that works with what David is doing. Nonetheless, I’ve ordered several times from the Midwest Photo Exchange, not because they advertise on the site, but because they are doing something that works with what David is doing - so well that David actually writes about it. You might think you need an ad, but what you really need is to do something that will get David to write about you. Strobist is becoming a community, and the advertisers / sponsors of the site will get the most value by being a part of the community (see yesterday’s post on Nikon for tips). And that means more than just doing ads.
3. I was less vehement about full feeds that night (and I do love my full feeds) because I don’t think that David’s audience is an RSS enabled audience. The small sample size at the bar bore that out. So full vs partial doesn’t make that much difference, really. I’ve been reading the blogs of some wedding photographers because I think that maybe someday I might like to take a crack at that. But one thing I’ve noticed is that the word on Strobist is out. I see the techniques being mentioned. People see off camera flash pictures and want to know how to do that. And the answer that invariably comes back is Strobist (or occasionally, the OneLight). You can be sure that this is happening in real life, maybe even more so than on line. So the flow net for Strobist has expanded beyond the RSS savvy crowd and into the real world. No amount of full vs partial RSS feed is gonna change that.
But just in case, click here to convince David of the value of a full RSS feed. 
Here are some thought from Adobe’s AIR Bus Tour in Seattle yesterday.
First, is that Adobe is laying out some serious money to promote AIR - they got a (literally) rock star bus, complete with beds, loads of electronics, and tour paint scheme. The event yesterday was at a nice restaurant which they rented for the day, and Adobe was very generous with food and drink, which was of a higher than average quality for a conference.
On the whole, the sessions were informative, although I wished that there had been a little more detail presented. There’s already been lots written about Flex and AIR/Apollo, so I’m not going to rehash any of that. Here are some of the more interesting tidbits that I picked up.
- Kevin Lynch mentioned that when they opened the native code portion of shockwave, they only got extensions for Windows. It was pretty clear that they want to reach platforms besides Windows.
- Mike Chambers reemphasized that point when he said that the amenability of WebKit to mobile (ported to Series 60 by Nokia, and now, of course, on iPhone) was one of the big reasons for their choice.
- There’s some of sample code based on hacks that involve the GPS sensors, cameras, and other gadgets on the bus
- Aptana is supporting AIR developement in their Eclipse plugin.
I also learned a new term from Lee Brimelow of Frog Design: a “deviner”, a person who has training as both a designer and programmer. I had never heard the term before, but it’s relevant to the content of the talk that Mimi Yin and I are giving at OSCON in a few weeks.
Ryan Stewart persuaded me to do a talk for the Ignite the Web sessions in the evening. I thought it fitting to give a presentation on “Openness and the Web”, based on the content of that string of blog posts that started my dialogue with the Adobe folks. The Ignite format (5 minutes, 20 slides switched at exactly 15 second intervals) is pretty demanding of speakers. I’d consider myself an experienced public speaker, but doing the Ignite talk had me pretty nervous. The delivery went well - I only had one gap where I got out of sync with the slides. Afterwards, John Dowdell, and Ted Patrick, as well as a few others, came to talk about the content of the talk. John and I traded thoughts and clarifications sporadically during the rest of the evening, and he told me that it definitely helped to have heard more from me in person. On the whole, it seemed worthwhile. The only downside is that now Ryan is trying to get me to sign up for the next Ignite Seattle.
Tomorrow I’ll be over in Seattle attending Adobe’s AIR Bus tour. As part of that, I’ll be giving an Ignite talk on “Openness and the Web”. If you are attending, stop by and say hi…
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