David Emery OnlineScribd CTO: “We Are Scrapping Flash And Betting The Company On HTML5″
Tomorrow, online document sharing site Scribd will start to ditch Flash across its tens of millions of uploaded documents and convert them all to native HTML5 Web pages. Not only will these documents look great on the iPad’s no-Flash browser, but it will bring the richness of fonts and graphics from documents to native Web pages.
Impressive stuff – I’m interested to see what the markup is going to be like (I’ve never seen a machine write good markup).
Visit ➔Fifth Birthday
On the 18th of April, 2005 I posted this inauspicious post and brought this blog blinking into the world. Everything has to start somewhere.
It’s quite a strange thought to me that this blog is 5 years old.
5 years is a strange in-between length of time that somehow simultaneously a long time and not that long at all. It doesn’t feel like I’ve been doing this blog for a huge amount of time, but yet I’ve somehow amassed 1376 posts – not including this one – totalling 200,000+ words (it’s very difficult to get an accurate figure) which seems like a hell of a lot.
Not that quantity is any indication of quality, of course.
Looking back at the first few posts indicates that at the very least my writing has got a little better (although I could really do with a proof reader), but also that my focus has got a bit broader (and maybe deeper?) – certainly less of ‘woo Apple have a new thing out’ posts hopefully. I think I’ve hit a much more sustainable rhythm that’s been mirrored by much of the rest of the blogosphere (hey, we don’t use that word really anymore, do we? Not...
Read more ➔Understand The Web
Perceptions of the web is changing. People are advocating that we treat the web like another application framework. An open, cross-platform, multi-device rival to Flash and Cocoa and everything else. I’m all for making the web richer, and exposing new functionality, but I value what makes the web weblike much, much more.
A must-read article on the state of the web today; I could quote practically every paragraph.
I remember a while back Khoi Vinh lamented that there are no ‘masterpieces’ on the web; no culture-defining works that will last the test of time. I’m sure he was referring to design when he wrote it (the particular post escapes me), but that’s a fallacy that touches on the same points made in this article; the web isn’t like print graphic design, just like TV isn’t like theatre or photography isn’t like painting. The same is true of the web and applications – they’re similar but different mediums.
I’d argue that YouTube is a masterpiece just as much as the Mona Lisa or 2001: A Space Odyssey. It’s a totally different kind of thing, and that’s the whole point.
Visit ➔HP buys Palm
HP has just announced that it's acquiring Palm to the tune of $1.2 billion, which works out to $5.70 per share of Palm common stock. The deal is planned to close by July 31, which marks the end of HP's third fiscal quarter of the year. Current Palm CEO Jon Rubinstein is "expected to remain with the company,"
A very smart move for HP; they can’t be happy being shackled to Microsoft for operating systems and WebOS is a great OS in the making.
Interesting also that this comes the day that the Apple WWDC is announced, which for the first time has abandoned having a Mac app design award, instead focusing on iPhone and iPad awards instead. Mobile OSs are the future – both Apple and HP know it.
Visit ➔Spotify Goes Social
In its newest app update, and the biggest since launch in 2008, Spotify users will now be able to connect to their Facebook page and import friends from their profile who are also registered Spotify users. Connected friends will become visible in the Spotify browser, and this opens up a whole new landscape of interaction and activity which can now be published simultaneously to users’ Facebook profiles and within the Spotify browser in the new feed section.
The social features in the new version of Spotify are pretty nifty – I already know plenty of people that share playlists so this is a perfect enhancement to current user behaviour.
What’s far more interesting – at least from my point of view – in this update though is the ability for Spotify to play, store and manage local files. At the moment I pretty much don’t use Spotify because the large proportion of music I listen to isn’t on there (music from blogs, pre-release albums etc), so this new feature makes it a lot more attractive.
If I didn’t have to pay £10/month for the iPhone app I’d ditch iTunes…
Visit ➔Why All Those Records (Gaslight Anthem, Crystal Castles, Hole, Etc.) Leaked On Monday
Because PlayMPE--"one of a handful of technologies that record labels use to distribute advance, watermarked albums, to blogs, magazines, and a variety of other publications," reports AbsolutePunk.net--was hacked last week. PlayMPE is the preferred industry vehicle these days as far getting records to critics ahead of the official release date. But all it took was one clever teenager to get himself on the company's distribution list, and the rest was RapidShare history.
Ouch.
Visit ➔Design reset
It’s pretty clear this new fangled iPad is a reset in personal computing. I really hope this “reset” echoes throughout the web design community. The best example I’ve seen is from the New York Times.
The iPad has revealed a great deal when it comes to the design of websites. The app store is now full of apps that provide a nicer interface to a web app or site, but most of them don’t actually do anything that couldn’t be done on the web.
The New York Times app is a great example – it’s far nicer to read an article on it when compared to the website (which is full of clutter and visual noise). Now, obviously there’s some features that are iPad (or more specifically touch-interface) specific but there’s a lot that can be learnt in this space I think.
Also, on a similar note:
It seems that more and more Apps are replacing websites in a time when more and more applications are moving to the web. What exactly do we want? Email went from the Application to the Cloud with Gmail, and we love it. The same for Flickr for photos and Google Docs for documents. At the same time Twitter started out as a website but quickly moved to applications on multiple platforms. It is clear that just moving everything to the web isn’t the ultimate solution for everything. That eBay and IMDB app are clear examples.
Now, I don’t believe apps are the ‘death of the website’ as that’s obviously link-baiting hyperbole but there’s a kernel of truth in there…
Visit ➔The Firefox 4 Download Manager
Alexander Limi elaborates on how Mozilla plans to improve the download manager in Firefox 4:
I wondered how long it would take for iPad UI elements (in this case pop-overs) to make their way over to the desktop. Answer: not very long.
Visit ➔Fun with social APIs: a pair of mini-apps
I’m very happy to say that we’ve recently released two free mini-apps meant to let artists do some fancy social network building on their own sites. They’re both simple PHP/Javascript apps that work with native APIs. One offers tweet-for-track capabilities for Twitter. The other encourages people to become fans on Facebook by offering a free download for all fans using Facebook Connect.
First off, let me just say I really admire what the guys over at CASH Music are doing; it’s great that there’s room on the internet for the intersection of Open Source and music, and that someone’s doing it.
However, am I the only one that has a great distaste with the whole ‘Tweet for a Track’ model? The premise is simple – to get a free MP3 download (or any other content, really) you have to let them post a promotional tweet using your twitter account.
The short term promotional benefits are obvious (lots of people tweeting about you or your content), and it seems like an easy shortcut to “viral” success but that’s just the problem; it’s a shortcut, not the real thing. A real viral success is something that people want to post to their twitter and tell all their friends about, and hence contains the authenticity of a genuine recommendation.
However, forcing someone to tweet (and often with a predefined message) just isn’t going to carry that same authenticity; it’s just going to feel like marketing to anyone reading it (and no one likes to think they’re affected by marketing). Not only that, the person you’ve forced to tweet isn’t going to feel great about inflicting it upon their friends either.
It turns something that should be exciting (getting a bit of content for free) into something that feels, well, icky.
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