Tim Heuer

"Competition is dropping prices, increasing quality and making everyone’s internet a better place." (ryan stewart)

flash just did an update to the flash player.  i believe (according to their site) this takes it to v9.0.115.0 (at least for IE on windows).  what's included in this update?  primarily H.264 encoding support in the player.  this has been in beta for a while, but now 'official' from adobe.  the second announcement involves their (adobe) pricing/licensing changes around flash media server products, something that has been somewhat criticized for a while as cost-prohibitive.  the new pricing looks like a real aggressive price drop based on their own admissions.

looks like they listened.  part reaction to competitive heat?  maybe, but as noted above...competition helps end consumers and forces all vendors to think different, increase quality and make it better for us (consumers).  i agree.

i went to the flash site to check out the new features after reading the press release.  since i didn't have the new version of the plugin i thought what a perfect opportunity to see this upgrade experience.  i'm using IE7 on windows vista.  my first thing i see is

great, i know i need it and this links to me an 'express install' which i presume is like an inplace installer similar to silverlight's options.  i click it.

maybe redundant to some (the original flash movie already alerted me to that), it confirms that i want to install that upgrade.  i do, click yes.

at this point i'm presented with this (although a new instance of IE is also opened up as well).  ok, fine i close the browser and now have the ability to check it out as i see a 'Launch' button now.  however, in IE when i click it i get a javascript (null) error and am unable to launch the popups.  seems we all still haven't solved the 'get around the popup blocker problem.' -- out of curiosity i load firefox now and see what i get...here's the first screen (after going to the same page):

ok, i thought i already did that (common user question), but being a techie i know that some plugins load differently in each browser, i (as a techie) can accept that...i click download.

i'm taken to here to accept the EULA and download.  hey, what happened to 'express install'?

downloaded .exe and done, open it up.

oops, need to close FF before i do that...okay, closed and then installed.

again, out of curiosity i go to my mac.  i'm presented again with a different experience, requiring me to download a .zip file which contains a .dmg and also asks me for what type of mac i have (intel or PPC -- is that a mother-in-law proof question? -- i know does this check for you).  i didn't take screenshots of that upgrade, but it looks identical to this screencast i did of a pure flash install (yes, the upgrade process took the exact same steps).

my point here is to NOT say 'adobe sucks' because of their install process.  my point is that install/upgrade processes aren't as simple as we all make them out to be.  especially in browserville.  there are different platforms, versions, browsers, etc., etc.  mike downey (a pm with adobe) had commented on the silverlight install experience being somewhat cumbersome (on a mac).  it isn't ideal, but that doesn't mean that it doesn't match existing experiences (for the mac).  even given that in IE on windows i was presented with an express install option, but in firefox i wasn't, means there are some things that adobe considers too when creating an install experience.

my point -- it isn't as simple as it looks with all the platforms out there.  my intention isn't so say "see, told you so" -- but rather to point out the similarities and perhaps parity in those experiences.  sure, flash has huge penetration, but does their latest update?  i think there are probably other ways of upgrading the plugin, but i went to the source vendor page and this is how they are doing it, presumably prescribed guidance.

i'm eager to see the first sites who really take advantage of the H.264 encoding (not youtube style, but pushing the edge).

one of my colleagues and super-star-wizard-man david chou posted recently on platforms.

he previously was chatting about popfly as a platform and then thought it a bit more to back up from a larger view to help us ponder what exactly a 'web platform stack' means.  i think for people who haven't really distilled it down into any consumable thought areas, it does a good job defining where some web platforms fall in to the greater scheme of the overall goals of a web strategy.

maybe i'm not saying it well :-) -- but you should go check out david's post about it and leave your thoughts.

brad abrams kicked off some webcasts regarding silverlight over on msdn.  you should check out the on-demand as well as the upcoming webcast series...

Kickoff Webcast:

designers:

developers:

i love the title of the last one "how to work alongside a designer" -- makes it sound like it is going to be a therapy session.

"Go back to Jersey, Sonny. This is the City of the Angels and you haven't got any wings." (from LA Confidential)

i'm headed to los angeles, ca tomorrow for a week of the .  while last week already yielded some training in some of the expression tools and , i'm headed out to do my best to mentor those that are taking advantage of the microsoft working areas.

what is the phizzpop design challenge?

The PhizzPop Design Challenge pits top interactive, Web, and design agencies against one another to push the limits of technology and creativity in a battle royale. Think Mad Max for design.

basically teams have been chosen and they will be presented with a problem statement on monday.  this problem statement will include instructions to them of what those team should incorporate into their solution.  the implementation, however, will be up to them.  there is a panel of judges who will listen to the teams present their solutions and how they went about solving this particular problem statement.

i've yet to visit the la office and i'm excited to spend some time out there.  i'm coming off a weekend of, well, let's just say "pain."  i'll be bringing my meds though.  more importantly i'm bringing my new camera rig in hops of talking to some of these teams while they are out there.

if anyone knows any celebrities as well that might be in the la area and are willing to do a cheesy public service announcement for internal videos, let me know...i've got some ideas.  if you know anyone in the cast of Heroes that would be sweet...drop me a line.

well, that's where i'll be this week.  i'm hoping to head down to irvine with woodyp on wednesday and chill out at the installfest down there.  hope to see some of you there!

i hopped on a plane at 4am this morning to head back to phoenix from seattle.  oddly enough i landed in rain.  what gives phoenix?  actually it is a welcome refresh for me.

i was in seattle for the fire starter event with my comrade mithun.  this was basically a one-day silverlight lovefest.  and the lineup of people was awesome:

it was awesome.  if you had silverlight questions, this was the place to be.  i mainly lurked in the back and twittered occasional thoughts on what i was seeing (which probably did nothing since a poll to the audience showed not many people are on twitter in that area).  i saw a lot of people ask the presenters questions which i assume is always a good sign.  i learned some new stuff myself which is always great.

adam kinney proved no smoke and mirrors on his...er...i mean...lenny's xbox live gadget built in silverlight.  after getting gamertags from the audience i think he suddenly realized that the statuses would be offline because they were all there :-) -- but yet, one person had a "1 minute ago" update and they were in the audience...hmmm...portable xboxing?

the popfly demonstration seems to always get a smile from most even if you aren't interested in mashups or anything.  i think it is because you just realize the ease of bringing information together and not having to spend a ton of time together -- and getting an interesting visualization!  adam actually whipped up a similar xbox live gadget in a few minutes using popfly (not the same features, but for not writing a lick of code and getting xbox live gamer information and a silverlight UI plus implemented in a vista sidebar gadget that was impressive).

there was a couple of things i twitter'd about that might be worth mentioning here as well (aside from my happiness to chocolate milk on campus)...

    • arturo demonstrated the desginer/developer workflow of
    • laurence's book on silverlight 1.0
    • there was a question about positioning text within elements.  although silverlight 1.0 does not have justification settings in elements explicitly, you can do it.  the code in my user controls in 1.0 sample has some code that you can look at how i used some simple functions to center the text on a button based on the text and size of the button...very simple.  hoping this will be obsolete in silverlight 2.0.
    • adam kinney talked about user control patterns and specifically called out an important createFromXaml parameter (second, optional parameter) which is createNameScope.  this boolean parameter provides a unique name to each element that you create.  this is very helpful (and required almost) when you are creating a lot of same controls in an iteration for example.
    • i learned of two tools JSLint and JSMin.  the latter is for 'crunching' javascript to reduce size of the script files (you know remove whitespace, etc.).
    • adam nathan's book on silverlight 1.0 unleashed
    • ernie had really good pointers on working with media, specifically with what attributes in playlists are supported.  i couldn't capture them all in time, but the content will be posted.
    • ernie also had a session on what silverlight might look like in the future...his message: understand WPF.

great sessions.  the content was recorded, so subscribe to this blog and i'll update a link once it is available.