Faruk At.eş

The Creative Revolution

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The iPad has caused quite the commotion online, from debates about Flash on the web to ridiculing the device, from claiming Apple has finally made a bad product to claiming that the iPad announces the Orwellian end to our civilization. And then there's people heralding the death of creativity.

I'm sorry, but… what?!

In his piece, Tinkerer's Sunset, Mark Pilgrim wrote the following:

But you don’t become a hacker by programming; you become a hacker by tinkering.

Tim Bray has similar sentiments:

For creative people, this device is nothing.

Clearly, neither of these well-respected programmers have ever looked at the AppStore's many hundreds (if not thousands) of applications that allow people to be creative. The iPhone/iPod Touch platform has already driven creativity among consumers to grand new levels (including some New Yorker covers). Apparently, to misters Pilgrim and Bray, "creativity" means tinkering with settings.

But even that's not true; the fact is, these guys remind me of old men sitting on their porch yelling "Get off my lawn!", except in this case it's old men sitting behind Apple ][e's yelling at kids playing with iPhones and iPads, drawing paintings directly with their fingers rather than through inputting complex mathematical algorithms and vector patterns in a command line.

When these men became programmers, they didn't do so because tinkering was "so much fun"; they did it because there was no other way. When they were young, doing anything with a computer required a strong understanding of mathematics, the ability to think in binary and the perseverance to keep exploring things without any book or person around to guide you.

That time has long gone.

Nowadays, some of the best programmers you'll find have never tinkered with computers in their life until after they first learned all about Objective-C, Java, Ruby or what-have-you. They learned from the treasure trove of information found in books and on websites that helped them learn Object Oriented Programming and memory management. Entire college courses exist to teach people how to write code; is that not better than forcing these millions of students to learn how to do this by tinkering?

"But I can't write code on the iPad!" these old men whine. Perhaps not—that might change, though. More curiously, why aren't they writing apps to write code with? Last I remember, the great pride of hackers was that they would create their own tools whenever tools didn't exist to do their work.

Or could it be that most people don't care so much about writing code? Joel Johnson nails it:

Well guess what? Only shade-tree tweakers give a flip about creating their own tools. Most people want to use the quality tools at hand to create something new.

The simple matter is that these guys are old, and they grew up in an age where tinkering was the only possible course of action if you wanted to use the latest and greatest technology to its fullest potential. The Mac, in 1984, shifted that paradigm of creativity and creation towards average consumers a little. The iPhone and iPad are shifting it even further towards consumers, away from the tinkerers of old, the small little "elite" that excludes the vast majority of people.

It's a shame to see such respected programmers try to position Apple (a professional competitor to them, mind you) in an evil light, but fortunately there are plenty who see what's really going on. As Dan Moren wrote for Macworld:

For Apple, it’s not about killing off tinkerers, but ensuring that not everybody who wants to use a computer has to be a tinkerer.

Which, it should be noted, is most everyone.

So Long, And Thanks For All The Flash

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I’ve been an open web standards enthusiast and evangelist for many years and have long dreamed of the day that Flash would either become an open technology—meaning, not proprietary and controlled by only one company, originally Macromedia, Adobe today—or that it would simply go away and become irrelevant.

This desire has had nothing to do with any disdain you might think I have for the controlling company; it’s all about the impact Flash has had on the usability of websites throughout the entirety of my career as a web professional. We’ll get to my criticisms in a moment; I want to start with a very true argument made by John Nack, an Adobe blogger who has nothing to do with the Flash team but has valuable insights nonetheless. The recent announcement of the new Apple iPad—which, like its smaller-in-size device siblings the iPhone and iPod Touch, does not support the Flash plugin for web content—has stirred up a lot of debate online and Nack’s piece is worth reading in full. I want to address just this bit, however:

But let's also be honest and say that Flash is the reason we all have fast, reliable, ubiquitous online video today. It's the reason that YouTube took off & video consumption exploded four years ago. It's the reason we have Hulu, Vimeo, and all the rest--and the reason that people now watch billions of videos per day (and nearly 10 hours apiece per month) online. Without it, we'd all still be bumbling along.

Flash has indeed been the sole piece of technology that drove video on the web forward and brought it to the millions of users enjoying it today. For that, we should be thankful because the Web would not have been quite so interesting without sites like Youtube, Vimeo, Hulu and countless others.

But Nack conveniently ignores a similarly big impact Flash has had on the web, one that is rather negative. After video, what are the two most common uses of Flash on the Web? Online games, and advertisements.

The games, I couldn’t really care less about. Flash on OS X is so slow and cpu-heavy (not just video, all of it) that graphically rich Flash games aren’t particularly enjoyable for me and simple ones are nothing compared to even basic iPhone games. The ads, on the other hand, well, they’ve been a source of endless frustration since the very first time I came across one. Flash-blocking plugins exist for almost every browser, without a doubt in large part thanks to the pervasiveness of Flash ads, their average intrusiveness and the high degree to which Flash causes browsers to crash or lock up.

Ever heard of an SVG blocker? A CSS3 blocker? They don’t exist because they’re not considered necessary; these technologies are open, but more importantly, they don’t get abused and they don't create terrible user experiences.

If it weren’t for the utter necessity to sometimes visit certain websites for their information and data, I would have flat out across-the-board abandoned any and all sites that had the distasteful audacity to put a Flash ad covering most or, worse, all of the page's content until clicked away. Even with plugins like ClickToFlash I sometimes have to deal with this nonsense, and the only reason I can imagine sites keep doing this is because the ads are so utterly intrusive that users accidentally click on them a lot, making them a financially worthwhile affront to any sense of taste.

Then there are the entirely-Flash-made websites, which roughly 99% of the time are made in such a way as to be completely inaccessible to anyone besides the fully-capable mouse users, and even then there often exists a usability drop that, to me, greatly diminishes the value of using the technology in the first place. I would have given some examples, but Google can't index such sites and even Adobe’s own OpenGovernment site got recreated using standard HTML, CSS and JavaScript.

It really accentuates how Flash makes it easy to build something that looks fancy and pretty, but typically lacks great usability and/or accessibility.

Back to the situation at hand: the iPad, a handheld computing device aimed expressly (among other things) at browsing the Web and providing the best experience in doing so. What does its lack of Flash mean for that?

Well, evidently far less than Adobe would like you to believe. With big fanfare, an Adobe employee (speaking solely on his own terms and not representative of the company, it should be noted) pointed to a number of popular websites that use Flash technology to provide (predominantly video) content. And all but two of them were debunked as they had mobile device-optimized sites or even dedicated applications that allowed users without Flash to experience the same content. Oops.

Are iPad users going to notice anything missing? Probably not. Writing for the Chicago Sun-Times, Andy Ihnatko provides a telling example:

Months ago, I installed a browser plugin for Safari called “ClickToFlash.” It blocks all Flash content. You’ll see a placeholder image in the webpage and if you want to view the content, give it a click and it’ll load in. I have not noticed any drop in my ability to enjoy the Web. What I have noticed is that my browser is faster and more responsive, and that I can leave a couple of dozen tabs and windows up for weeks without having to force-restart my Mac.

Not much of a strong case in favor of Flash's value to the web, there.

Developers of websites tend to understand this concept pretty well: use a proprietary plugin to deliver your content, and you’ll almost certainly have to offer a version for those without the plugin. Without the latter you risk losing part of your audience and thus, income. Websites that exist solely as a Flash app will have to make a difficult choice: create a non-Flash version, or place the against-all-odds bet that Flash will soon be added to the iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad devices.

Lastly, there are the advertisers who make Flash ads; their ads will not be served to this growing segment of users, so they’ll have to reconsider the technology or simply lose money at an increasing rate.

From Adobe’s perspective, this appears to be a pretty grim situation. Flash, for all its contributions to bringing video to the Web, is set on a course to irrelevance. Worthwhile content is already being delivered by alternative technologies—including video, thanks to HTML5—and worthless content like Flash ads are not particularly missed by users. The only real use case left for Flash is games, a huge sub-industry it must be said, but not one that is likely to change the course of our industry as a whole.

Flash, I’ll tell you right now, is dead.

What about opening it up?

Nack argues that open-sourcing Flash would not benefit the platform:

Open-sourcing Flash would lead to a fragmentation of the format & Flash runtimes, and that would destroy the predictability and agility that differentiate Flash from other standards.

I’m not really convinced by this; opening up Flash and documenting it to become an open Web Standard, allowing for its runtime to be improved by countless developers all over the world and for browser developers to implement much better, native support, could well be the only thing that could save Flash. Adobe would have a huge lead on competitors in terms of authoring tools, and it would take a long time for the open source community to create an authoring tool just worth mentioning (and I don't see Apple bothering with it), so from a business perspective this wouldn’t disrupt things that much; far more important is the long-term situation, where Flash actually remains relevant.

Nack suggests that Flash will stay relevant anyway, by continuing to innovate and “deliver better features more quickly”, but those arguments are worthless to developers when they have to build the same content twice—once in Flash, nice and easy, and once for mobile devices that otherwise wouldn’t be able to access it.

One such “innovation” was the Flash-to-iPhone-App idea, which converted Flash games to native iPhone games. A laudable effort, but the depth and usability of the first series of games made with this technology was so severely lacking that it’s hard to imagine it’ll really take off, let alone sometime real soon.

Meaning, if you think that the Flash team is capable of bringing such amazingly great features to market that developers would forgo supporting the iPhone, iPad and similar non-Apple-product but equally Flash-deprived users, you’re fooling yourself and you’ve clearly not paid attention to the past ten years of technology development on the Web.

The symptoms are all over the place, starting with the discussion raging online right now—this piece included. Another telling development is that Flash-lacking user percentages are now being measured publicly for websites on Twitter, via the #shareyourflashstats hash tag. Another is that because of all this, the soon-to-be-released Modernizr 1.2 will feature a check against the user’s ability to render Flash.

Developers are smart, they balance tradeoffs all the time. For the past ten years, Flash’s ubiquity and ease-of-authoring has heavily outweighed the various downsides (for enough people, anyway). Now that there are well over 75 million mobile devices that browse the Web with no support for Flash at all, as well as an increasing number of people using Flash-blocking plugins in their desktop browser, that tradeoff becomes a much harder sell. Clients wanting to reach as large as possible an audience will soon realize, if they don’t already, that Flash is not going to get them there. Authoring content twice is more expensive than authoring it once, and Flash is not the one technology that works across the board.

There are innovations that Adobe could do that make authoring Flash continuously worthwhile, like having a respectable “basic HTML, CSS and JavaScript export” feature or something along those lines, but those lead to the question: why bother putting the Flash version online at all, if the authoring tool also creates a good enough non-Flash alternative that actually works the same for all users?

Flash may well continue to exist as a technology for authoring specific content or as part of other tools—like how it is used in the Adobe Creative Suite, not that I or anyone I know is a fan of that—but as for being a technology to deliver Web content with, it is effectively dead.

Some people just won’t acknowledge this yet.

I’m not mournful about this myself—my criticisms outlined above explain as much—but I also don’t want to dismiss the good things Flash has brought to the Web. We have awesome video sites delivering great content, now and for many more years to come, and I’m quite thankful for that and will be for as long as that lasts. Flash also brought about some fun games I enjoyed, though none that captured the depth or excitement I’ve found in many iPhone games. But Flash’s days as a part of the Web’s technological infrastructure are numbered, and as time passes more and more people will realize this and move on. This process will take years, but I’m ready to say goodbye now.

So long, and thanks for all the Flash.

iPad: The Better Webbook

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Remember when I wrote about ChromeOS and Litl, somewhat over a month ago? It was all about the next generation of Operating Systems and the many, many devices and different types of devices that we're progressing towards; ChromeOS and Litl stood out because both are completely browser-based Operating System, which is similar to Palm's WebOS but even more to the letter. To identify the Litl's uniqueness in particular, I wrote:

Leave it to David to make Goliath look the fool; an innovative and ballsy approach at making a brand new computer, complete with its own Operating System. A total break away from the traditional mold of computing devices and operating systems.

In my mind, I started referring to ChromeOS netbooks (as yet unannounced, hardware-wise) and the Litl computer as "webbooks". They're not really a netbook, the way we think of netbooks today, and they're certainly not tablets. "Webbook" seems fitting, if admittedly not a great name.

The iPad, out of all announced and existing devices I can think of, reminds me most of the ChromeOS netbook (concept) and the Litl, except better. For one, the iPad drives a lot of its value through the built-in Safari web browser, which means that it is capable of doing many of the same things ChromeOS and Litl do. Unlike the two of them, it lacks Flash but it compensates that tremendously by being so much more than just a browser-based OS: it is the iPhone OS on steroids, and with more potential (and much more powerful hardware).

Another observation from my earlier piece applies here, this time about Google and ChromeOS:

First they came with Android, now Chrome OS; the two platforms appear not to share any code or frameworks, so Android developers are at no advantage whatsoever when it comes to developing apps for Chrome OS.

The iPhone kickstarted as a platform by leveraging the Cocoa framework, reinvented for a multi-touch interface instead of a mouse and keyboard. This meant that all existing Mac developers—who are responsible for a large number of fantastic products with great UI—were able to quickly get started building apps. The iPhone's popularity and monetization potential, along with the really great SDK, meant that many more people got started building apps for it.

Now there's the iPad, and it builds on top of the iPhone SDK and CocoaTouch frameworks. I haven't yet explored the iPad SDK but you don't need to in order to realize that every iPhone developer is now also a well-prepared iPad developer. And there are over a hundred thousand iPhone developers already (whilst a much smaller number are published app creators, that number is still larger than for any other mobile platform).

The iPad, as a result, is the "webbook" that really delivers. It offers all of the potential that those other devices have to offer, but adds on top of it a wealth of existing applications that already work on it, a legion of developers ready to expand their skill set and product line, and a much more powerful layer of applications that have yet to be created for it.

There's so much more to be said and is being said about iPad, but I felt this particular aspect was being overlooked thus far.

Adding Tags to the OS X Address Book

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One of my very first experiences with Mac OS X was watching Cindy Li update her Address Book with all the business cards she had accumulated on day 1 of the @media 2005 conference in London. The simplicity and elegance of such a mundane but common task struck a chord with me, leading to my switch to the Mac very shortly thereafter.

In all the years that I've been a Mac user, now, I've used Address Book to pleasantly manage my contacts but there are a couple of things that I've found increasingly lacking about it. One of them, in particular, is making it more useful as a tool for managing business contacts in an efficient and flexible manner.

The primary Address Book use case for me is searching through it for someone with a particular trait: a designer, a programmer, an investor, friends in the area, people in cities I'm planning travel to and would like to meet up with, et cetera. These are all traits that would be best expressed by a tagging mechanism: I would tag people with their primary skills and passions, their related interests and their geographical location (among other things). The problem is, Address Book has no support for tags, and no real plugin architecture to add it. The only thing it has is the Notes field which you can stuff full of meta-data about a person, so how do you take advantage of that?

The obvious solution is to just write out your own tags in the Notes field, but you can't just write the words on their own: searching through your entire AB for words like "product" or "design" can lead to ambiguous results, such as (part of) a company name or an AIM or e-mail address. Using hash tags ("#design") doesn't work because the hash sign gets ignored. Fortunately, there is something that works: the hyphen!

Prefixing your tags with a hyphen allows you to do functional tag searches in Address Book that exclude normal occurrences of the words. They'll still include hyphenated URLs like easy-designs.net, but it's a big improvement nonetheless. And, you can search for multiple tags separated by spaces.

So if, like me, you want to organize your contacts in a slightly easier, faster and more flexible manner than using countless of groups, tag them with hyphen-prefixed tags in the Notes field. You don't have to go into Edit mode, and using newlines between tags creates a nice listed overview for each person, too, e.g:

-design
-productdesign
-sfbay

Like it? Let me know your thoughts via Twitter!

The Weekend I Met The Internet

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There are certain people that sometimes have a troubling time digesting the nature of my lifestyle, or perhaps I should say our lifestyle, for I am speaking about something not unique to myself but characteristic of a great many people. Many great people, I should add.

Ten years ago—that it's been so long never struck me until I wrote it down just now—I went on my first trip across the world for the purpose of meeting people I had never met before. This wasn't a vacation for the vacation's sake, it was a vacation to meet people from the Internet. Haha, how weird is that?!

Well, not very. This past weekend, well over a hundred people traveled from far and wide to San Francisco for the sole purpose of… meeting people from the Internet—myself included. We came from different countries and different continents, and from cities all over the U.S., and for two short but amazingly fun-filled days, we were alltogether in person.

Most people, when they go away on vacation or a long weekend, go somewhere where they're not surrounded by the people they see and talk to every day. Those 140-odd of us in San Francisco, well, we don't see each other in person every day, but we see one another online with Gratuitous Picture Of Yourself Wednesdays and miscellaneous other photo posts to Twitter and Tumblr. We talk to each other all day long in small chunks of 140 characters or up to sixty-second sound clips. We are one another's friends and we share something every single day with each other—except real-life interaction.

The great thing about the Internet is also one of its most challenging flaws: it brings you "together" with people who can be—and are—anywhere else in the world. Sometimes even out of this world. You just aren't in the same physical space, and that brings about some challenges, not in the least having to explain this new interaction and friendship paradigm to people that don't quite get it.

But this is why we organize events like this San Francisco TweetUp; so that we may see each other in person every so often, and give each other real hugs and high-fives. We do this because these people are our friends—not on the Internet, but from the Internet. The friendships we build over bits and bytes, using words and pictures and sound clips and videos, are every bit as significant and meaningful as the friendships we built when we were young kids playing with other kids in the back yard.

It's events like these that make me realize just how small the world really is, and how immensely filled with wonderful people.