I tend to be harsh on Flash a lot, and I dislike it as much as the next standards-advocating (and technologically savvy) Mac user. Since I like putting my money where my mouth is, I decided to try going into February and not use Flash even once during all of its 28 days, inspired by Michael Heilemann‘s initiative to do the same. He even logged his difficulties, which I haven’t and won’t be doing.

For me, the conclusion after February was clear. I missed out on a few things that annoyed me intensely. Most of the things I missed out on were videos on websites like TED and the New York Times. I had some catching up to do after February. With the help of ClicktoFlash and Youtube and Vimeo’s HTML5 players I was able to watch most of the video content out there, but there is still a lot that you can’t watch without that little plugin. I also ‘missed out’ on a truckload of so-called ‘rich advertisements’, which I absolutely adored.

But the problem of going through your digital life without Flash it’s not just videos on otherwise accessible websites. Try browsing for motion design agency showreels and websites for new games without Flash. Some industries have a vested interest in Flash because it is a mature platform for graphic websites, despite advances in HTML + CSS + Javascript. And I can imagine; the Flash-less approach doesn’t only break down in some browsers, it’s simply not mature yet. Take a look at the current Macheist page. At the time of this writing, it is using 65 to 70 percent of the processing power in my early 2008 Mac Pro, equipped with eight Xeon cores.

Worse still, people hail these Flash-free websites as progress and the road to the future. With terrible performance and compatibility like that, I prefer Flash, despite its drawbacks and proprietary nature. Actually using these technologies and advacing the state of the art is great, but I hope it doens’t put these upcoming standards in a bad light. It’s worth noting, however, that a lot of these techniques are in their infancy.

I’ll be happy with a more efficient and well-performing Flash plugin for Mac, but what I want above everything is a access to the of data that is used by web plugins. It’d be great if I would’ve been able to at least view the motion agencies’ showreels (which are all in Quicktime) and read a bit about games or view some screenshots without requiring a plugin. If I do want to opt into the so-called ‘rich’ web experience, I’ll use Flash, Silverlight, or Web Plugin #4512 to render blinking text and videos projected onto cubes which fall down the screen and bounce around using realistic physics.

Microsoft Labs is doing great things with Silverlight that aren’t possible with Javascript and modern standard-based technologies (yet?), like Pivot, which was demonstrated at TED this year (Flash video – sigh). Pivot’s data, however, for at least half of the video, is the actual web, built on standards and accessible to any technology. This way, if another superior technology comes by or a plugin is no longer supported, anyone can harness the power of the existing data to replicate or even improve on the functionality that we’re so accustomed to. I like that.

There is nobody stopping you from making an iPad or iPhone application using Core Animation which browses Wikipedia like Pivot does – try doing that with all the video that is on the internet.

In conclusion, I’m actually happy to use Flash again to get at all the content I want. I’m equally happy to have missed out on the drawbacks of Flash. While before February I was convinced Flash had no place in the world, I am now a bit more relaxed about it. Flash has its place – but we shouldn’t lose track of the real goal: making the data we want to interface with accessible regardless of the technology I have on my computer, be it a phone, tablet, or PC.

When I watched this movie earlier today, which Craig linked to on his Twitter page, I once again thought about how much it can hurt usability if you consider your users to be (far) more ‘intelligent’ than they actually are. Everyone who’s in the field of designing particular software interfaces (and even icons) requires at least one idiot to ‘proof’ his work.

If you take offense at the term ‘idiot’, I apologize. To clarify – if it hasn’t been clear to you from my first sentences – when I say ‘idiot’, I actually mean the least ‘intelligent’ and/or computer-familiar class of users this particular product has.

“This isn’t news,” you say, “Surely, everybody takes into account end-user stupidity, and Apple, for instance, is a nice shining example of making stuff everyone can use.”

Really? I invite you to a short look at of the wonderful app that is iPhoto ’09. Most user friendly software ever, right? I gave it to my parents in law so they could edit, manage and share their pictures. Sharing is obviously an important aspect. Personally, I love iPhoto. Makes stuff so much easier.

Let’s say I want to make a slideshow. “Bah, easy!”, says iPhoto, “you only have to click the self-descriptive icon in my toolbar from any collection of photos and off you go.”. Sweet! That makes for an awesome slideshow. Now I’d like to share this particular slideshow. Where do we go now?

My spouse, who is far from computer-illiterate or an actual idiot, had asked me how I could export slideshows, and although I hadn’t ever done it, I was sure it was possible. “Hah, that’s easy!”, I exclaimed, making a fool of myself. It took me a solid 10 minutes to find it. I was the idiot.

“Ah, the share menu!”, I thought. Bzzt. Wrong. Not there. Easy way out: I tried to use the Help menu to search for ‘Share’ and ‘Slideshow’. Bzzt. Sorry, no sharing here. A few of these harsh lessons later, I was still utterly stumped. I kept searching and trying seemingly unrelated things, fearing the worst for my perception of iPhoto as being so friendly to the computer-illiterate.

Spoiler: the iPhoto slideshow exporting is hidden in… the File menu. Nope, not in Share, not part of any particular UI related to your current collection or slideshow, and not part of anything in the actual slideshow editing UI either. It’s in the ‘File’ menu. You have to click ‘Export’, and then select the rightmost tab, which reveals a quite nicely designed UI. Right next to ‘Import from Library’. I bet that doesn’t import slideshows, though. But who knows?

Everybody makes these mistakes. I won’t heckle any single party over this: this iPhoto annoyance is a mere example. It’s more important to acknowledge it when you made them, and rethink how you go about working with the extremely varied ways people interact with your product.

And perhaps Apple needs a few more idiots around.

Today was a pretty special day in San Francisco for me: it wasn’t just special because I had a truckload of work to do, but also because I had one of my first meetups with internet friends from Macrabbit. You might know them from the excellent CSSEdit.

The Moscone is looking awesome this year. There’s some gorgeous façade artwork on display – there’s a lot more images of it in this post, as well as a look at the banners they hung up inside. But those weren’t the only huge icons on display since today, since me and Sean designed a truly massive print ad for doubleTwist that’s displayed on the side of the flagship Apple Store. It hit TechCrunch after it had been up there for an hour. Some great images of that further into the post as well.

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Well, after a solid 13 hour trip and a beefy walk around town I’ve set up base here in San Francisco again. In the next few days, I’ll be posting updates on WWDC meetings, announcements, the first shirt printing, and my presentation at Cocoaheads WWDC.

Some more images of my first day follow.
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iPhone icons are gorgeous. The home screen is a beautiful display of icons that have been extremely carefully designed to achieve a stylistic balance. On the desktop, the same applies, but icons have far less ‘rules’ imposed on them, and are generally very diverse in their appearance. One could conclude that there is less consistency in the design of desktop icons than there is in iPhone application icons.

As a result, icons in the Mac OS X dock also generally have less trouble looking good and blending in with the system icons. There’s simply more room for creative freedom and slight stylistic differences. The iPhone is a different story. I keep all third-party application icons (apart from a few notable exceptions) off my home screen, because they stick out like a sore thumb. Why is this, when it is so seemingly simple to fit into the consistent design standard, and what can Apple do about it?
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Since the last gaming article on Flower, one might expect a post on a relaxing and casual game, but I want to talk about Armored Core for Answer instead; the latest game in the line of the Armored Core series is everything but casual.

I hadn’t played an Armored Core game before, but as a vocal mecha lover, I wanted to give it a shot after I had jumped through a bazillion hoops to make a Japanese Playstation Network account and downloaded the (also entirely Japanese) demo. I started up the game, enjoyed the horribly designed menu – a real stalwart quality of Japanese games in general – and went straight into the first mission.

I lasted about 30 seconds. I was literally blown away, mentally and ingame, by a 3000-feet (about a kilometer) high walking fortress with six long-range cannons firing projectiles the size of a bulky SUV. At that moment I realized that this was a game that was practically tailor-made for me.
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