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Chrome’s On It: A preview of Google Chromium OS

In July, Google announced their plan to develop a lightweight operating system based on their successful Chrome browser. Intending to be open source, speedy, secure and simple, this would be their attempt to re-think the operating system as Chrome previously ‘re-imagined’ the browser.

It was Google’s aim to get users from start-up and on to the Web in a matter of seconds.

The Chrome OS would be the kind of system targeted at Netbooks, catering for the modern generation of computer user for whom the majority (if not all) of interaction takes place on the Web.

The OS would pretty much just be a browser in fact. All the user’s applications and data would (and would have to) be stored in the cloud; as stateless data and Web-based apps.

With that in mind Google could completely go back to basics and redesign the underlying security architecture of an OS. Because it was their plan to run everything ‘in the browser’, the underlying system would no longer need the capabilities of a normal operating system, for example, the ability to install applications or the need for security precautions to handle them. There is also no file storage, so you wouldn’t even need any real kind of storage space or file system in the traditional sense.

This all results in the user never needing to deal with viruses, malware or updates for applications or their security system. It also means the OS will be up and running in seconds of booting up – and thus, ready almost immediately to get on to the Web.

A couple weeks ago, Google held a special event announcing the official release of the product and previewed some of the features on a live webcast (covered by TechCrunch and ReadWriteWeb).

They followed it up with a short introductory video explaining some of their decisions and what users can expect in the full version:

Their YouTube channel also has a recording of the announcement and the audio of the Webcast is archived here.

As part of that announcement Google publicly released the code to the open source community and called for contributors to engage with their developers and start working with the code.

If you’re interested in doing that, the Chromium wiki has a how-to on getting and building the source and TechCrunch wrote up a step-by-step guide to getting started.

This also meant that you could download and build the source to have a play, so I thought I’d give it a go.

Getting and Installing Chromium OS

TechCrunch’s coverage has a guide to running the Chromium OS on a virtual machine, essentially software that replicates the behaviour of a standalone physical machine. This means you don’t have to install this OS instead of your native system or worry about any operations performed by Chromium affecting your current platform, it’s running in a secure sandbox.

They link to two disk images, one built by GDGT (which requires a free registration) and a Pirate Bay hosted torrent file.

At the time of this writing, the torrent file and image is considered to be safe, though as Jason Kincaid writes, this could at some point be re-written to be unsafe.

Now although it’s obvious, I’ll point out (as the article does) that this is a very early release of Chromium, so isn’t as near fully featured as that we’ve seen demonstrated. That version too is itself unfinished. This build has also not been put together by Google.

Neither is this intended to run on a virtual machine, so you won’t get anywhere near the performance that you would for real. This is the usually the case for any system running on a VM, but because pretty much the whole deal with Chromium is the speed, what we’ll be seeing should not be considered ‘as is’, it just a method to give you a bit of a sneak preview instead.

Using VMWare

Usually, VMWare Player is my preferred choice for virtualisations. However the build comes as a VMDK file and VMWare Player runs from a VMX file. The VMDK file is the appliance, the VMX file is a descriptor (processing instructions that the Player relies on).

VMX files are easily written in a text editor and I found an example which I modified to run as part of my development environment, which follows below.

Simply save this file as VMX format and run it from VMWare Player:

.encoding = “UTF-8″
displayName = “Chrome OS”
guestOS = “other”
memsize = “1024″

ethernet0.present= “true”
ethernet0.startConnected = “true”
ethernet0.virtualDev = “e1000″
ethernet0.connectionType = “bridged”
ethernet0.addressType = “generated”
ethernet0.generatedAddress = “00:0c:29:cd:8d:e6″
ethernet0.generatedAddressOffset = “0″

usb.present = “true”

sound.present = “false”
sound.autodetect = “true”
sound.virtualDev = “es1371″
sound.fileName = “-1″
sound.startConnected = “true”

ide0:0.present = “true”
ide0:0.fileName=”chrome-os-0.4.22.8-gdgt.vmdk”
ide0:0.deviceType = “disk”
ide0:0.mode = “persistent”
ide0:0.redo = “”
ide0:0.writeThrough = “false”
ide0:0.startConnected = “false”

virtualHW.version = “3″

config.version = “8″

floppy0.present = “false”

Depending on your settings, you may have to change the ethernet0.connectionType to “nat” and the ide0:0.fileName to your VMDK filename – if you got the torrent version, that will be “chromeos-image-999.999.32309.211410-a1.vmdk“. I also gave it a little more memory.

Using VirtualBox

TechCrunch recommend using VirtualBox, a cross-platform virtualisation. VirtualBox can run straight from the VMDK so don’t worry about a VMX file – just follow the instructions.

First Impressions

Initially, everything is a bit sparse and you may wonder if you’ve done everything properly (have a look at the screenshots below), but this is just a reminder that what we’re playing with here isn’t ready at all – the video demo is a far more polished version than this and we’ll keep that in mind.

Chrome login screen Chrome boot screen

When it gets going though, we start to see some of those familiar features.

There’s the application menu, not a drop down menu in our version but a ‘pinned’ tab – the drop down must have been put in later.

I started to play with some of the apps, they’re exactly the same here as they are on any other platform – they work completely as they should – Google’s Calendar, Docs and Reader to name a few.

Chrome application menu Chrome Calendar

Saying that though, why wouldn’t they? These ‘apps’ are just the webpages we’re used to, actually you’ll see exactly the same as visiting ‘http://www.google.com/mail‘ and ‘http://www.google.com/reader‘. There is zero difference, just like visiting ‘Amazon.co.uk‘ works plenty fine too.

The fact they’re called ‘apps’ is just semantic thing, just a way of thinking about them as products launched from some kind of desktop-analogy, rather than destinations found at the end of a search engine. I’ll come back to this later.

Then I started to play with the apps that launch in ‘panels’ – the first hint of something that looks native to Chromium.

There’s appropriations of the Calendar again and Google Talk.

Chrome Calendar in panels Chrome Chat

But then the illusion was slightly shattered when I notice ‘View: Mobile’ link at the bottom of the calendar and chose to click ‘Desktop’, which just showed just the other Calendar view (the first one, above), all displayed in that little window with scrollbars – because, again, it’s just a Web page we’ve loaded here, but in a custom view.

The chat is pretty much the same as the Google Talk, and includes voice chat.

This was actually a bit disappointing, of course I know that the Chromium OS is pretty much just Chrome and that everything is a Web page really, but I expected these apps to have detected that I’m visiting on the Chromium OS and serve a more tailored interface. I wanted some kind of dedicated experience basec on the app knowing that I’d be seeing everything through one of these panels.

Having said that, the Chromium OS project site has a whole section dedicated to the User Experience, which describes the ‘motivations, assumptions, and directions’ behind the interface design. It shows much of their work in-progress.

On their screenshots of the latest version, these windows seem to be more developed, the chat doesn’t have the default controls and there’s a notification panel that looks like it nicely ties up the application in some kind of native Growl equivalent – see here.

By the looks of it something like that could be achieved as simply as combining RSS and Javascript (maybe it does – it’s all Web pages remember), but putting it in a custom panel, presented in custom ‘chrome’, would give it a lot more strength and me more confidence.

The majority of the links from this application menu, in fact, are just to Web pages, rather than apps in these custom windows.

One of them links to a straightforward enough Chess game, demonstrating Chromium’s support for Flash. It comes with Flash Player 10.0.32.18 installed (currently the latest stable release) and it runs just fine.

Chrome Flash support Chrome Chess

A new paradigm

On the idea of using only Web applications, looking at Web apps versus desktop apps, I think for a long time people have been wary of becoming completely dependant on them.

When I say ‘Web apps’ here, I don’t mean everything that you could consider to be an app or just any kind of RIA, arguably any ’site’ is or could be ‘an application’. Instead I’m going to refer to the purely stateless apps, where the software, user settings and data are all stored somewhere in the cloud – on a server somewhere as opposed to the user’s local machine. Here I’m referring to the kinds of Web applications that are direct parallels of popular desktop apps, think the likes of the Google Docs suite.

For example, I know of a few people who dabble with Google Documents (Google’s word processor), but won’t use it exclusively over Microsoft Word, they use it for the odd document or quick note but not anything of length or real importance. Likewise with Google Spreadsheets as a possible choice over Microsoft Excel.

I think Spreadsheets is a different game, Excel is really quite powerful and has a lot more advanced features, though I’m no spreadsheet wizard. With Documents however, with the feature set far closer to that of Word or any enterprise desktop word processor, what’s the problem halting full adoption?

Is it a trust issue? Are people wary of Google or concerned about losing their data?

I’m a big fan of Documents, I use it for all my writing, I don’t own Microsoft Word and anyway, I like it. I’m writing this post using Documents because I prefer the environment over Wordpress’ authoring tool, I’m confident that my data is safe and secure.

And then there’s email, I don’t use a desktop client at all for my personal email, I use Google Mail. But compared to the rest of the Google app suite, Google Mail is seen as something quite different.

For some reason, Google Mail is set apart from the rest of the Google Docs applications, not seen on par, even though your data there is equally as secure or insecure, and backed-up or prone to loss there as it is with the apps on Docs. They run alongside each other, they have the same authors, same security, the same look and feel even.

So why is this? Is it just the case that Google Mail has been around for longer, so we’ve just gotten used to it? It has had a longer development life, but those advances are duplicated across to other software.

I wonder how many of the people who choose not to use Documents for trust, security or want of having their documents saved locally, do use Google Mail but haven’t ever exported their mail and backed-up an archive on their computer?

I think two things set Google Mail apart. Firstly, it’s just better than most mail clients – it’s fast, responsive, it shows emails in threads (which was pretty new at the time) and since then we’ve gotten hooked and now can’t possibly drop it for any of those old clunky desktop clients.

Secondly, probably because of that first reason, it seems we’ve kind of ‘forgotten’ that it’s a Web app – that’s just a load of that temperamental HTML and Javascript substance writing data to the browser, but not only is it so powerful that it can trump the desktop software, it’s extremely reliable so we seem to think that it surely can’t just be a Web page like any other page in our browser.

Not only are we forgetting that actually there really is no difference between Google Mail and any other page (other than excellent engineering), but that there is a difference between it and one the desktop alternatives.

What I’m talking about here is that we should consider our way of thinking about these applications. It’s not a new observation that the gap between desktop applications and Web-based applications is closing, Google Mail is probably the best example of that – perhaps the killer app in that respect. It just seems surprising that the Chromium OS has zero file storage, you do not save anything –  but it really shouldn’t be.

I talked about suspending disbelief in convincing myself that some of the Web pages I was looking at were actually apps and not just normal HTML pages – but does it really matter?

Take the application menu, note it’s similarities to the application interface on the iPhone which also collates Web links and native ‘applications’ together. Both treat them as one and the same with an icon treatment that doesn’t distinguish between the two.

Ultimately, if we get the desired result – on the basis that trust and security is in place and what we want to get done, gets done – I don’t think it matters if the program is Web-based or ‘desktop’-based, as much as it doesn’t matter if the app is written in HTML, AJAX or Flash instead of C or VBA.

When Adobe first starting talking about AIR, describing it as something like a desktop runtime for Flash, I didn’t think anyone would consider any Flash app to stand on equal footing to traditionally written desktop software (again, from the likes of C or VBA). At that time no-one really took Flash anywhere near as seriously as they do now. But now look at all the Twitter clients we use, the BBC iPlayer.

I digress. What I’m saying is that everything on the Web is constantly evolving.

Google Mail is the application that proved that stateless computing ‘can be done’ and can be accepted as the norm. Chromium then, has the potential to be the software that proves true stateless computing ‘can be done’ and is a confident first step to introducing that as the norm.

Chromium loads some Web apps natively, others it loads as if they were native. With apps like these, if you were the kind of user that didn’t know or didn’t care that they only served online, you wouldn’t be any the wiser because of the way in which Chromium unblinkingly presents them.

I’m reminded of the ‘What is a browser?’ video and how initially I thought of the people as being quite naive, but in retrospect I don’t think it matters what a browser is, it’s what you do with it.

For a lot of people the search engine (Google or otherwise) is synonymous with the Web, or is the Web. Not removing choice, I don’t see a problem with these apps being synonymous with ‘mail’, or ‘chat’ or ‘calendar’ for users who wish to use them.

We’re pretty much always online now and Chromium is targeting the Netbook type system (also to note perhaps, the TechCrunch article says you cannot download and install Chrome on any machine – you will have to buy a new one), Chromium could really work. As I say, if it does it’ll enforce this new paradigm of how we think about these apps.

NB: There are fall backs for offline use – recently Google announced that they are dropping Gears for HTML5 APIs and offline storage, but I won’t go into that now and anyway, replacing normal computer usage isn’t what this is about.

In the end I couldn’t survive the whole day on Chromium because of the virtual machine’s performance, but I got to wondering whether I could sustain myself on completely stateless computing if I was handed the real Chromium to try out for a period of time.

With the help of Wakoopa, I looked at the most popular apps for various platforms and chose those I use the most, for each I came up with a currently cloud-based alternative – all of which I’ve used at least once when circumstance has called for it.

Here’s a sample of what’s available:

Desktop Web-based
Internet Browser N/A
Mail Google Mail, Google Wave, Hotmail, Yahoo! Mail etc
iTunes/Spotify Last.fm, Pandora
Instant Messaging Google Talk, Google Mail
Skype/Voip As above, GizmoCall, or any webcam supporting site
DVD/Video player Hulu, YouTube (Now supports TV and ‘films‘)
Word Processing Google Documents
Microsoft Excel Google Spreadsheets
Adobe Photoshop Splashup, Picnik
Twitter client Brizzly, Twitter ;)
RSS aggregator Google Reader
Code IDE CodeRun – can edit, run and compile various languages including PHP, ASP.NET and Silverlight

There are far more than I’ve listed here – what I’m saying is, this isn’t a phase this is just development.

So Chromium is looking promising, no doubt more official releases will be on the cards for next year. Until then, if anyone does happen to have a Chromium-ready Netbook they want me to Beta test.. I’m up for the challenge. :)

Eight: This Happened #8

This Happened returned with their eighth London event as part of London Digital Week last month.

Shajay Bhooshan – Computer Generated Architecture

Shajay Bhooshan is an architectural researcher working at Zaha Hadid Architects and a course tutor at the AA School of Architecture.

Shajay talked about his research into alternative approaches to architectural design, namely his use of unconventional software and modelling techniques for some of his work at Zaha Hadid.

He spoke about using software traditionally used for developing videos games and designing motion graphics, showing us some of his experiments with Maya.

He explored the effects of using CGI over traditional methods, writing algorithmic and generative visualisations to create new original designs or influence his existing ‘traditional’ ideas.

Shajay showed us a lot of illustrations and motion captures from his research and project work, all of which can be found on his blog.

Shajay Bhooshan – Computer Generated Architecture video and slides.

Dotmancando – CoinFlipper

Dotmancando is Nitipak Samsen, an interaction designer and recent Royal College of Art graduate, who demonstrated his exhibition piece; the CoinFlipper.

His ideas revolved around the psychological aspect of control and his belief that contrary to our outward appearance, we don’t always want decisions left up to fate or randomness, such as that found in the event of a coin-toss.

Dot claims that we most likely always form a preference as to the outcome before flipping a coin and probably really only flip a coin anyway to feel less guilty about a choice, or to affirm that such an outcome is the right decision.

So he created a mechanism to take that decision out of the hands of fate and to perform a predictable coin toss by way of a impartial mechanical device, in turn, forcing ‘the flipper’ to reveal their true intention.

Dot was very entertaining in showcasing his many prototypes and the recordings of the experiments he carried out. We saw various incarnations constructed with wood, solenoid and Meccano and DIY-style gears attached to rulers until he ultimately achieved his final design.

His has all his work on his blog too, along with most of those prototypes), which can all be seen in this highlights video, on Vimeo:

Dotmancando – CoinFlipper video and slides.

Alexander Grünsteidl – Digital Wellbeing Labs

Alexander Grünsteidl is an ex-product designer who founded Digital Wellbeing Labs, a project set up to pilot a new kind of retail environment for digital lifestyle products.

Born out of distaste and ‘recognition of failure’ of the traditional mindset of consumer retail in selling electronic products, Digital Wellbeing Labs attempts to address the need for innovative consumer experiences in converging products with digital services and new media.

Alexander saw that his electronic products no longer sold successfully in ‘traditional’ shops, suggesting that the conventional retail model is a leftover process of the industrial age, a process that works for big brands but not for smaller.

He claims that now in our ’society of information’ a different distribution model is required, that small brands don’t need innovation in their products – what’s needed is innovation in shopping.

His showroom attempted to challenge both the traditional and Internet retail economies, specifically the current trend of ‘the last click’ – and pointed out Dixon’s recent advertising campaign which recognises that.

His showrooms are intended to be places for companies to connect with customers and to demonstrate their products, not places to perform actual transactions, but social spaces to engage.

Alexander has written an interesting article, titled ‘Goodbye high-street?’, which explores the thinking behind Digital Wellbeing Labs.

Alexander Grünsteidl – Digital Wellbeing Labs video and slides.

Jenhui Liao – The Self-Portrait Machine

Jenhui Liao, another RCA graduate, showed us his exhibition piece; the Self-Portrait Machine.

Jenhui works on the connections of humankind and machine, exploring the relationship and cooperation between humans and machines in the manufacturing process and the apparent dependency and inseparability that the two share.

He created a machine that takes a snapshot of the ‘user’, a person whose hands are immovably strapped the machine, holding marker pens, and moved around a canvas by a set of motors and devices in order to create their portrait in a ‘cooperative’ process.

Jenhui was intrigued by the cooperative roles of humans in manufacturing, working around (and even inside) machines.

He claims that similarly human identity is not independent of the machine-like workings of our society. That consumer buying and what we consider to be individual characteristics of our personalities are determined by mechanics outside of our control, that we are extensions of that machine.

He went on to consider the notion of a portrait, a single representation of a person, a traditionally selected and contrived choice.

His conception subverts that idea, partially removing choice by enslaving the human locked into his machine (which he named Geppetto) and forcing the human to recreate (and experience) the machine’s point of view.

Whilst their influence is limited, the participant can affect the outcome of portrait in choosing to cooperate with the machine (or not) by allowing or constricting their movements.

Jenhui Liao – The Self-Portrait Machine video and slides.

Notes: Notes, slides and videos from Flash on the Beach

It’s been two weeks now since Flash on the Beach so I thought I’d collect all the links, slides, source code and videos from the various talks and demonstrations here in one place for ease of reference for whoever might need them.

I’ll try and keep this updated as and when I see more appear online, likewise if you see something I’ve missed – give me a shout!

I also thought I’d show off Artillery’s excellent FOTB titles:

Day 0: Sunday 20th Sep 2009 (Workshops day)

Day 1: Monday 21st Sep 2009

  • Hillman Curtis (site) – Telling Stories
  • Joel Gethin Lewis (site) – Epiphany
    Lights On! in action

Day 2: Tuesday 22nd Sep 2009

  • Jeremy Thorp (site) – Hacking the Newsroom
  • Jennifer Shiman (site) – Using Flash for Your Cartoon and Comic Projects
  • Richard Lord (site) – Frameworks: The good, the bad, and the ugly
    View slides
  • Joel Baumann (site) – Numbers in Art
  • Paul Burnett (site) – More than Bending Pixels
    Source code and examples
  • Karsten Schmidt (site) – We make our own tools, and then they shape us.

Day 3: Wednesday 23rd Sep 2009

  • Andre Michelle (site) – Kling Klang
  • Serge Jespers (site) – The Flash Platform in a multi-screen world
  • Mark Doherty (site) – Contextual Application Development
  • Koen de Weggheleire (site) – PLAY with Vectors!
  • James Jarvis (site) – Live Drawing with James Jarvis
  • Jared Ficklin (Twitter) – Seeing Sound: Visualization in Nature & Code
    Source files
  • Ralph Hauwert (site) – Research Realtime graphics with Flash 10

Day Three: Reporting from Flash on the Beach

Note: this post is a continuation of my previous two articles on FOTB: The Beach and Day Two.

Here it is – the third and final day of Flash on the Beach!

Contextual Application Development

Mark Doherty

Mark Doherty started the day filling in for the absent Serge Jespers, who would have been presenting ‘The Flash Platform in a multi-screen world‘.

Mark, known at Adobe as ‘the mobile guy’ gave what sounded to be a very similar talk, focusing on the contextual practices of cross-platform application deployment, rather than (I think) the development of those applications and the devices now available to us.

He outlined Adobe’s three vectors of innovation; Rich Internet Applications, the Cloud and Devices – exploring for each the opportunity to create Flash applications and introduced their newly adopted paradigm and tag line, ‘Single experience, multiple devices’. It’s their wish to enable full engagement of RIA experiences across any device and platform.

He talked about Flash Lite and improvements gained over the previous six years of development. Flash Lite is fast becoming a very powerful tool and it’s Adobe’s intention that it should take leadership of mobile application development over the likes of Java.

But the talk covered more than just mobile devices, for example Mark spoke about Flash for the television. On that he made an interesting point that would run the length of the talk, about the importance of being aware of platform context.

He pointed out that devices like the television are never intended to be turned off, so, similar to Grant Skinner’s note on applications behaving as good system citizens yesterday, these kind of applications need to be aware of memory usage and simply cannot have any memory leaks.

We need to redefine our notion of ‘Flash applications’ and readdress our habits formed as a result of only developing browser-based and non-persistent applications.

Another assumption that cannot continue is that we can get away with deploying an application that can simply dynamically resize for different screen resolutions. This is Mark’s idea of ‘contextual applications’ comes in.

Applications should be platform-aware, true – detect it’s screen resolution, but also be aware of it’s computational capabilities, graphics and data support, it’s interface mechanic and tailor our applications specifically to those.

We saw Gamesplaza.mobi, which detected Mark’s touch-screen phone and served touch-screen games accordingly.

The New York Times have a collection of applications that think along the right kind of lines.

For the NYTimes, there’s the popular AIR desktop application, the Kindle version that serves the paper in PDF form, iPhone and Smart phones can browse the mobile website and there’s a version for the Chumby. Each platform offers a tailored experience and each has its own business model (some have paid subscriptions, some serve ads), but each is powered by the same service.

We saw UVLayer, a cloud-based virtual desktop and media sharing service funded by the Open Screen Project. UVLayer comes in two forms, visited in the browser or on a mobile device and the pair demonstrate this idea of contextual applications very well. The desktop is a place to administrate, manage an organise your media, but on the mobile the interface is remodelled and prioritise for the tasks you’d most likely want to carry out on a mobile – like watching and sharing those videos, photos and messages. It’s a different view of the same service.

The bottom line from Mark and Adobe now; don’t just scale or appropriate your application, recognise that platform, choose and serve content specifically for that platform and that context.

Connecting the Dots

Mario Klingemann

Mario Klingemann is a self-confessed ‘maths groupie’, likening his attraction to not being able to play the music, but loving the band.

His talk intended to reignite all of our lost love for maths, expelling all our bad feelings of the dry and boring maths taught in schools by delving into the beauty of geometry, the intricate patterns of computational design and the universal truth that only mathematics can behold.

He drew colourful metaphors of maths versus art, likewise of famous mathematicians and artists, before diving into number theory; his investigations into prime numbers with the Ulam spiral and Sacks spiral, before returning to geometric art with the tessellating and tiled designs of Islamic culture.

He offered some recommended reading on the various subjects, for example Daud Sutton’s Islamic Design: A Genius for Geometry, Robert Dixon’s Mathographics and Jay Kappraff’s Connections: The Geometric Bridge Between Art and Science.

Mario reunited us with cellular automata and algorithmic based systems to create some impressive visualisations. Making a connection with Flash, he plugged in Pixel Bender and created controls to alter system rules and introduced randomised variables to look for reoccurring natural visual phenomena, analogues of cellular or organic formations.

Another book recommendation – Stephen Wolfram’s A New Kind of Science.

Then he went on to talk about a bit of a game he had with Ralph Hauwert (UnitZeroOne) on Twitter, when he saw that he had sent out a Base64 encoded image message (explanation), where he tried to find if there were any other techniques he could employ to compress more complex images.

He applied a number of algorithms, encoding and compression techniques, then went on to exploit Twitter’s UTF-8 encoding and use Chinese characters, so it eventually ended up looking like this:

Mario Klingemann's encoded tweet

All very interesting, even though a lot went over most of our heads. He ran out of time eventually, but finished off the talk later in the day at the Jam Throwdown.

My colleague Adam Cousins joined me on this third day, he has written about Mario’s talk on his blog. He plans to write about rest in the coming week.

Union and MegaPhone

Colin Moock

Colin Moock’s session looked at multi-user interactive activities and how he believes that multi-user activity is the future of all applications.

He questions how many of us would still be using computers if it were not for the Web, or an Internet connection. He thinks in the same way that the Internet adds value to computers, multi-user activity will add value to applications in the future, if not be the main use for those applications. In fact, that they’ll be pretty rubbish without it.

It’s something he’s felt for a while, he pointed to his Unified computing lecture of five years ago as an example as to how long he’s been thinking about it.

So Colin has developed the Union Platform. Currently in an alpha state, Union is a development platform, server architecture and protocol for creating such multi-user applications.

The Union platform breaks the complexity of multi-user application development down into a small group of digestible, familiar concepts; clients, the server, messages, rooms and attributes. It enables rapidly produced systems and supports Actionscript 3.0. Read more on the Platform Overview page.

We saw a demo created by Clockmaker, a 3D multi-user Tenori-on, deployed and ready to play with right now, and then he quickly coded a simple chat application which could send and receive real-time chat messages.

Writing it live, at one point Colin’s code had an error – of course with everyone watching there were plenty shouts from the crowd as to what was wrong. He said we just proved his point as to the value of introducing multiple users :) .

Then he talked about MegaPhone, a product that enables multi-player games and activities in public spaces by turning your mobile phone into a ‘universal controller’.

The idea comes from the assumption that pretty much everyone has a mobile phone nowadays (in the Western world, I guess), that we’re all ‘connected’ in the sense that we all have a device of this kind in our pocket – so why not enable us to converge with them and interact with each other, or with an interface in a public space.

MegaPhone enables any phone to work on any screen because it doesn’t require any kind of installation on the hardware, it uses the features that all phones share – dialling, voice and the keypad. It;s just a facilitator service, it’s not app that’s pushed onto the user – thus, it is the universal, and universally compatible, controller.

We saw the concept demos, a big screen Whack-a-mole that required lots of synchronised shouting and ‘Grabber’, likewise a relatively straightforward volume-controlled game where the user shouts in an attempt to get their character to grab various objects displayed on a big screen.

Colin is the core technologist at MegaPhone, so aptly he showed us some code. It is intentionally very straightforward, six or so listeners that refer to calling, hanging up, key presses and volume detection, all with custom event handling.

There’s contact details on the MegaPhone site to apply for a developer key now!

Jam Throwdown

Grant Skinner, Mario Klingemann, Julian Dolce, Andre Michelle, Jer Thorp, Joa Ebert

The Jam Throwdown premise is simple, six speakers have ten minutes each to do whatever they want – presumably to do the best they can to impress us. We were told to expect demonstrations of some of their best work or greatest failures, previews of as yet unseen apps or experiments, perhaps even some live coding – and undeniably every speaker succeeded in their task.

First up was Grant Skinner who demonstrated some physics and collision detection experiments he had been playing with, eventually combining them with the sound spectrum API to create a pretty cool dynamic audio visualiser.

Mario Klingemann continued showing the results of his image encoding techniques from his earlier Connecting the Dots session.

Julian Dolce demonstrated a handy tool to compile multiple FLA files, using Eclipse, by way of an ANT task.

I was probably the only one excited about this – generally I use a PC and I’ve heard you can write AppleScript to do this on a Mac, and Flex can do this anyway but Flash usually can’t. Good news is, it’s all available on his website and it can handle straightforward publishing, debugging, FLP files, intelligent error handling and is also available from the command line.

André Michelle extended his ‘Kling Klang’ talk on manipulating sound and run-time audio processing from earlier that day. He devised various algorithmic techniques for sound manipulation, creating delay effects and playing with feedback. There were some incidental sound experiments, a Tenori-on sequencer, more visualisations and a very cool graphical synthesizer tool.

View the slides on his site.

Jer Thorp showed us a piece of his work commissioned to design an accessible playground, but for which he employed very unconventional design techniques, largely by designing using Processing both in 2D and 3D.

Then came Joa Ebert, who had an incredible session on Tuesday which was already the talking point of the conference, anyone who hadn’t seen it had definitely heard about it.

Where everybody else had spent the full time talking and presenting their work, Joa just said “Hello,” queued some thumping dance music and immediately sat down to speed-code for the whole ten minutes, wowing us by creating a fully-realised 3D sound visualiser written in Processing.

Needless to say it was outstanding, not to mention that he afterwards revealed that he uses a keyboard without glyphs.

You can see the whole video on Vimeo:

Seeing Sound – Sound Visualization in Nature & Code

Jared Ficklin

With a DIY mindset, Jared Ficklin explored sound visualisation with and without code in a Maker Faire/Brainiac-style session.

Using smoke, fire, oscillators and costumes he worked through the physics of sound and waveforms and how they can be visualised.

We saw some of his work with the sound and sound spectrum APIs, visualisations he’s created in the past and a few by other artists such as Annika Hamann’s Fowl Owl and Robert Hodgin.

He offered tips and best practices on how to work with sound in Actionscript specifically.

Although the talk was very hands-on, he couldn’t do everything he wanted to do on stage. Especially set fire to things.

He had a enactment of a Rubens’ Tube, with a long hollow PVC tube filled with bean-bag polystyrene balls, passing a sound through the tube to watch the air pressure change the shape and form of the balls as it passed down the length, modelling the balls mimic the sound waves.

Do see the real thing in action, with fire, he showed us one he prepared earlier:

Space

Joshua Davis

Flash on the Beach closed with an exceptional talk from Joshua Davis who explored the notion of Space. Not so much space as Astronomy, although apparently 2009 is the International Year of Astronomy, but of course with regard to design.

He talked about design technology, his approach to computational design and his past pioneering work with Macromedia Flash.

He talked about his work with other artists such as Stefan Sagmeister (as did Hillman Curtis on Monday) and Branden Hall, with whom he created Hype – an Actionscript framework for creating visual and generative art.

To see Hype in action, there’s some nice examples here and you can watch Joshua and Branden’s discussion with Carlo Blatz on Powerflasher’s blog.

Joshua went on to consider the notion of the physical design space, showing some work from various exhibitions, some interactive installations and his work with printed art.

As with every of the inspirational talks of FOTB this year, I’m going to cop out and say you really had to be there. Joshua is a funny guy and had everyone hugely entertained, as I’m sure you can imagine if you’ve ever seen him speak.

His presentation is also online now on his site (in zip format), which shows some of his great work.

See you next year!

And that was the end of Flash on the Beach 2009!

Needless to say again, it was a great conference. Honestly I didn’t know what to expect before going, this being my first year, but if offered so much more than I would have imagined it could. I go to plenty of other conferences, groups and conventions and this beats the lot.

John Davey insists that Flash isn’t a product, it’s a mindset – and Flash on the Beach captures that.

As for the organisation, it was flawless, and there was a huge amount of freebies thrown in too.

Thoroughly recommended, I’ll definitely be going next year!

The Beach: Reporting from Flash on the Beach

Update: I’ve now written up my thoughts on Day Two and Day Three.

Now in its fourth year, Flash on the Beach has quickly grown in to one of the most popular Web conferences in Europe. This week hundreds of developers, designers, gamers and animators (you name it) have arrived in Brighton to see and hear the latest news and innovations in the Flash world. I’m here and until Wednesday, trying to get to the best of the packed schedule.

Flash on the Beach 2009

Keynote

Richard Galvan and Mark Anders

The conference opened with a keynote from Adobe’s Richard Galvan (product manager for Flash Professional) and Marc Anders (Senior Principal Scientist).

They started with the usual kind of Flash Player boasting, statistics, looking at the penetration and speedy uptake of the past versions for the last view years and looked over some of the feature successes of 2009 before outlining what we can expect in the near future.

Of those success stories they particularly highlighted the prevalence of 3D, the perspective API in particular and the new drawing API. With both, celebrating the growing power of the Flash platform in their ability to handle these developments as they’ve promised years previously.

They talked about the forthcoming release of Adobe AIR 2.0, demonstrating some of the popular applications that have surfaced this year in TweetDeck and Fanbase.

Elsewhere on the Flash player, the new text rendering engine looks impressive. The forthcoming update easily renders ‘print quality’ text in any reading direction – not only bi-directional right to left, but supporting languages such as Thai, Hebrew, Arabic and Asian languages horizontally and vertically.

We had a sneak preview of what else is to come in the CS4 update. Inclusive of the above text advances; authors will have a far greater amount of control over editable properties, more toward the likes you would find in Photoshop (kerning, ligatures, etc) as well as the TLF (Text Layout Framework) improvements which can link multiple text fields like columns, as to what we’re more familiar with in Adobe Illustrator.

There’s a keen initiative to make life easier for newcomers to Flash – and designers ;) .

For example, there are now a number of code snippets bundled with the Flash IDE which, whilst not being anything brand new at all for most workflows, has been lacking in Flash for some time. These will beparticularly beneficial for those experiencing migrations problems from Actionscript 2.0.

Alongside those, the code IDE also has both auto-completion and code introspection for custom classes.

As has always been Adobe’s intention, there’s a continuation of tightening the integration of programs across the Creative Suite.

Flash Professional and Flash Builder (the renamed Flex Builder) have a partnered workflow between coding and design environments. Documents can be created within the Flash IDE and a document class be generated and automatically be launched within Flash Builder. Flash Builder in turn has compile and debug shortcuts via the toolbar to switch back and forth with Flash thereafter.

The keynote concluded with Mark Doherty joining Richard and Mark on stage to demonstrate some of their developments with mobile devices. Showing Flash running (almost) natively on a few mobile devices and even promised their first television platform support – though poor cabling let down the demonstration.

Advanced Desktop Development with Adobe AIR

Mike Chambers

The first talk proper I attended was with Mike Chambers exploring some advanced techniques with Adobe AIR. Since it’s release 18-odd months ago, there’s been plenty of entry-level talks and tutorials at conferences I’ve attended, so I was looking forward to a more advanced demonstration.

Mike went through some of his contributions to the AS3corelib, a must-have library of tools that came around last year.

The first was the FileMonitor, straightforward enough, is a handler class for monitoring changes to a file on the system marked for observation. The class dispatches events on modification and movement (or if it is deleted) by polling the file regularly and, basically, looking for changes to the last modified date. Mike noted that this class and the VolumeMonitor, which he demonstrated next, essentially facilitate what AIR natively ‘cannot’ really do. They’re not particularly hacks, but workarounds until the runtime supports these functions natively.

Mike also talked about the AIR 2.0 release, that as well as having the performance improvements you’d expect, checks off a few of the most popular feature requests, which was one of Adobe’s highest priorities.

He demonstrated the StorageVolume API, which monitors for USB mounted hard drives. He recorded a video with a flip camera and handled the file transfer within an AIR application which detected it’s mounting and read the file contents.

This really made AIR look like it could eventually be a very powerful desktop runtime (and already it’s pretty damn good as it is). But with it’s seamless connection with the hardware devices and by seeing it confidently carry out the kind of tasks you’d expect more traditional proprietary software to perform was really something.

Likewise, Mike showed some examples of storing persistent data for applications by creating custom file types. He also utilised the application cache, by way of the ResouceCache class, to optimise processing. This of course also allows you to access these kinds of assets whilst offline, which after all is half the deal with AIR. It too really made AIR look like a far more serious, or at least a more mature platform than it’s young age may otherwise suggest.

Finally he talked about forthcoming changes to running native processes and applications – and this is a huge deal.

I’m sure this is would have been the most requested feature by far – that AIR should be able to launch files in their native apps and run other applications or processes securely from within it’s own runtime.

Mike was the developer of the CommandProxy, a proof-of-concept bridge between AIR and the OS by way of a secondary application (running in the background), but this development now makes that obsolete. This would be able to talk to other applications the correct way, whether that application is something like Photoshop or a command line process.

Apparently though, if you do use this functionality, you can no longer distribute your applications as an .AIR file. Although your app will still be completely cross-platform (this is important to Adobe, he says) you’ll have to export as the platform-specific executable – so a DMG or EXE file, for example – though handy as it is, the compiler will produce these for you :) .

Mike has now uploaded his notes to his blog here.

HelloEnjoy

Carlos Ulloa

Next up was Carlos Ulloa who discussed a selection of his latest work for his studio HelloEnjoy. Founder of Papervision3D, Carlos (as ever) didn’t fail to impress.

The first project was ‘Flowers’, a very intricate visualiser and editor for forms of artistic models of abstract 3D flowers. Whilst offering a very simple interface to manipulate the characteristics of the flower – shape, size, colours, in real-time – it hid some extremely complex mathematics and transformations behind-the-scenes.

Carlos took us through how the project was conceptualised and ultimately built, referring to some of the libraries he used along the way – Flint particles being one of them, as well as the excellent GouraudMaterials for shading.

Secondly he demonstrated EnergyLab – a relatively straightforward game mechanic, but executed to the highest levels of workmanship and attention to detail that I’ve probably ever seen in such an application.

Having visited the site before and being impressed enough simply by the experience it offered (it deservedly won a FWA, too), I hadn’t truely realised how much work had gone into the development of the project – particularly the 3D work more in the combination of Papervision and Maya, than the video production which is arguably more striking.

Carlos went through an extremely complex and lengthy process to achieve the desired visual results requested by the client, who pretty much came to them with a video full of CGI and asked “Can you do that?”. It’s exemplary of the powerful effects that can be created in Flash as boasted in the keynote.

Working in parallel with Papervision and Maya, for weeks scrutinising every detail of the project it would seem, it’s as much also a remarkable achievement of workflow and process. I don’t think that playing the game really represents this.

Finally we saw walkthroughs of HelloRacer, an iPhone application developed with Unity 3D in just a week (the online version of which can be seen on Carlos’ blog), and the popular HelloEnjoy website – newly improved with extra models and sound. By this point most people were already pretty blown away, Carlos made this look relatively simple - he sets a high bar.

Adobe Town Hall

Adobe Flash Platform team

This session was a face-to-face Q&A between the leaders of the Flash platform and the community at large, an open-mic style meeting allowing anybody to fire any questions they had.

The team was Richard Galvan, Mark Anders, Paul Burnett, Andrew Shorten, Mark Doherty and Lee Brimelow.

Most questions related generally to workflow, feature requests or concerns over software bugs, with the odd teething problem with CS4 thrown in. However a few points are worth nothing outrigh.

For one, the panel were asked about threading and whether there are any plans to support some kind of threading in the Flash Player (ever, at all). I thought this would produce an outright “no”, but it seems it is something that they’re considering. No doubt due to the high amount of requests. They said, whilst threading is very hard to achieve and in no-way present in any form natively for the player right now, they’ve looked at other methods of running concurrent tasks seen elsewhere with the likes of HTML5 or Grand Central Dispatch, to facilitate something similar. So although there is a definite interest, what we might eventually see may not necessarily be ‘threading’, per se.

Another (perhaps inevitable) question asked for any update on the status of Flash for the iPhone – both for support in the Safari browser as well as potential to run applications natively on the platform. Disappointingly, there is none. This was an outright blank – although of course, it’s still a target. Adobe will demonstrate Flash Player 10 to the best of its ability at Adobe MAX 2009, but other that that, there’s no new plans. It was actually at FOTB last year that the first announcements were made.

Thirdly Flash Media Server got a mention, FMS is something I have a bit of a soft spot for. The question was asked as to whether it will ever support AS3 – currently it’s a cheap version of AS1, which is basically Javascript. Though unfortunately here too, they had no news to offer – more to do with the fact that none of these guys work on the platform personally, so they couldn’t offer anything. But it was said that the platform is still being developed though, and it’s probably just ‘a matter of time’.

Finally there was a quick conversation about the ‘headless’ Flash player, a distribution for search engines to allow indexing of Flash-based content (SWF files). I wrote about this when it was announced, but it sounds as if it might now be released again but for developers to play with – for the same reasons and SEO purposes so we can see how it works inside-out, but also as a tool that could be used for the likes of automated testing, or anything else that we might be able to come up with.

Another note taken from the session actually, it seems that Flash on the Beach is unfortunately ‘too close to MAX’, as I heard on multiple occasions. Adobe are obviously holding back from secrets for MAX, fair enough, but it was disappointing to hear this said a few times to the crowd of eager community members who’ve paid their hundreds of pounds for their tickets.

Cybernetic Art Revisited

Dr. Woohoo!

Flash on the Beach has been noted for a being a conference that despite it’s name isn’t solely concentrated on Flash. Although you’d expect the whole platform to be covered (Flex, AIR, etc), which it is, FOTB also hold sessions on technologies only loosely associated with Flash, other Adobe products and pure Web technologies too. They’ve held talks on the likes of Processing for example, and there are talks about technology in general. This was the first of those kind for me.

Dr. Woohoo! talked about his time working with cybernetics and digital art and his paradigm of Art + Science = Serious Fun. He talked about about the people and places that have influenced his work and shaped his career to date.

He spoke about his time at the Santa Fe complex, showed some great recordings of the Art && Code symposium and other exhibitions he’s attended, spoke about the current state of affairs with reference to projects like Computer Vision and more recently Project Natal.

He then demonstrated his latest work with a ZCam and openFrameworks to drive mini-bots around his podium on stage.

There was a lot of name dropping and references thrown in to books and other institutions, recommended reading and quotes from luminaries of the field (far too many for me to write here). His blog is regularly updated, so hopefully his slides will eventually surface there.

Telling Stories

Hillman Curtis

Telling stories was another such session.

Hillman Curtis was the Art Director at Macromedia when Flash was first born in 1998. In his talk he spoke about his journey from then until now, his work with photography, film and Web design and his influences and muses found along the way.

We saw work from his portfolio and part of his latest film; a feature length documentary on David Byrne.

Despite being another code-free talk, it was attended by all event-goers and met with a compelled atmosphere no less.

I actually though this was very well placed at the end of the day, it seemed to encapsulate everything about why we do the things we do, even if not talking directly about our software product itself.

Epiphany

Joel Gethin Lewis

That was the end of the daytime sessions. After a break we returned for the first of the ‘Inspired’ evening sessions of the week. These talks aimed to be free of code too, if not development entirely, hosted purely for inspiration and the feel-good factor.

Joel Gethin Lewis is an interaction designer and artist who previously worked with United Visual Artists.

We saw some of his work there including the brilliant Regent Street Christmas lights of 2007. The huge light installation claimed to be the first ever ‘interactive’ Christmas lights created, the formations and lights changed based upon the density of shoppers below and other factors such as surrounding weather conditions, captured by cameras and climate sensors hidden around the street.

Since then he has founded two new companies, Hellicar&Lewis and YesYesNo.

From the latter we saw their project Lights On (also currently on the YYN homepage at the time of this writing), a massive audio visual performance created for the opening of the new Ars Electronica museum. With YesYesNo, he spoke about his work with openFrameworks and Computer Vision also.

He also worked on another great project called Contact, a floor-based artwork commissioned by the British Council that tracked the motion of those walking over it and generated physics-simulated shapes and objects below them on a giant LCD surface.

The thing is, this project was developed in about two weeks and made possible only by leveraging open source software. It’s with this possibility and ultimate realisation upon Contact’s success that that Joel reached his ‘epiphany’; that in his opinion, all software not only need not be paid for but should be free and open source.

Enthused, he found a whole host of open sourced software and similar successful projects and became set on being a champion of the open source school of thought. There’s a great article from Creative Review earlier this year in which he and partner Pete Hellicar talk about their experience.

All in all, a great first day from Flash on the Beach – all boxes ticked and more, exceeding expectations already.

I do apologise for the lengthy post, worry not – I’m sure I can’t keep this up. :)

You can’t start a fire without a spark.