For some reason when I started writing I thought it’d be a great idea to use rather abstract titles for all of my posts, something short and curiously inviting (hopefully) rather than the straightforward approach of actually describing what the post is about. I wanted to avoid long and boring titles like “Differences between Flash Player 10 and 10.1″ or “How to install.. blah blah”.

So although, as far as titles go, they could probably be more boring – they could definitely be more helpful. Most of them are obscure and aren’t really meaningful. They’re fine for human readers, especially after people have read the post, but they’re not so good for search engines or people searching for what I’ve written about.

I decided then to use Wordpress’ custom fields to add a descriptive ’subtitle’ to each post that should shed some light on what I’m actually writing about and hopefully the titles should start making sense.

I could have started anew and use descriptive titles from here on, but that would be inconsistent and make those old titles even more nonsensical. I could have renamed the lot, but the old URLs would then be meaningless (the name is in the permalink) or if I changed those URLs then previously incoming links would be broken.

Adding Custom Fields

Custom fields are essentially metadata for each post and can be pulled in by your theme.

I choose to display my subtitle under the each post title so humans, search engines and crawlers alike can read abstract title and the helpful subtitle description together.

Custom fields are added at the bottom of the ‘Add New Post’ page and can be any amount of value pairs that take a name and value.

These custom fields won’t automatically show in your post, you’ll need to edit your current theme’s PHP files to retrieve them.

The get_post_custom function will return a multidimensional array with all custom fields of a particular post or page, which you can traverse to find your custom value pair:

<?php get_post_custom($post_id); ?>

Otherwise you can use the get_post_custom_values function and send the field name to get an array of all the values with that particular key:

<?php get_post_custom_values($key); ?>

I’m using a field to add a subtitle, so I append the value onto the end of my title which you can see on the left (if you’re reading this on my site).

Semantically this is part of my title. As I stated above, for SEO purposes, I want this to be considered as a part of my title for all intents and purposes by search engines and spiders as well as humans. I only ever want them considered ’separately’ on an aesthetic level and in Wordpress’ forming of the permalink.

So I’ve styled up the subtitle to look complimentary to the ‘actual’ title with CSS, but injected it into the post’s h2 title tag in my mark-up so it stays semantically sound for machine readers and accessibility purposes.

So here’s the combined title mark-up (without style hooks):

<h2 class=”entry-title”>
<a href=”..”>Start Making Sense</a>:
<span class=”entry-subtitle”>Wordpress, SEO and pimping my blog</span>
</h2>

And the styled and un-styled versions look like this:

It’s subject to a conditional statement that checks whether the custom field has been populated, so I don’t have to rush through adding them to all my posts and those without subtitles yet won’t look broken.

This does mean however that it’s only implemented by the theme, not by the publishing platform. This means it will only be seen by visitors to the blog, it isn’t published to the RSS feed, for example, so syndicated readers won’t see it.

Sitemaps

Another improvement for SEO purposes was to add an XML sitemap.

I recently added a HTML sitemap in the form of my index page, but then saw Google’s Matt Cutts discussing HTML versus XML sitemaps who concludes that if you can have both, then do so.

It’s very easy to generate a sitemap and according to Matt’s video a simple list of URLs would suffice, but I looked up the Wordpress Plugin Directory for ready-to-roll solution and found the Google XML Sitemaps which does the job for me.

It’s fully automatic so it doesn’t need my attention once I’ve installed it. It generates an XML file based on my current posts and pages and automatically updates whenever I publish or modify anything new.

It also sends notifications of updates to the main search engines – Google, Bing, Ask.com and Yahoo! – and has a number of advanced options concerning prioritising pages and setting the frequency of how often certain pages should be checked again by crawlers for updates.

The XML file it generates sits at http://blog.marchibbins.com/sitemap.xml (for me) and there’s an option to attach an XSL file for styling, but I choose just to use plain XML.

Social Bookmarking

I got to browsing some of the other popular plugins and temporarily tried out Sociable which adds typical social bookmarking links to the bottom of each post.

It supports nearly 100 different APIs and the drag-and-drop interface and nice and easy to work with.

I chose not to use it in the end, I thought it was a bit over-the-top for my site.

There’s a lot more in the directory though, like Add to Any, SexyBookmarks and ShareThis – though they’re not hard to write anyway, if I eventually change my mind.

Tweaks

I made a few other minor changes here and there, some CSS changes and design tweaks.

I threw an RSS link into the header and dropped the amount of posts that show on my front page.

I realised my posts can tend to get pretty lengthy and often have embedded videos or Flash content, so showing ten of those (the default) made the page quite heavy.

I started using the ChaosTheory theme when my blog was freely hosted on Wordpress.com and I’ve stuck with it since, making odd modifications to both server-side code and the front-end as and when. To use it on a Wordpress.org blog I found a port hosted by Automattic but it’s never been quite right nor entirely compliant with mark-up or CSS standards, I’ve only really maintained it for consistency.

Recently though I found the Unicorn ‘Universal Conformance Checker’ from the W3C which combines all the common validation checks and also has a MobileOK Checker which looks at the ‘mobile-friendliness’ of a site.

Shamefully my blog scores an awful 0/100, due to links with “_blank” targets, the amount of images embedded, the presence of Flash and Javascript and a ton of other things.

Over time it’ll be my aim to get all that sorted. Hopefully without having to start my own theme completely from scratch.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Adobe MAX 2009

Adobe TV has a MAX 2009 channel with a lot of content, with videos divided into three categories – Develop, Design and Envision.

Here’s some of the highlights:

Develop:

• Building Applications for iPhone with Flash Professional CS5
  Aditya Bansod
• Designing Applications for Desktops and Mobile Devices with Adobe AIR
  Arno Gourdol
• Designing and Developing for the Multiscreen Web
  Thibault Imbert
• Multi-touch Development with Flex
  Andrew Trice
• Creating Real-time Social Apps with Flex and Flash Collaboration Service
  Kevin Hoyt
• Introduction to BlazeDS and LiveCycle Data Services
  James Ward
• What’s Coming in Adobe AIR 2
  Christian Cantrell

Design:

• Multi-touch and the Flash Platform
  Daniel Dura and Matt Bugbee
• From Big Screen to Browser, Desktop and Mobile Device with Flash
  Jonathan Wall
• Flash for the Digital Home: Flash on TV!
  Matt Snow
• Using Code to Prototype Interactive Design
  Remon Tijssen
• Design Considerations for Contextually Aware Solutions
  Ali Ivmark and Christian Robertson
• MegaPhone: Your Phone is Your Controller
  Colin Moock

Envision:

• Adobe MAX 2009 Keynote: Day One
  Shantanu Narayen
• Adobe MAX 2009 Keynote: Day Two
  Ben Forta
• Open Screen Project Fund: Fuelling the Future of Flash Experiences
  Bill Perry and Mark Doherty

Future of Web Apps

Carsonified have only uploaded a small handful of talks over the past few weeks but they’re all worth a watch. So far I’ve only found their London talks on their Vimeo channel, but the Dublin sessions have started to appear on the FOWA site.

Here’s what I’d go for:

• The Future of HTML5
  Bruce Lawson
• How to Build Amazing Web Apps
  Blaine Cook
• The Future is Ruby without Rails
  Emma Perksy
• 14 Web App Survival Tips
  Ryan Carson
• Introducing Atlas: A Visual Development Tool for creating Web Applications
  by Francisco Tolmasky
• Taking your Site from One to One Million Users
  Kevin Rose
• Branding and Marketing Essentials for Your Web App
  Alex Hunter

I’ll update as and when more work their way online!

Flash on the iPhone

Here’s how they broke the news:

It’s a huge announcement.

Rumours of Flash running on the iPhone have been going around for over a year now, with Adobe and Apple ‘officially’ being in talks since November. The Flash team did well to bluff any developments when asked about it at Flash on the Beach this year, so clearly they were keen to save the big reveal for MAX as it deserves.

As you can see in the video, Flash CS5 will make it super-easy for developers to publish their Flash applications as a native iPhone executable, so simply it would seem, as changing a publishing setting at author-time.

This means developers don’t need to make any changes to their applications in order to run them on the iPhone (though presumably the APIs will be limited). It also means that existing applications won’t need to be rebuild from scratch (not even be completely refactored, as before) and can be distributed via the AppStore.

It doesn’t, however, have effect on viewing Flash in the Safari browser. This still cannot be done.

What Adobe have achieved is the ability to compile Flash as an iPhone executable to run as a native application – they haven’t created a Flash Player for the iPhone, or any way for the iPhone to interpret a SWF at run-time. They’ve made their files compatible, rather than the other way round.

There’s already some applications available in the AppStore, these are:

• Chroma Circuit
• Trading Stuff
• FickleBlox
• Just Letters
• South Park Avatar Creator
• That Roach Game
• Red Hood

 
Adobe have created an Applications for iPhone Labs page demonstrating apps running on the phone:

There’s also an FAQ (and Developer FAQ) which goes through what can and can’t be done.

Mark Doherty has written about the announcement and lists some of the limitations that will be imposed, for example some typical features you might expect to work with, but won’t be available:

• Microphone access
• Camera access
• Photo selection from file system
• Contact selection from the address book
• Cut/copy/paste
• Maps

 
..actually quite a few limitations.

Ted Patrick is one of the Adobe team who developed some of the demo applications. He has posted an article on his blog with the four sample apps and included full source so you can see, as he says, there’s absolutely nothing special going on – it’s just simple AS3 cross-compiled to iPhone ARM Binaries.

Aditya Bansod has written an article for the Adobe Developer Connection which goes in the technicalities in a little more depth. He also has an hour-long episode on Adobe TV, taken from MAX, exploring the technologies:

Of course, it’s not news that Flash isn’t without sceptics. Not everyone is looking forward to the prospect.

Jeff Lamarche is an iPhone developer who has some very good points on being cautious when developing Flash for the iPhone.

He shares my opinion that you should avoid ‘hammer development’ principles and instead should choose the best tools for a platform. He says:

Flash has always been a compromise that takes considerable overhead to let you create applications that can run on multiple platforms, while feeling native on none and getting native performance on none.

He goes on to make valid points about performance when road-testing some of the applications, also noticing some inefficiencies and possible breaches of Apple’s guidelines.

Presumably when you create applications with the recommended workflow, with XCode, Interface builder and the iPhone SDK, developers are somewhat constrained by them – definitely with regard to the interface, visual components and interactivity. With Flash’s ‘back-door’ sneak of creating apps, these may be breached.

That being said, I haven’t had a chance to play with these applications yet (I don’t actually have an iPhone..) but even then, presumably these are apps for demonstration and are, as proven, purposely uncomplicated.

And as always Flash has its haters.

A comment on Mike Chambers’ post might be a bit knee-jerk and unjustified, but also hints as to some of the feelings that will no doubt surface if the AppStore is inundated with bad Flash apps and games.

Hopefully Apple won’t change their position on accepting Flash.

Flash on everything else

But not to forget – this was really the second big announcement of MAX.

The first announced that the forthcoming Flash Player 10.1 appears to run on pretty much every other smartphone and high-end mobile device on the market too. Which has a lot to do with new commitments to the Open Screen Project.

Ryan Stewart has a run-down of the news, which announces Flash will run on Blackberry, Palm Pre, Windows Mobile, Android and on Skyfire browser for Nokia Symbian OS (links via InsideRIA).

Google have joined the project, see the post on their blog and Adobe’s press release for more information.

At Flash on the Beach, Mark Doherty’s spoke about the improvements to Flash Lite and how advances in Flash technology outside of the ‘main’ Flash Player have beneficial effects overall, to the platform as a whole. One such advancement is that the new multi-touch and gestural events in Flash 10.1 will be completely available for non-mobile applications too.

Daniel Dura and Matt Bugbee’s Multi-touch and the Flash Platform on Adobe TV discuss and demonstrate what can be achieved with these new events.

I’ve just noticed that InsideRIA already have a ‘Getting started’ primer for multi-touch Flash, too.

As I say, advances in one technology can propagate development in another. That said, Adobe have also announced that they are developing a lightweight Flex framework for mobile devices, called Slider.

Slider is a mobile-optimized version of the Flex 4 framework, allowing developers to leverage their existing Flex skills but benefit from optimised performance and a streamlined user experience for devices with less memory and slower processors.

There will also be a new set of user interface components.

Going full circle, a greater presence of Flash and Flex on mobile devices puts more pressure on Apple to adopt the Flash player for their Safari browser.

Hopefully some time soon, seeing this screen will be a thing of the past:

As Serge says, there’s lots of things to get excited about and it’s a great time to be a Flash Platform developer!

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.

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)

• Julian Dolce (site) – iPhone App Development For Flash Developers
  Handout, files, slides, samples
• Lee Brimelow (site) – Down And Dirty With The Low Level Bytes
  Slides, source, ByteTrainer app
• Seb Lee-Delisle (site) – Papervision3D 2.0

Day 1: Monday 21st Sep 2009

• Adobe Keynote – Richard & Mark Expose All!
  Richard Galvan’s blog, Mark Anders’ blog and video (182mb mp4)

• Keith Peters (site) – Casual Game Architecture: How to finish coding a game without despising it
  View slides
• Mike Chambers (site) – Advanced Desktop Development with Adobe AIR
  View slides
• Carlo Blatz (site) – The shoemakers son always goes barefoot…
  Review (in German) and links

• Carlos Ulloa (site) – HelloEnjoy
  HelloEnjoy & EnergyLab
• Rich Shupe (Twitter) – Lead the Hand and the Arm will Follow: Inverse Kinematics in Flash CS4
  Slides, source and samples
• Chuck Freedman (site) – Visualizing Voice: Using the Flash Microphone for advanced interaction
  Video of a similar talk from FITC Toronto 2009

• Rob Chiu (site) – Fear/Love
  Preview of Fear/Love and last year’s FOTB promo
• Mike Jones (site) – Who’s A Bright Spark Then!
• Adobe Town Hall – Adobe Flash Platform team
  Richard Galvan, Mark Anders, Paul Burnett, Andrew Shorten, Mark Doherty and Lee Brimelow

• Dr. Woohoo! (site) – Cybernetic Art Revisited
  Slides and lecture notes
• Joshua Hirsch (site) – Big Spaceship : Fun Begets Quality
  Some of the showcased videos are on Vimeo
• Thea Eaton (Twitter) – Accessible Action Games!
  Accessibility in Flash and some examples

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

Day 2: Tuesday 22nd Sep 2009

• Elevator Pitch – 3 Minute Wonders
  Iain Lobb, Wim Vanhenden, Chris Black, Jolyon Russ, Conrad Winchester, Matt Pearson, Jon Howard, Bartek Drozdz, Aron Hallborg, Paul Croft, Bram Plessers, Nick Kuh, Frank Reitberger, Sean Randles, Trevor Boyle, Michiel van der Ros, Robert Turrall, Andrew Fitzgerald

• Grant Skinner (site) – Quick as a Flash
  Presentation slides and sample code
• Mark Anders (site) – Flash Catalyst in Action
  Andrew Shorten’s video interviews on Flash Catalyst
• Peter Elst (site) – The Secret Life of a Flash Freelancer
  View slides

• Andy Polaine (site) – A Interaction Designer’s Guide to Play
• Joa Ebert (site) – Leaving The Sandbox
  Slides and video
• Lisa Larson (site) – NEVER MIND the Buffer! FMS Made Easy
  Presentation and code examples

• 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.

• Contrast (site) – Unconventional Web Applications
  Des Traynor on Twitter and Eoghan McCabe on Twitter
• Craig Swann (site) – Choose Your Own Adventure
  Craig’s agency, Crash!Media

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!

• Mario Klingemann (site) – Connecting the Dots
• Marco Casario (site) – Preparing for the Flash Catalyst’s era
  Part One (more to follow)
• Stacey Mulcahy (site) – Can play well with others
  FOTB writeup

• Colin Moock (site) – Union and MegaPhone
• Seb Lee-Delisle (site) – Work / Play
• Hugh Elliott (site) – The 10 Best Excuses to NOT do Amazing Work
  Talk review and Presentation files (zip, but currently unavailable)

• Jam Throwdown – 6 Speakers, 10 Minutes Each
  Grant Skinner, Mario Klingemann, Julian Dolce, André Michelle, Jer Thorp, Joa Ebert and his session (on Vimeo)
• Laura Jordan-Bambach (site) – The Death of the Creative Director
• Andy McDonald – Flashed Fashion

• 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

• Joshua Davis (site) – Space
  Presentation (zip format)

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:

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!

Day two of Flash on the Beach would prove to offer even more Flashy goodness than the first, with great talks throughout the day and wowing us every chance they got.

Elevator Pitch

3 Minute Wonders

The day opened with an hour of elevator pitches, allowing twenty solo attendees to individually take the stage for three minutes at a time to show their best work, idea, code or drawing – whatever they liked really. The idea being to give those brave enough an open audience to show off the coolest thing they’ve got.

And there was some cool stuff.

Mostly we saw people’s new business ideas and apps, lots of games and Actionscript experiments. A lot of them actually were projects that have been declared open source and some creators took this time to call freely for collaborators and testers. There was also a couple of generative artists thrown into the mix too.

All in all, given the talks that we ended with on Monday, what could have been an absolute incoherent shambles (as event runner John Davey did seem to worry about) came across as smoothly planned and well informed.

Probably the most useful project to note, I thought, was presented by Conrad Winchester called ASAXB – a tool that intends to put an end to the endless serialisation of XML to and from objects in order to handle your data with code.

Inspired by Java’s JAXB, it enables you to annotate code for marshalling and unmarshalling from Actionscript to XML. You don’t actually write the code that does the conversion, instead you give instructions to the marshalling system about how to package your object as XML and it does it for you. This is one of the open source projects that I mention.

Another talk was a really quick comparison between Objective-C and Actionscript 3, from Nick Kuh. Previously I’ve been a bit unsure about why Flash developers are either expected to (or keep banging on about) iPhone development – but somehow after seeing this I figured, it probably doesn’t matter. It probably doesn’t matter whether we should or shouldn’t be (or be expect to be) developing for iPhone or with Objective-C, ultimately, as this guy said – it’s just another language. In fact, the plus is that it’s an object-oriented language – so anyone with knowledge of OOP is halfway there already. So why not, eh?

Quick as a Flash

Grant Skinner

Basically, Grant Skinner is the man. You probably already know this, if not you should.

Grant’s talk was on optimisations for Actionscript. He went through a whole ton of techniques, practical examples, demonstrations and supplied code snippets from the most basic alterations to some pretty advanced trickery to provide ways to improve the speed of your code and relieve the CPU operating your applications.

Most people are aware of simple tips and best practices you can assert, declaring a loop length outside of the loop itself, collapsing literal values, using multiplication instead of division – those kinds of things – and Grant often blogs or tweets bits of code (he showed us some nifty bitwise tricks I’ve seen him post somewhere else before). But there was so much here, some stuff I’d not seen before and a lot I would never have even thought would really have any impact on performance – but wrongly so.

For the majority of his optimisations he provided timed tests and metrics for true comparison. Demonstrating the different ways of carrying out the same logic, highlighting areas that are easy improvements and black spots you should always avoid.

The optimisations weren’t only code-based either. He spoke about the other wages on performance, on-screen media (audio, video, webcam) and graphics (renders, filters, composites).

He also discussed the garbage collection of the current Flash Player and how to ensure there is an allocation for it to operate. He also considered the differences in the performance of the Flash player when running within the IDE, or standalone, or as a plug-in for the browser. There’s quite a difference.

This led on to his exploration of how to measure your own optimisations and to the tools that he has to offer to do so. See his PerformanceTest, FramerateThrottler and Janitor classes, to name a few.

There was a great depth to everything he said, he discussed qualitative and quantitative testing and the importance of benchmarking your tests.

Actually he made an interesting comment at the very beginning of the talk, stating the need for our applications to be good system citizens. As Flash matures and AIR becomes an ever-more solid desktop runtime, we can’t expect to hog the CPU anymore or for users to excuse that. It’s relates to my thoughts during Mike Chambers’ session with AIR on Monday, that I wrote about in my last post.

Anyway, the serious value of the talk really was in the code he provided and I’ve barely mentioned that. There was actually one hundred slides in all and I can’t hope to relay everything here. Fortunately his slides are already online, so read them here if you missed out. It’s such a great resource to have all those in one place.

Leaving the Sandbox

Joa Ebert

Grant Skinner is the man, because Joa Ebert cannot be human.

Joa’s talk was also about optimisation and began with some shared components of the last talk, but it soon became clear that his was ridiculously hardcore in comparison.

Joa took us down to machine code-level to analyse optimisations, scrutinising the compiler mechanics and the processes it performed during compilation.

He demonstrated the first of his frameworks, AS3V, a code-validator like no other for Actionscript 3. Born out of unhappiness with the current compiler and other code validators, AS3V will generate warnings and offer optimisation tips upon detecting exactly the kind of code that Grant talked about improving earlier – not just code errors.

For example, he talked about loop invariants, a often-encountered situation where a value is declared inside a loop even though isn’t changed with every iteration. Of course, this code compiles and executes, but needlessly takes longer to process (having to instantiate a new variable each time). His validator, available as an Elipse plug-in, detects those kind of code inadequacies and alerts the user at author time. It points out code that will run slowly, not only code that won’t run at all.

The tool looks for the breaking of coding guidelines and best practices, as well as opportunities for runtime errors – where compilers of course, only look for compilation errors.

Turns out Joa was only getting started at this point. He spoke about another framework he developed during ‘a week off’, called Apparat. This is a monolithic framework behind a number of other tools he then went on to talk about, all concerned with optimisation.

The first was TDSI, TurboDieselSportInjection! an optimisation for Alchemy – you can see some examples here.

Second there was Reducer, which reworks the JPG compression for SWF files to make them an incredible ten times smaller at 100% quality compression, or obviously even smaller at lower percentages.

Then he demonstrated Dump, a disassembler that looks at machine bytecode for the purposes of debugging and can also be used to generate inheritance graphs and UML diagrams from compiled SWF files!

Finally he presented TAAS, ‘Three Address Action Script’, which is an optimiser for the Actionscript compiler rather than the code.

Joa wrote this program to find inefficiencies in the compilations process, for example finding opportunities to rewrite algorithms, perform dead code elimination, some relatively ’straightforward’ stuff like single static assignment and in-line expansion – and even to make use of functions that Adobe have written into the compiler but don’t actually use!

He showed that when performing calculations on to ints, the compiler converts the values to Numbers (and back again) in order to use the Number calculator even though there is an int calculator available.

Ultimately, he compiled with his optimiser and the performance increase was simply amazing - calculations and transformations faster than anything I’ve seen before, and I’m sure faster than Adobe have ever seen either. I cannot see why he doesn’t work for them. It’s not released yet, but you can follow updates on his blog.

“Oh yeah,” he then said, “I’ve got one more thing” (this was after plentiful applause and people were already getting ready to leave).

As if he hadn’t impressed us enough, Joa then showed us, in seconds, that he’d written two more new compilers himself – one that compiled C# directly to a SWF file and another that compiled Java to a SWF file.

I kid you not. Then came a lightning fast fly-through look at how they work (that probably no-one understood), some proof it was live and working and real – and he deserved the standing ovation he got.

Have a look at how many wowed tweets immediately followed his session, including those from some speakers who were present. It really was something.

His slides are also up online now, they’re over on Slideshare here.

More than Bending Pixels

Paul Burnett

After lunch I attended Paul Burnett’s session on Pixel Bender, a tool I’m still yet to use.

Honestly, I didn’t really know much about it before I turned up, of course I’d heard about it and had seen the getting started demos everyone has seen and I think a lot of people were at the same situation there – keen to see what it can do and hope to see more than just the basics covered. It was packed.

So he started with those basics – the spherize, twirl and tangent flip filters, but quickly ramped it into something interesting. He shared with us the thinking behind the tool, how some of the mechanics work.

Pixel Bender actually runs as a different thread to Flash (now I think about it, they mentioned this at Monday’s Town Hall meeting when asked about threading), so any processing it performs, regardless of the task, does not impact on the speed to which Flash performs. This can be leveraged in interesting ways (more later).

We looked at the anatomy of a Pixel Bender plug-in – the PBK kernel file, the code of which you can edit and how to run this file in Photoshop. Later, the PBJ file which is the compiled extension used within Flash.

Pixel Bender plug-ins are developed within the Pixel Bender Toolkit, essentially another IDE which comes with Flash CS4. Apparently though, it’s hidden away somewhere (in a utilities folder?), perform a search and find it for yourself.

Within the toolkit we dissected a filter script, discerning the role of parameters and how to manipulate images on a pixel-level with the evaluatePixel() method. Ultimately we threw a plug-in into Flash and got something running – basic shades and blends, how to duplicate an image, return two versions, how to use multiple input images and how to write straight from Pixel Bender without supplying any source at all.

This is all very cool anyway, but Paul mentioned that it’s not only image manipulations that Pixel Bender can perform, essentially it’s any kind of data.

He showed us how to send a sound file through a filter, with a simple plug-in that looked an instance of a Sound class (sent as a ByteArray) and performed a similar function to the duplication of an image, by returning itself and the sound at a position slightly earlier, creating a delay effect.

In the same way that a Pixel Bender filter looks at an image pixel-by-pixel and returns a stream of modified data back out, the sound byte array is considered the same. He basically listened for a data change event on the instance of the filter, passed that into a new Sound object (with a bit of a buffer) and played it in real-time. Very cool.

There’s far more simple stuff you can do – he demonstrated a six channel mixer that received six sound files, contained six parameters – a value to determine the volume of each channel – and passed them straight back out after a simple transformation on the amplitude, easy and very responsive.

Persisting that ‘data is just data’ and Pixel Bender doesn’t care what it receives, he then sent some pure numbers to a filter to perform simple trigonometry calculations.

At first this might seem a little needless, seeing how Flash can perform these calculations after all, but then you recall that these processes are running as a different thread.

He provided us with an example that called for some heavy calculations to be processed whilst simultaneously playing a video clip on the stage. With normal Actionscript the calculations caused the video to hang and the framerate to drop, but by utilising Pixel Bender’s own thread and mathematical processing power, by sending the calculations there instead, Flash is left free to play the video as in any normal instance whilst Pixel Bender does it’s own thing – it just reports back when it’s done.

Then David Lenaerts of Away3D joined Paul on stage to show some impressive demos of Away3D which has adopted Pixel Bender for lighting effects and texture mapping. Some very nice reflections, lighting effects with fire and ambience and an example with a human face that renders sweat, scars and frowns all with the tool. The examples are here on David’s blog and here on the Away3D blog.

Paul has now put this slides and source online on his blog.

Unconventional Web applications

Contrast

For the first of the two inspirational talks of the evening, Dublin-based Contrast, in the form of Des Traynor and Eoghan McCabe, spoke about creating unconventional applications. They explored the notion of conventions – on the Web, in design, in life – praising the importance of following them and the ramifications of those who do not.

They discussed the problems of only following conventions; the restriction they put upon innovation, the idea of being lazy by essentially following suit as a rule of thumb, and the decreased marketability of products that can only follow a trend.

They were well versed in product design and consumer technology and pointed to some of the champions of unconventional design, the success stories of those that broke the rules. Apple with the iPhone, for example, who launched a radical mobile device in one of the hardest markets to penetrate; the Dyson vacuum, a product in a saturated market which is bottoming-out and the lowest price wins (which is the worst way to win); and the Nintendo Wii, which swam against the ever-rising tide of hyper-real graphics and enhanced performance and instead reinvented interactivity, engagement and had some fun.

Then they took these ideas to the Web, prompting a challenge to conventional wisdom on layouts, the sign-up process, the home screen and even copy.

All their points were valid, but I couldn’t help but feel that their information was a bit outdated. Especially with regard to the current state of the Web – especially, unfortunately, toward rich media, Flash sites and RIAs.

Their critique of Web design for example, seem to dissect the kind of HTML sites that were popular four or five years ago, where people weren’t daring to break a two- or three-column layout, with an inverted ‘L’ navigation and probably Times New Roman. Back then of course their ability to do so was somewhat limited too. But we’re at a cutting-edge Flash conference, where everyone knows what you can do with websites now and we’ve been treated to amazing demonstrations throughout the whole day, so it felt like these guys were equally a bit behind with the current state of play.

They showed a site as an example of the kind of rule-breaking they want to see, but it was very basic – an almost entirely static one-page Flash website actually with the kind if obfuscating highly-convoluted navigation mechanism that we look back and frown upon. One that overuses Flash for the wrong reasons.

At one point Des actually said ‘the Web is moving toward multimedia now’ and there were a few suppressed sniggers in the crowd, but then earlier in the talk they had openly admitted to not really knowing much at all about Flash, it’s not their field, so no-one held it against them – especially since the rest of the presentation up to this point extremely insightful.

Choose Your Own Adventure

Craig Swann

Craig Swann’s session was like no other. What started as a journey through his childhood from early coding days and finding his way onto the Internet, turned into a profound and existential exploration of life, success and creativity.

I honestly can’t relay his talk, how he took us from his college years to the Grateful Dead, via a trip on liquid acid and praying with Santana, to exploring cymatics, to founding his agency, and what happens when you run polygraph tests on plants or get Buddha monks to talking to rice and water.

(All of this happened).

Bottom line from Craig: you choose your own adventure – “We are what we think”, inspiration drives opportunity.

End of day two!

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.

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.

It reminded me of the ‘replies kerfuffle‘ earlier this year and Twitter’s reactive decision to review their technical decisions as a result of the amount of negative feedback they gained so quickly, their adaptability should be applauded. Biz admits they learned a lot.

What I’m getting to is that although Twitter has been near revolutionary, that now even though it’s such an important social tool – it’s still very young. Not in the sense of naivety (nor am I questioning their success), more that there is still a huge amount of potential in Twitter that we are eagerly awaiting to see come to fruition.

Here I want to talk about some of the things that I want to see, some of the things that I think are still lacking, though recognising some of the obstacles in seeing them fulfilled.

For me, the notion of conversations (as in actual conversations) and topic threads are pretty much non-existent and obviously missing. I mean ‘actual’ conversations as in direct correspondence between parties, rather than the more ‘global conversation’ reference that’s loosely thrown around when one wishes to sound informed lately.

Replies, Threads and Conversations

The function of ‘replies’ and ‘mentions’ have seen a lot of work on the Twitter platform, see their blog archives for the changes to-and-fro, but in my opinion they are still very limited.

When the ‘small settings change‘ took place in May, it turned out to be considered far larger than the heads at Twitter had anticipated. The intention was to clean up what was seen to be undesirable and confusing, though the result is arguably as vague. If you type ‘@someone’ into the status box and tweet then everyone following you will receive it, but if you click the ‘reply to’ button (which automatically puts ‘@someone’ in the update box for you) then only those following that ’someone’ will see it. The reply button create a response message – manually typing it does not, apparently then it’s a mention. Correct me if I’m wrong.

Anyway since those changes, reply tweets now link to the original messages (facilitated by clicking the reply button on that tweet, no less). So now when viewing a tweet, the ‘in reply to [someone]‘ is actually a hyperlink to the status update to which the user has replied.

This connection though, is only one way. And that’s the main crux of everything I’m going to say here.

The reply is aware of the original tweet, but the original tweet does not know that it has been replied to.

This isn’t so much of a big thing in a simple two-tweet case of ‘question and answer’ (maybe), but this is what stops users and applications from easily following conversations that are taking place.

For example, look at the following illustration of a conversation over four tweets:

The messages read A through to D, chronologically, with each tweet replying directly to the previous. Without having witnessed these tweets being sent, the only way to follow them is essentially backwards. Each reply has a link to it’s original tweet, so starting with D, you can click through C, B and A to reveal the point of origin.

This is the problem. Tweets have no forward links to their replies.

In the above case:

1. Tweet B is aware of tweet A (though A is unaware of B).
2. Tweet C is aware of tweet B (though again, B is unaware of C).
3. Tweet C is unaware of tweet A, even though it is linked to tweet B which is aware of tweet A.
4. And so on, the coupling continues with D (and E and F, etc).

 
Without creating links in the forward direction of the conversation, structuring and viewing threads like this is almost impossible without some serious archive mining.

Regardless of whether users wanted these changes to happen or not, I don’t think they solved the problem they set out to anyway. They were put in place to clean up timelines, removing conversational tweets just like these because seeing without context they’re almost always irrelevant, having been written in 140 characters. But now, if someone was really interested as to the answer of tweet A but they didn’t follow @birdsigh (or any replier), then they would never know it had even been answered, not only because they don’t get @birdsigh’s tweets but because they wouldn’t see tweet C either anymore.

If tweets had references to those that reply to it, anybody could see responses from everybody.

True, conscientious users often retweet replies that they’ve received if they are of value, but this can look a bit weird – seeing a number of usernames (including their own) then the message, like so (see the duplication of @aral):

So here’s another problem that Twitter are already on the heels of answering – with the new retweet functionality Biz mocked up, looking far cleaner and a lot smoother – no need to paraphrase or condense tweets to fit in n amount of usernames who deserve props.

I mentioned the archive mining – Twitter’s Search API has something almost there. If one of your results is a reply, there’s a ‘Show conversation’ button which expands to show nearby (?) tweets between the two participants. It shows the thread, yes, but it’s not that reliable – it can include tweets that weren’t direct replies to the others, rather mentions that were chronologically in between. And none of that is in the main API anyway.

Visualising conversation

That’s another thing – there’s no single place or any really decent way that I’ve seen to visualise this kind of information right now. It would be nice if the ‘in reply to’ link didn’t need a page change to see the related tweet.

Some of the desktop AIR applications try to solve this problem, for example, DestroyTwitter has a nice dialogue box – but only shows pairs of tweets, so you still have to click through:

TweetDeck has a similar view to the Search page’s conversations, showing the latest tweets between two participants, filtered to those mentioning or replying to the other – so again it does show correspondence, but it’s uninformed – you can’t select a thread and show only that and here too you see unrelated and old tweets also.

I’ve not seen any application that shows conversations involving more than two participants.

It’s interesting that phase one of ‘Project Retweet’ introduces a ‘retweet’ button, something that’s been around in the desktop apps for a long time (even if on their part it’s a crude copy-and-paste with the additional ‘RT’ prefix added). Like Biz said, some of the best features are emergent – so it wouldn’t be so surprising if, seeing how desktop applications are already attempting to visualise threads like this, they might one day materialise on Twitter.com as a fully fledged feature.

What’s to come?

The Twitter API documentation now has some timeline methods labelled as ‘Coming Soon’, those for the new retweeting API. One of those is the statuses/retweets_of_me method, said to ‘return the 20 most recent tweets of the authenticated user that have been retweeted by others’, (here).

Woop! That does mean forward linkages right?

If tweets can be tagged to inform that they have been retweeted, surely its somewhere possible to also inform that they’ve been replied to?

Back to visualisations, it’s be great if Twitter had some pages similar to these to show retweets and conversations (respectively):

Okay, it’s easy to see one improvement and make an assumption that it can be applied ‘exactly the same way’ elsewhere. As as developer I know that and get tired of hearing those kinds of requests

But it’s good to hear that these improvements are but ‘phase one’ of what’s to come. Maybe all of this has been recognised, in store – maybe already in development! Who knows. I’m sure I’m not alone in wanting something like this.

I mentioned the idea of threads with more than two participants. Immediately my idyllic conversation view above falls apart right here if you want to see a whole topic of multiple threads on one screen.

I guess you could check for any replies to a given tweet and any replies to those replies exponentially, presumably listing them all chronologically, but you’d miss out on the direct correspondence between individual users.

That kind of non-linearity is another great thing about Twitter, you don’t really get that anywhere else. Take for example correspondence on blog posts – if someone has something to say in response to a post then they can comment, but if in reply to that comment the person wants to write a second lengthier response, is the comments section the correct place to do it? Or would say, a post on their own blog ‘in response to’ be more appropriate – because that’s on their domain, under their name and heading?

Then there’s a weird loss of connection though, that post doesn’t appear in-line with the original post (other than a pingback, maybe) and users are confused where the topic continues.

That said, the ability to reply to multiple tweets also isn’t possible, only to reply to a single tweet and mention another user within that message to ensure they receive it.

I look forward to seeing the new retweeting functionality come into effect. Hopefully the change will be well received.

Thinking about the negative feedback the changes to replies received, I recall when Twitter stopped providing their SMS service to UK members – back then I was gutted but now that they’re back, I don’t use them anyway. I’ve turned device updates off. Things are different now, there weren’t as many desktop applications (and those weren’t even half as useful as today’s) and my way of thinking about the people I follow and those that follow me is different now too, my behaviour has changed.

The way I use Twitter has changed and will no doubt continue to do so as the platform evolves. Though I’d be very happy to see anything like what I’ve written here turn up (somehow) on Twitter eventually, I think it would change change the way we use it even more.

Update (02.09.09): Since writing this I’ve been pointed to two more applications that attempt to visualise conversation threads.

The first is Tweetie for Mac, that not only shows more than two tweets in sequence, but updates from multiple users:

  
The second is Tweader, a web based tool declaring an outright ‘new way to view Twitter conversations’, clearly also in recognition of the need for one. Tweader requires an ID of a reply update and (as above) constructs the conversation backwards by retrieving each original tweet.

Both of these do the job as best they can, but are still subject to the limitations of Twitter’s API.

For example, with Tweetie you must click a reply tweet, you can’t click a tweet and see the conversation that followed – the forward links are still absent.

Same with Tweader – try this and this.

Now although it’s the Twitter API that doesn’t offer this kind of linking, these tools are standalone applications so there’s nothing to stop them from storing their own form of descriptive data internally to allow conversations to be pieced together in such a way.

For example, upon receiving a reply tweet, one could store the ID against the original tweet ID (within their own infrastructure) so if a query is made upon the original, it’s responses can be found.

But as I’ve said, what I would like is for Twitter to support threads with a formalised API call – say with a method whereby one can submit the ID of any tweet (that is part of a conversation) and get a full node list of all tweets connected to that it, either in response to or those that came before it.