On 4/11/07, Steve Watkins <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Cheers for the detailsed response, comments from me scattered below: > > --- In [EMAIL PROTECTED], "Mike Meiser" > <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > > On 4/10/07, Steve Watkins <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > The flash issues does seem silly but there is a logic behind its > > > evolution. Flash originally put on mobiles to enable developers to > > > make flash that specificaly targets the device, whether to provide > > > games or net-enabled widgets, screensavers, etc. Not to provide > > > desktop-level flash compatibility in the browser. > > > > hmm... sounds like AOL. :) > > I dont see it that way, because here we are talking about flash as a > language/development platform/runtime, rather than as a website. Right > now if I want to develop apps that run on the N95, then so far as Ive > learnt so far I could use C, Java ME, python or Flash Lite. So I > believe that previous versions of flash lite have basically been > competing in this space.
Right, all I meant is it reminds me of the early days when we used to have to author one version for everyone... and then one special little version for AOL. Ultimately it lead to a lot of people disliking AOL. The same thing happened int he browser wars, still does, but to a MUCH lesser extent now. Ironically people used to hate everything other then IE becuae IE had the dominate market share... but in fact it was IE that was "embracing and extending" standards to create the incompatibility. > > Indeed full browser support on mobile devices is probably the biggest > > issue facing the mobile web... as long as it stays "like the web but > > not really the web" it will never really catch on mainstream, it's to > > much of an effort for everyone. There will always be some purpose > > specific winners... but I'm betting it's mainstream catching on will > > be a factor of band... 3g and wimax. > > Yes, I think this has been fully realised now in most quarters. It > looks like Apple, Nokia & Microsoft are aware of this, and certainly > the browser on this N95 is attempting to bring the full internet to > the phone. It works (flash & other video within browser being one of > the big remaining issues), I can surf normal sites, but its always > going to be more painful with such a small screen and no mose, > compared to desktop browsing. I think you're right... the move is obviously to "author once play anywhere"... it's the same move wether you're talking web pages or media. The duplication of effort to split the entire web into to formats is incalcuble. Meanwhile the overhead in bandwidth, development, and processing power for hand held device manufacturers is an easier obstacle to over come then convincing a user that they don't need access to 95% of the web which won't work on their phone... or otherwise trying to figure out how to make a translation layer. This is luckily not slowing down the development of cheap web enable devices because nearly any new phone these days has basic primitive WAP / mmode support, or support for whatever standards the mobile web is using. My own piece o' crap free phone... (I refuse to pay money for a product that's locked to a single network, throw-a-way hardware I call it, just like I call media uploaded to closed hosts like youtube throwaway media, and that's usually what happens to it)... anyway, my own phone which I never expected to use for anything still supports gmail mobile which I find infinitely useful. I set it as my homepage, and now all i have to do is press my "web" button and I'm there. All this is to say... is the basic needs of the mobile web to have a stepping stone for making critical... or purpose specific mobile apps available to a mass market has been met. Now that that need has been met and is nearly ubiquitous this frees hardware manufacturers up to focus all their attentions on fully capable web browsing devices. It's a quick first step. Unlike other areas where innovation ussually slows down after the first itteration... the expectation has been set by the real web... mobile is and will always be playing catch up and innovation won't slow down until it's fully compatible with the rest of the web. I always say the web has "blown the expectation curve"... and it has. Mobile carriers cannot expect to piece mail the web like cable companies... net neutrality as long as theres transparency in the market IS the norm and any attempts by ISP's to limit it will be seen by users as "breaking" the web... and consumers will never settle for DRM on music... this is all because the internet has radically shifted the expectations in these areas. It's the exact same thing with the mobile web... people will never settle now for anything less then fully capable web access. Anything else will always simply be seen as "broken". This as opposed to say... cable TV... or ink jet printers ink... the internet has not blown the expectation curve on these markets... yet anyway. Ink jet printers continue somehow to charge ridiculous prices for ink... and cable companies still control what we watch and when by how they package their wares, though the web... is slowly starting to change that expectation too. A couple last examples.... so you can't give your users your own version of "mobile email" like mobile providers attempted to do back in the day... the users increasingly demand access to THEIR current email provider wether that be yahoo, gmail or whatever. But in certain new and evolving niches... like text messaging, or ring tones, the ISP's are still getting away with 4000% markup until that is until competition and expectations chase the huge profit margins out of these niches as well. But those aren't general web tools at all... yet. That is, until users start moving and demanding access to web services like twitter... but that tech is still years away from going mainstream. Speaking of the parrellel but unequal... as an experiment which will hopefully be long term... I set up my primary desktop machine with Ubuntu. Overall I love it... because the majority of apps I use everyday are already open source or have open source alternative. The new platform as they say is not the OS... it's the web. As such firefox alone which is the exact same on ubuntu as mac or windows makes this transition a whole lot easier... then there's gmail and various webservices so all my office 2.0 applications are exactly the same no matter what OS I'm on. The problem is this it has GREAT support for flash, makes me greatful for vPIP and that so many sites are now using flash, but I can't find ANY plugins at all that work worth a damn for MP4, MOV, or any of the various formats quicktime ussually covers. My particular niche area of interest... online video... appears to be the achiles heal of linux... if I didn't have a mac box sitting right next to the ubuntu box this one very simple problem would have completely killed my move to linux... i cannot function without having access to mp4, mov and other various video formats. There's another term some people use for this set expectation... I'm blanking on the name now. It most commenly occurs in this industry when a company roles out a major redesign of it's website or software. The new version may be superior in every way, but users get into VERY specific workflow patterns.. use patterns they have repeated 1000's and 1000's of times... and if you disrupt, alter or break their workflow patterns there are many who will never forgive you. Especially if that one favorite feature is missing... they simply won't be able to relearn, find alternatives, or otheriwise deal with the change. > Building little projector into the phone is one possible future > answer, or unfolding/unrolling screens, if the tech reaches a good > enough level. Completely unrealistic, but I still like it... My personal favorite is "digital paper" I want phone that unscrolls. :) And later... I'll get a phone with a holographic display... R2D2 style. :) But back to near term good old practical reality. > Certainly web developers were understandably not enthusiastic about > having to make mobile compatible versions of their sites, and full > broswers in phones will take care of this on one level. On the > otherhand as I said previously, smaller screensie & limited controls > will need to be taken account of to create the right experience for > the user. Luckily this is no longer something that the site designers > have to worry about. In this age of mashups & aggregation, its so much > easier for someone else to get your core service/content and handle it > differently for mobile users. Exactly... just as hardware developers are moving away from the "mobile specific" web to support the entire web so too are we web developers coming toward them with XML, the semantically marked up web, the seperation of content and style... and more granularity in the basic break down of data.... the web page is not the only package the web comes in anymore... RSS being a GREAT example... all this allows data to be mashed up and remixed into any form. Just as the web has blow the expectation for hardware makers and it becomes easier for them to make a phone with a fully functioning web browser then to convince would be buyers they don't need access to the other 95% of the web... that same expectation has been blown for developers of webservices. Here we are 10 years on in the grand scheme of things and bandwidth has exploded... but the size of the actual web page in kilobytes hasn't gone up by much... in fact ajax has allowed us to embed more functionality into the page and yet strip out more weight. (In some cases anyway.) Webservices developers are under the same pressure to ensure their sites work everywhere. > I think Widgets fit into this nicely, they are a very similar > formfacctor to what would work well on a 320x240 mobile device, and so > I see a future where the main website will work on the phone, but may > not be the best experience, so downloading a nice widget or other sort > of client-side app, that expresses the underlying data/service in a > mobile-friendly way, will become popular. It's funny that at the same time webservices are getting more ubiquitous they're also leaping out of the page. Widgets are where webservices depart from general utility to meet VERY specific needs. Widgets are the simplest form of purpose specific tools. All I can say is I think I understand... gmail mobile for example now has a gmail java app... haven't used it though... won't work on my phone. I have however used the google maps widget on my phone. Fun, but not all that practical. > Ajax may slightly complicate things in that it will often work on this > new gen of mobile browsers, but may be rather clumsy to use (drag & > drop is a no no on this n95 for example, apples iphone may well have > the edge here). On the otherhand autocomplete is an ajax thing which > is highly welcome on a mobile where you want to type as little as > possible. > > > > Interesting, this open source browser being a replication of apple > > webkit... not actually another branch of the same code right? > > Im not sure what you mean by replication. According to their site "The > Nokia Web Browser is built upon S60WebKit, a port of the open source > WebKit project to the S60 platform. > > WebKit contains the WebCore and JavaScriptCore components that Apple > uses in its Safari browser" > > http://opensource.nokia.com/projects/S60browser/ > Aha... so that confirms it. Apple's web kit is built on open source. > > > > > The dominance of flash on the web as a video delivery package has > > actually blown my mind and I'm quite happy about it, except for the > > downloadability factor. > > Yeah. The thing I like about DivX browser plugin & the stage 6 site, > is the prominence of the download button, which sits next to the large > play con in the middle of the player window on the stage 6 site. > Still at the end of the day it feels like the services/site who use > flash are in the driving seat on this issue, if they make it real hard > for users to download its usually because they dont want them to > download. And yet flash is not DRM... and even if it was there would still be a whole cottage industry of download and conversion tools for flash video. > > The sony PSP support for mp4 has helped your cause. I think we are > > seeing more and more .mp4 files... personally I don't care for h264. > > The hardware demands and compatibility aren't worth the jump in > > quality or compression. I feel the same way about some of the codecs > > in flash which are very processor intensive when they needn't be. I'm > > overall very pleased with the majority of video sharing sites and > > their ability to play well on older machines. Blip had some problems > > with this at first, but I'm very pleased with their current player. > > > > It didnt feel like the PSP helped at first because Sony mangled the > format that worked and it had to have a PSP-specific adjustment. Its > gotten better with newer firmware, I need to do some testing on this, > certainly in theory the main part of the PSP mpeg4 & h264 spec should > match ipod-compatible files quite well. Now the PS3 is on the scene > and it also likes mp4 and h264 vidoe formats. cool cool. I just site google whom has "download this video for ipod and PSP" > I agree about h264 to a certain extent. I was an early supporter but > realised after a while that Id have to wait a while for compatibility > to increase. Im pleased with how soon a phone has arrived that > supports it, so give it a few years and I think we'll see its adoption > increase , its already come a long way in terms of how many vloggers > are using it. And the baseline version that ipods etc use, is a bit > less cpu intensive. Lets not forget that some of the early compalints > about how hungry h264 is, was because the quicktime encoder is quite > slow, and apple put all those HD samples up in h264 and confused the > issue, people with older machines were not getting full framerate on > that stuff. All I care is that we don't leave the slow computers behind because it widens the digital divide. It's important $300 laptops if no $100 laptops... or old laptops we give to our kids... donate or whatever support the web. This is not simply entertainment we're talking about... it's art, culture, education, and above all communications. > > Hmm... never thought of using flash to record on mobiles... can't > imagine it. > > I mean it in the sense of how flash is used in the 'flashmeeting , or > youtube post an instant video from your webcam' sense. So you could > under certain conditions record live straight to a server, or > participate in live video. This starts to overlap with what it sounds > like Steve Garfield was experimenting with recently, live streaming > from phone, albeit using different technology to achieve it. Didn't see that experiment I guess. I still can't imagine flash getting so good as to function as a conduit for recording videos or streaming video on the endless array of proprietary handheld hardware devices with all their endless differences. > > > > That said you can get rss mp4 feeds of most youtube feeds through > > google video... I did a post on this recently at mmeiser.com/blog. > > > > But I'm off topic... I hope mp4 will become a defacto standard like > > mp3... I see know other close competitor... I also think flash is VERY > > secure in it's place for web based viewing... but that it will never > > work for widespread offline viewing such as set top boxes, cell > > phones, portable media players and more... portability is not the > > issue... interface and interactivity are... these devices can't handle > > advanced and varying interactivity in flash files. > > > > I think flash could work in most of those scenarios, a lot will come > down to commercial decisions and competition etc, and I guess what > happens with DRM. If flash video support comes to mobile & other > browsers, then the mainstram use of flash video, the likes of youtube > and blip, will work and thus have their place on these devices. I dont > expect them to become the main format the device can aggregate, > playback, record, but as youve said, we'll just have to wait and see, > Im just guessing. If it turns out that you can just use a different > flash file thats more suited to mobile platforms as the player, and > play the same flv as the desktop can, I think it will succeed. At a loss... I can't even guess as to wether flash video will be a success on mobile plaforms. A year or two ago I would have said straight up no... I'd also site the need for video formats that work within the set top box model... which must function with a primitive remote.. and in a passive viewer model but who knows where it'll go. streaming vs. downloadable resolution issues interactivity issues passive vs. active use models The mix of issues as video moves from desktop, to mobile, to tv and wherever else it may go are just to mind bogling all that can be said is video will slowly become ubiquitous as the written word and certainly take as many forms. It is communications, it's entertainment, it's art and it's so much more. The only thing I get pissed about is when idiots judge it based on their own industry... i.e. most people can't seem to get their heads arond the fact that it's more than jus entertainment... ie. the news man who still thinks all bloggers are wannabee journalists. Online video is beholden to noone... it may potentially even suprise us with what it may be used for next.... and we're the artists, experimenters pushing it to see what it can do. > > Ultimately in order for web video to go mainstream, beyond the desktop > > computer all technical issues such as compatibility need to become > > completely transparent to the end user. "just press play" is the term > > that comes to mind. Even downloading and caching must be transparent > > or go away. > > From the looks of it, most mobile designs have taken the opposite > approach to downloading - they make it highly visible and often > require user confirmation. This is simply down to the possible costs > for the user, and the networks not wanting to have to deal with lots > of users trying to get partial refunds for data they didnt > specifically say they wanted at the time. This will hopefully fade as > 'unlimited' data packages become more normal, but I think it will take > a long time. There's only one way inb my mind media should work... like a river. All subscriptions and queued media should flow into one time based channel, latest allways at the top where media can then be played or skipped as the user chooses. There may be 1000 variations on this theme but it's the central architectural form. I could go on about it for hours but I'll spare you. > > The masses aren't going to sit around with iSquint and rip movies for > > their ipod. > > Agree. > > > > > As bandwidth cheapens and bittorent or future peer based technology > > gets more transparent it will make more and more sense to move these > > formating issues into central locations instead of replicating the > > time / cost to each individual user. > > > > Ive always been a bit cautious about peer2peer stuff, partly because > network havent factored so much user uploading into many of their > equations. In the UK traffic shaping is now a reality with soe ISP's, > others are investigating it, and for a long time very few of our > 'unlimited boradband' deals have really been unlimited, with > 'excessive' users penalised. ... I find the fault with the networks... the information flows according to demand... not according to what the isp wants... a network that is not neutral, not 2 way, not transparent is simply a broken network and the users will increasingly see it as such. Cheers to you too... this has been a great meandering chain of mail... for early morning reading.... of course I was distracted for a couple hours... and it's now nearly 10am... but still it was great to roll out of bed and sink my teath into. A big meat sandwich of ideas. :) -Mike > Cheers > > Steve Elbows > > > > > > Yahoo! Groups Links > > > >
