Notes From Management: Not Dead Yet

Apologies for the near month long dearth of anything on old Cathode Tan, it hasn't really been by choice and I hope in the next couple weeks to start being able to blog on a more regular basis again. It's the same old story - lots of paying job type work devouring aspect of daily life, little room to not just blog but to be doing much worth blogging about. Heck, I downloaded the latest Borderlands DLC recently and I'm not sure I've even installed it yet.

However, I just recently accepted an offer from Salesforce.com to become a Developer Evangelist. As an Evangelist, maintaing blog and twitter content will become part of my job description, so hopefully Cathode will be able to benefit from that inertia as well.

I've got one more week of work at Model Metrics left, then a week off, then off to evangelizing. Does New Vegas come out just in time for that one week off?

Oh, I believe it does...

For Sunday: Mozilla Seabird

Mozilla recently got community feedback and design concepts from Billy May, the guy who redesigned the Blackberry into touch screen and produced this demo:



Sadly it will likely not go much past this relatively awesome video, but awesome all the same.

Is Good Old Games Dead, Or Just Playing?

Apparently over the weekend, Good Old Games, a digital distributor of old Windows games from the Polish company CD Project, went bully up with a public message that it couldn't exist in it's current form anymore:

We have recently had to give serious thought to whether we could really keep GOG.com the way it is. We've debated on it for quite some time and, unfortunately, we've decided that GOG.com simply cannot remain in its current form.

We're very grateful for all support we've received from all of you in the past two years. Working on GOG.com was a great adventure for all of us and an unforgettable journey to the past, through the long and wonderful history of PC gaming.

This doesn't mean the idea behind GOG.com is gone forever. We're closing down the service and putting this era behind us as new challenges await.

Following this, however, has come the announcement of a re-release and more information to arrive later this week ... fueling the notion that this is more publicity stunt than funeral wake. Stunt might be harsh - though the overly morbid tone of the plain home page message doesn't lend to mere restructuring ... so if GOG returns in a week or so, they could certainly be accused of being overly dramatic.

For Sunday: Monsters Trailer

This looks pretty awesome.

For Sunday: Congress in AutoTune

Love. It. Thanks Klem.

Geocache Hunt Turns Bomb Scare

Sigh.

Lake County Sheriff's Department officers, including the bomb squad, and the Long Grove Fire Department were called to the scene, Jonites said.

The store and the parking lot were evacuated as a precaution, but no injuries were reported.

Officials determined the box contained a geotag used to help GPS systems track locations, and pieces of paper, the lieutenant said.

The geotag is part of an Internet treasure hunt called Geocaching, where players use a GPS device to track hidden geotags which issues the latitude and longitude of its location, the lieutenant said.

-- Internet scavenger hunt leads to bomb scare in Riverwoods

I sigh mostly because there's nobody to really rail against here. You can't really blame the police for investigating a mysterious package being hidden in a public place, nor can you really hate geocachers. They're just so darn adorable. But sigh, this is the world in which we live.

(Also) For Sunday: Portal 2 Coop Trailer

For Sunday: Paranormal Activity 2 Trailer

Apple Quietly Reverses Developer Tool Ban

Apple did not specifically mention Adobe — though investors drove up shares of the company up 12 percent on the news — but the changes seem to mean that you can use Flash to develop your apps, and then compile them to work on the iPhone and iPad with a tool called Adobe Packager. This could be boon to publishers, including Condé Nast, owner of Wired, which use Adobe’s Creative Suite to make print magazines and would now be able to easily convert them into digital version instead of re-creating them from scratch in the only handful of coding languages Apple had allowed.

To be clear, that doesn’t mean Flash is coming to iOS as a plugin: You still won’t be able to view Flash content on your iPhone, iPad or iPod Touch. This change in Apple’s policy just means developers can use third-party tools such as Flash to create apps sold through the App Store

-- Apple Eases App Development Rules, Adobe Surges[Wired]

For all the bluster that roared from Apple on banning the use of tools like Adobe's Packager, including a strongly worded essay from Jobs which essentially ignited the debate on HTML5 versus Flash/RIA/the world, it has now softly backed away from the stance that such tools would lower the quality of the App Store and let developer use them.

Why? Well, possibly because Apple's reasoning was mostly PR nonsense designed to look like a strong technical argument ... but I have to somewhat doubt that really factored much into the equation. This is Apple we're talking about here and the company has been able to use PR to defy gravity countless times before.

The more prominent, and probably more likely, theory, is that Apple decided it wanted to trot out that amazing Epic Citadel demo (which is, by the way, truly amazing - at least on the iPhone4) they realized that there would be no way to unleash it onto the world without subsequently backing off on the whole third party development tool.

Epic's bread and butter, after all, is the third party development toolset which allows for other companies to license their technology for games ... and a huge feature of that is UnrealScript - a specific language the engine uses and how the majority of Unreal games are coded. To have shown the demo and then not change their policy would have just been an enormous tease.

And to change the policy to only let Epic in would likely have brought anti-trust champions bearing down on Steve Job's office door.

So it's true - you can probably thank video games that Apple has come to its senses.

Land of Me And The Wilderness Downtown: AIR and HTML5 Demos

I love mornings where new things land in my lap. First was an email asking to go try The Land Of Me, an interactive children's story/game developed in Adobe's AIR. Designed for preschoolers and with Prof. John Siraj-Blatchford from the The University of Swansea - The Land Of Me looks to be a delightful artistic romp ... well, if you're around two years old. There is a free chapter to download and try and since it runs on AIR - the game runs on most PC's and Mac's.

A few twitters also pointed to The Wilderness Downtown, probably best described as an experimental HTML5 video mashup with Google Maps. It's an interesting concept which mostly works - currently best serving as an example of what using the HTML5 video tag might mean down the road. It is, however, specifically designed for Chrome - though it appears to work in Safari, those certain devices using Mobile Safari need not apply.

Enjoy, peeps.

Game Play: Blur (and a little Mod Nation Racers too)

A twist on an old joke: multiplayer would be a lot of fun, if not for all the people. Bringing a bunch of random people from the intertubes repeatedly to game together has had a pretty uneven history - with the addition of VOIP to online gaming resulting in a thunderous din of people singing, cursing and warbling.

That said, Blur manages it pretty well. I played the hell out of the online only demo and now haven't even bothered touching the single player of the full version. It's very pick up game oriented and since the action is pretty intense even when you're trying to catch up to the pack - uneven skill levels across player don't feel quite so bad because you can still wreck the hell out of other cars.

And it doesn't hurt that as kart racers go, Blur is very good. Driving feels tight and controlled, there isn't a dramatic emphasis on drifting and the power-ups, while mostly classic renditions of favorites from the genre, do the game justice to helping even the score. The graphics are great and the presentation is geared to getting you in a game, out, and back in again as swiftly as possible.

I'm light on complaint - I wish there were more powerups, and that the mods were more varied and arrived a little sooner. But it's hard to complain about a game I'm enjoying this much and yet haven't even played it's "other half". Definitely recommend.

A quick side note: Blur was actually a trade in for Mod Nation Racers, which I was somewhat looking forward to and yet found the racing itself, well, really frustrating. Seems to place a heavy, heavy emphasis on drifting and drafting and not so much on just pure driving. I get the modding aspects are pretty powerful, but if LittleBigPlanet was any indication, I won't have time to really get into it.

For Sunday: Brink Gameplay Video

This looks fairly cool, I haven't really played much online shootery since MAG (which I may dive back into with the beta). Anything with a Quake Wars pedigree is worth checking out in my book.

OMG THE WEB IS DEAD

Yeah, people - this is what it takes to get me blogging again. Not one - but TWO stories that have mostly caps in the titles and begin with OMG. Because apparently this is such a slow news month that people really need to get the attention grabbing headlines.

Wired has declared the web is dead (though, to be fair, they've branched this out to multiple articles to offer a rather interesting and broad discussion).

First, never trust an article that starts with a graph - which I've now stolen and duped here:



It's an interesting graph ... but the important bit is to note that it spans 1990, when even the Net was barely a mote in someone's eye, to 2010 ... when high school kids have smartphones with more sophisticated browsers than most corporate networks. Since the graph is depicting total net traffic, and it is safe to assume that total net traffic has increased dramatically in two decades ... lines sliding down may actually indicate portions which have stayed even while the larger pie gets bigger. Note for instance that video doesn't even appear on the scene until the late 90's, and it wasn't until about 2005 when technology and bandwidth allowed creations like YouTube to flourish that it even begins explode.

So yeah, it's an interesting graph. But in relation to the argument at hand ... it's kinda bullshit.

The argument in short, and it's hard to put this in short terms with it several pages and oddly being split into two distinct articles running side by side (which is probably the kind of design decision which could kill the web) is that applications are sprouting everywhere to digest specific points of data as opposed to an army of browsers trolling for everything on the planet.

And I'm not really about to deny that argument, for in doing so I'd have to pretty much ignore the fact that the iPhone and the iPad exist at all.

For the sake of brevity, I'm going to encapsulate the argument around this table (also blatantly stolen):



Because it seems pretty core to their concept and is wildly misleading.

Browsers Versus Apps
This is a cyclical argument as old as DARPA and is slowly spiraling into oblivion. Firstly, it (and much of the article) ignores the fact that apps have made a resurgence because of concepts like REST which allows the web to be a generic source of data. Is it honest to say that a web server which is returning JSONP or XML based on a simple set of incoming variables is ... no longer a web server? The trend, even since the referenced (and failed) push revolution of the late 90's, has been for the formatting of data which allows nearly any client - native or web - to consume data. That Facebook is both a very successful website and iPhone app is indicative of this, and Facebook's recent Graph API allows for others to create clients of nearly any variety as well.

Also, I'm always surprised by the number of articles proposing this trend as fact while overlooking the fact that many major web publishers are foregoing native iPad apps in lieu of HTML5 ones. The real transformation of the web is into more than just a content center, but a data center as well, data which can be accessed by a wide variety of clients.

Syndication Versus Subscription
I'm actually not even sure why this is a line on the table. Syndication is the act of formatting to data so that it can be subscribed. This isn't an either or - it's a cause/effect. Moving on.

Update: It occurs to me the models at conflict here are subscribe versus follow, which are actually different metaphors. Insert question mark.

Free Versus Freemium
While catchy, this is also an apples to advertising based models comparison. Take Pandora for example, which embraces freemium but also pushes ads for the free version. As the name assumes, freemium is an extension of a free (usually ad based) model ... not a replacement - and can apply equally to native, RIA or browsers based apps.

JavaScript versus Objective-C
This just seems like a silly comparison, but I think the real versus here is AJAX/HTML5 against Objective-C. Which seems to unfairly leave out the 3,000 other options for building web apps.

HTML versus XML
See above about the web turning into a data center. Like the Freemium comparison, XML isn't a replacement for HTML (though some developers would argue that XHTML is...) - it's another format for storing data without storing UI. Want UI? Get HTML. Want to create your own UI? Get XML.

Basically, let's return to the graph and consider what's really going on - the web isn't disappearing into oblivion, it's just that there has never been the all consuming webtop to eliminate the rest of an ever growing list of neighbors. It also seems premature to put nails into the web's coffin before Google has managed to release the Chrome OS, the first serious webtop concept to be produced in something like 15 years (I know, I developed one 15 years ago).

Maybe I'm biased though. I'm reading my email in a native app which actually just creates WebKit instances, while debugging my work in the cloud and listening to music in AIR. Does the use of AIR apps, which is closely associated with Flash, which is a plugin for web browsers ... mean that the web is dead or very much an undeniable part of our daily lives now?

My old boss and I had an ongoing argument we both knew was relatively ridiculous ... PDA's versus phones. Ridiculous because each debate resolved to the same conclusion ... that they'd converge to the point where you couldn't hold the distinction. That seems to be the real story of the web - that eventually you won't know where your native desktop and web technologies divide.

OMG STEVE JOBS WUZ RIGHT! (WAIT ... what?)

This is insane:

How bad is mobile Flash? When I went to ABC.com and tried to play a clip, I waited five minutes while the player said “loading.” During that time, it was nearly impossible to scroll around the page or tap objects on it. Eventually, I scrolled up to see a message that was previously obstructed and said ”Sorry. An error occurred while attempting to load the video. Please try again later.” It gets worse…

When I visited Fox.com and tried to start an episode of House, the program actually played but, even over Wi-Fi, the playback was slideshow-like. Worse still, the player became unresponsive as it ignored my attempts to tap the pause, volume, and slider buttons.

-- Mobile Flash Fail: Weak Android Player Proves Jobs Right [LaptopMag]

OMG! FAIL! STEVE JOBS WAS SO RIGHT! Wow, thank god I have an iPhone. I'll just go right over to ABC.com and watch me up some shows.

Um, ok ... here we go:



Oh, uh. Oh, right. Steve Jobs said plugins are bad and that we should be using native apps for anything cool. Apparently HTML5 video wasn't, um ... I dunno. Around or something. So I'll go download that app now and...



Well, that's embarrassing. I guess before you go pronouncing the Steve Jobs was right and that Flash has failed - maybe ... just maybe, you should actually compare it to something in reality.

Ground Control to Major Tom

Yeah, as Cathode regulars have noticed, the intermittent blogging has now turned into a full scale stop. Sorry, true believers, there's just a lot of bat guano flying around the old CathodeCave, so to speak. Life's complicated and when it's this complicated, it's hard to make an informed opinion about situations like the Penny Arcade Rape Joke - which is kinda what you people don't pay me for.

I don't really have a time frame for when this is will not be the case, in the meantime we'll still be twittering away (and to think I once mocked it so), so keep in touch there.