Where’s the ON switch?

There are important moments in your life that you look back on and you can instantly realize the impact that that moment had.

In 1988 I was working at my first job as a designer, my desk was covered with dozens of tools that I needed in order to do my job. Items that could make up a great museum display in 2011; Letraset sheets, Pantone books, Rapidograph pens, blue pencils, straight edges, triangles and french curves as well as a darkroom filled with toxic chemicals and a process camera the size of a small car.

In order to set a page of text we had to measure the space and then do math (yes math) to calculate how much copy could fit depending on the font style, font size and leading. I’m shaking my head just thinking about it.

But then one day everything changed.

I took a new job at a small Halifax ad agency where a friend John had been working for a few months. I arrived for my first day of work with my portfolio case filled with the tools of my trade and headed to my desk. On that desk was a boxy beige Mac Plus. My only previous experience on a computer was an awkward half hour on an Apple II at college (no one knew how to use it) and a few hours playing games on my younger brother’s Commodore64.

I remember sitting and staring at the tiny 9″ screen, the big clunky keyboard and brick-sized mouse and wondering what the heck I had gotten myself into. “So, where’s the ‘on’ switch,” I asked John. He reached around the back and switched it on. ‘Welcome to MacIntosh’ appeared on the screen after a few seconds and from that point on everything changed.

The ‘tools’ of my trade were gradually replaced by the Mac and its software. We had two packages to work with Aldus Pagemaker and Freehand, 2MB of RAM (whatever that was) and three fonts; Times New Roman, Helvetica and Brush Script.

I was aware at that time that the two founders of Apple were no longer there, Steve Jobs had left in 1986 and Steve Wozniak had left in 1987. But I was keenly aware of the contributions both had made to the device that I was now using to pay the bills. As the years went on, Macs became more and more powerful and could do even more of the heavy design work with tools like Photoshop, Quark and Illustrator.

Thank You, Steve Jobs

In 1996, the World Wide Web was going mainstream and Jobs returned to Apple. Two years later he introduced the iMac. While it wasn’t robust enough for my needs, I recognized the attention to design. It was beautiful, compact and came in five translucent color cases. Suddenly Apple wasn’t just the design geek’s tool, everybody wanted an iMac.

But we all know the Steve Jobs-led Apple didn’t stop there. In November the iPod was unveiled, in 2007 the iPhone and in 2010 the iPad.

I didn’t know Steve Jobs, but I knew that whenever I saw the guy in the back turtleneck and jeans take the stage that it was likely that some aspect of my life was in for a fundamental change. There is barely a moment during the day when one of the devices created under Jobs’ leadership is not within arm’s reach.

Thanks Steve.

5 Most Viewed Articles on the Delvinia Link Pool: May 10 – May 16

The Google Job Experiment | NoisyChannel.com

Facebook: Facts You Probably Didn’t Know | Mashable

Facebook Privacy: A Bewildering Tangle of Options – Graphic | New York Times

McDonald’s in 2020 – Frog Design | Gizmodo

Apple is developing a Flash alternative (and has been for almost a year). | The Next Web – Apple

Click here to see what links we’re sharing this week.

Muddy Mobile Waters – Part 2

As I discussed in Part 1 of this series, Apple is moving away from using a shared standard for distributing and running RIA content on their mobile devices. So how will we be able to efficiently create rich online experiences and have them work on the desktop and on mobile devices, including the iPhone and iPad? Let’s look at some possible solutions:

Target Only Apple’s Devices
I’m sure that there will be still be situations where it’s cost effective to develop an RIA that only targets Apple’s devices, at least for the near future. But the obvious problem with this approach is that you will limit your audience. While the iPhone is currently a very large slice of the mobile pie, Android based devices are rapidly gaining ground, Microsoft will soon release their new mobile OS, Windows Phone 7, and other mobile OSs are maintaining their market share.

HTML5
Creating RIA that works within the web browser, using the new HTML5 tags to handle video, audio and animation is certainly going to be a useful way to deliver cross-platform content.

However it relies on if a platform’s browser fully supports the HTML5 specification’s APIs. Currently most mobile device and desktop web browsers do not or only partly support HTML5 and all have individual quirks in how they handle older HTML and CSS. HTML5 also does not provide as fully featured an API as various plug-ins have (Flash, Silverlight, Java, etc.), so it will mostly be useful for embedding simple video, audio and animated content into the user’s browser. For more complex RIA interfaces in the web browser we will likely continue to use Web 2.0 solutions such as server-side scripting, AJAX, jQuery, plug-ins, etc. Even for embedding video and audio there will be issues, as it will be up to the browser to render video and audio and they are not in agreement about which codecs to use.

Flash
The Flash plug-in is already widely accepted by Internet users on their desktop computers, so I don’t think it will be a big stretch for them to use it on their mobile devices, especially if it comes pre-installed. Clients are comfortable with having their RIAs built using it and Device Central integrates several the Creative Suite apps, including Flash, to make it easier to create mobile content. Flash also supports exporting animations to the HTML5 Canvas tag, which may be useful for creating alternate content for non-Flash users.

But the problem with Flash is that currently there are not enough mobile devices that have the Flash plug-in installed to guarantee a large mobile audience and Apple is not likely to support the plug-in any time soon, if ever.

Conclusion
I anticipate that the Open Screen Project making Flash as mainstream on mobile devices as it is on the desktop. But it is the mobile user who will decide what really works for them, and truly RIA capable mobile devices which support the Flash plug-in have not yet gone on sale.

I suggest that unless you need to develop a mobile RIA right now, you’re best off waiting until the Fall. By then we should be able to see how the sales of non-Apple mobile devices are faring and have a clearer indication of how people’s mobile habits are evolving.