The Bull Og

At work, I’m transitioning off of the Mail team into a project where we’ll be prototyping some new functionality in HTML5.

While I originally thought we would be analyzing HTML5 as it will affect organizational strategy (can you imagine how much impact that would have?) it turns out that we’ll be implementing prototypes for a very specific need. Either way, it’s very exciting to be working in this emerging space in a team of top-notch FEs along with one of Yahoo’s top UEDs. Although not an explicit thought-leadership effort per se, I’m sure engineering will inform strategy will inform engineering.

On that note, I’ve started to reflect on the Adobe vs. Apple fight and future of RIAs, particularly in the online advertising space. According to the Apple iPhone OS 4 keynote:

“Users spend 30 minutes a day in apps. Say an ad every 3 minutes…10 ads per day. We’ll be at 100 million devices soon, so that’s 1 billion ad opportunities per day.”

1B impressions/day, as achieved with HTML5/CSS3/JavaScript?!? That’s certainly nothing to sneeze at. Is Flash really on its way out as the default interactive media platform? How long before it’s replaced by HTML5, if at all?

I don’t personally think that the move by Apple will completely eliminate the need for Flash, ever, even if the company continues its rapid growth in the mobile hardware sector. As much as I - as a web developer - would like to simplify my life by having one language (for both client and server-side) on one platform, I know we won’t ever get there (proof? that would imply a monopoly and current US regulation prohibits that, no?)

After some reflection on just how much has been invested in Flash as an industry standard in the last 14 years in addition to reading this article and its comments, I would tend to agree with this assessment on the future of Flash.

I have found myself wondering: “for all those developers and businesses who have legacy systems built around Flash, how will they transition from Flash to HTML5?” and that’s when I remembered OpenLaszlo. It’s been a while since I’ve looked at it, but I was duly impressed by its ability to generate both SWF and DHTML output.

For all of you developers who have never touched Flash in your life and are jumping on the HTML5 band-wagon right now, you have bright futures in 3-5 years when HTML5 matures and you’re already experts on it. For all of you SMBs (and enterprises?) who have heavy investments in Flash and want to migrate to capture more market-share, I wonder if it wouldn’t make sense to port your current solutions to OpenLaszlo and “compile” for both Flash- and non-Flash-enabled platforms. I think there’s a real opportunity for OpenLaszlo and the company behind it - Laszlo systems - to assist in the transition and/or bridge the gap as HTML5 becomes more of an industry standard.

Disclosure: I am an Apple fanboy, in spite of everything that’s happened recently with their developer policies, but I do not have any interest in Laszlo Systems.

Link: Skate & Destroy. Just had to reblog because of the beauty of the sculptures (via http://tumble.blagspot.com/):

You weren’t at Modulations? You missed out… on things like these… (all thanks to CCRMA):

Gettin’ down with Visda Goudarzi and Ge Wang on Michael Zeligs’ “Rhythm for Squares”

Groovin’ with Megan Miller and Michael Berger on Terry Berlier’s Pan Lid Gamelan I

Having worked with Catalyst extensively before getting into RoR, I have to give props to Dan (who I know from work) for an intro screencast on what I regard as the best web framework for Perl:

If you have any problems viewing it, you can see the video at the following URL:

Intro to Catalyst, Part I

How often do you go to a restaurant and the waiter/waitress brings you a glass of water with ice in it? How often are you so hot that you really need ice water to cool you down?

Here in San Francisco, I’ve been in air-conditioned restaurants in the winter where they’re served ice-water. Since returning to the States from Austria three years ago (where it is uncommon to serve ice in water at restaurants,) I almost always ask for ‘water, no ice’ at the beginning of a meal. Surprisingly, several waiters or waitresses have asked me why and ice water is simply no longer my preference. I find that room-temperature water with a bit of lemon does the trick if I’m parched, much more so than ice-water.

While walking down the street today, I thought “since it’s the standard at practically every restaurant in the US to bring you a glass of ice water when you patronize their establishment, what if the next time the waiter/waitress asked ‘Something to drink?’, everyone in the US responded with ‘water, no ice please.’ Wouldn’t restaurants, reacting to less demand, use ice-makers less frequently and thereby save vast amounts of energy?”

I don’t have any reliable statistics at hand, but let’s assume a rate of 3 restaurant visits per month per person in the US (population ~307M people.) If one glass of ice-water is served during those visits, that’s a lot of ice cubes.