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Digg API Contest Finalist: A mobile interface for Digg in FlashLite 2.x. DiggMob displays the popular stories from a category, allows reading the teaser, and can direct the phone browser to the full article. Preferences are saved to the phone for easy entrance after the first run. By: Brian McMurray (bmcmurray)
Now that I'm in the Top 10 it's up to the users to vote for their favorites by digging the article until May 31!
I have just submitted my application for the Digg API Contest: diggMob
diggMob is a FlashLite 2.x program which allows those of us with capable cellphones to feed our Digg.com addictions. Now you can get the most popular articles from most of the main Digg categories while on the go.
I'm not a huge fan of FlashLite 1.1. I've been playing around with it for the last few days in a mobile development class I'm taking, and I find myself really just waiting to move on to FlashLite 2.0 or something else entirely.
It isn't that FlashLite 1.1 is bad its just different. And inconsistent. I'm very glad that Adobe (Macromedia at the time) worked in what of the dot syntax they could, but I find myself wishing they had done more.
Saw this article this morning on The Register. Microsoft is unveiling a new mobile browser, Deepfish, which they plan will make viewing webpages on mobile devices more like being on a desktop. This will work by loading a "thumbnail" of the webpage and then allowing you to "zoom in" to the area you want to see. Supposedly Microsoft is saving on how much data will be downloaded by only loading the content you want to see. Perhaps I'm just too much of a standardista, but do we really need this? Microsoft claims this will alleviate the need for designers and developers to create a specific handheld stylesheet, and sure, it will, but isn't this getting away from the entire point of CSS and standards-based XHTML? Not to mention that this browser will only run on Microsoft powered PDAs and phones. The majority of cellphone users aren't using Windows Mobile devices, so what about them? They're screwed.
It's already bad enough that Pocket IE loads both the screen stylesheet and the handheld stylesheet. Then you get other devices like the Blackberry which broadcast that they are a desktop computer so they don't ever load the handheld stylesheet. Add into that the sordid state of built-in browsers on most phones with their poor CSS implementation and Opera Mini's built-in overrides and the mobile web is already a mess.
The Web is perhaps the greatest medium for content. It doesn't behave, however, like print and TV. For years, we as designers and developers have had to fight trying to force a square peg into a round hole. When big software companies do something like Deepfish, all we're doing is taking a miter to the round hole and slowly cutting it out into a square, when what we should be doing is finding a way to turn our square peg into a circle peg.
This has also been keeping me busy lately, working on a redesign for the Bradley Multimedia Program's website. The site is in need of an update (as I'm sure you all can see), and we wanted to create something that was more representative of the Program, who we are, and where we are going. With this, I also wanted to match the Slane College of Communications and Fine Arts' recently redesign website so that the Program's branding was well placed, as well as to keep with Bradley University's image.
As a class assignment, there are a lot of other students with other designs, but this is my take. With any luck, or perhaps just a good pitch presentation, my design might be selected, but I figured I'd throw this out to the world and see what people thought before I do that.
As though it weren't obvious, the orange squares are where photos would be placed; I simply didn't have anything fitting and we didn't get any source media to work from.
Yaniv Golan has an interesting post on his blog about the Flex demo he saw at FOWA. His arguement is that he doesn't get how Flex can be useful when it locks people down to a single "platform" (though as he admits, Flash is pretty ubiqutous). He counters with saying that with ASP.NET one could create applications that run the same as Flex apps that publish to XHTML, CSS, and Javascript.
He doesn't mention that in that scenario we're really just swapping a proprietary front-end for a proprietary back-end. ASP.NET servers need IIS (read: Windows). Flex can run on any server and in any browser provided the end-user has Flash (9).
His main point, however, is interesting. What is the benefit of Flex vs. its main look-alike, the open source OpenLaszlo? This is something I've debated with myself and others over and the only major benefits I can see either way are going to come down to end-user target platform and development nicities.
Flex has Flex Builder 2 with a drag-and-drop GUI that can handle just about all of the basic GUI construction and theming that any designer/developer team could need. OpenLaszlo (right now, anyway) doesn't have this that I'm aware of. OpenLaszlo publishes to Flash 7 and now with their Legals release, to DHTML (XHTML, CSS, and Javascript) and they have announced support for Sun Microsystem's Orbit platform, which will let them publish to J2ME (Mobile content anyone?). Flex will publish to Flash 9 and Apollo.
Both are aimed at making web applications. Web applications function completely different than the standard website and in most cases need to defy the web's "page" structure. So if web applications are going to break the functionality of the web browser paradigm anyway, does it matter anymore if they are deployed in Flash or DHTML (AJAX, XHTML+Javascript, what have you)? My gut says no, but in dealing with clients who often demand pixel perfect consistency, it might be easier to deploy in Flash...an environment that has always looked the same cross-browser and cross-platform.
I use 1and1 for hosting and have a shared hosting package, which I absolutely love. I don't get enough traffic on my sites or do enough different things that I need a dedicated box. I also happen to do my domain registation through 1and1. Recently, however, I've run into a situation where a client wanted to use 1and1 as their host but absolutely refuses to change their DNS to comply with 1and1's nameservers. This is something I never would have thought would be a problem, before it actually became one.
Google has recently unveiled their new Google Apps Premier Edition for offices and there has been a lot of buzz around it. Will web applications replace desktop applications? Is the "fat client" useless?
It's an interesting idea, and as a web application developer, it could mean huge things for me. I don't think, however, that we're going to see web applications really take over and completely replace hard-drive installed desktop applications. I think there are some applications which could exist just fine run completely as web apps, but I think there are a lot of applications which have the potential or will become hybrids which exist accessibly both "virtually" over the web and also on your desktop.
Convergence is the what I'd like to see. A seemless transition between the desktop office computer and my cellular web PDA or my microlaptop. While efforts like Google's take the pipedream of an integrated virtual office and make it a reality; their apps, outside of Gmail, really aren't available anywhere but on a conventional computer.
This is where I think platforms like Flex/Apollo and OpenLaszlo/Orbit are going to shine. Minor differences aside, Flex/Apollo and OpenLaszlo/Orbit are essentially the same and I wouldn't be surprised if eventually their formats become interchangable. Flex/Apollo will allow us to push to the desktop quickly and also straight to the web as well. There's the same sort of convergence that Google Apps is providing. OpenLaszlo has partnered with Sun's Orbit to push to J2ME, which most cellphones (especially the beefier PDAs and smartphones) can handle, not to mention that if you're careful, some Laszlo projects are running in FlashLite 2, as well.
With such platform independence, these systems are going to open up myriad possibilities for convergence applications.
So while I think Google Apps Premier Edition (or even just Google Apps) looks great and might stand a chance at challenging long-time desktop alternatives like Microsoft Office; I think that ultimately, Google hasn't gone far enough to make these processes truly convergent.
I've played around some with Flex since the Flex Builder 2 beta came out for Mac a few months back and I am very excited. I've also created some Flash applications (meant to be run on the desktop not in the browser) which connected to a MySQL database via some PHP scripts. What I'm curious about is this:
Flex needs everything to be in some form of XML in order to run (as far as I know, anyway) which means that I'd need to either write scripts or use the XML-RPC PEAR libraries to get my database data into an appropriate format.
This is essentially the same process for Flash, though there are other options such as serializing the data and sending it in this way.
How do you get your data into Flash/Flex and do you think using Flex for projects which aren't tying into already established web services is a bad approach?
The mobile web is still pretty new. There are a lot of different browsers and not a lot of standardization across them. It's something like the browser wars of Netscape v. Internet Explorer from 10 years ago. Only on steroids.
I'm no stranger to dealing with cross-browser compatibility, but when you start talking about supporting mobile browsers, support just gets insane. Pocket IE renders completely different than Opera Mini and both render completely different than a phone's built-in browser, and then different phones have different built-in browsers. And none of them are specifically targetable, like IE for the desktop is (similar to how we cannot really target IE/Mac).
Even worse is laxidasical support for the handheld media type for CSS. Pocket IE uses *both* the Screen and Handheld types, but defaults to Screen, whereas some devices like Blackberry's just pretend to be desktop computers but their browsers hardly support anything. It's really quite aggravating.
And then we get into the actual accessibility of the browsers, or rather, lack thereof. Opera Mini doesn't support accesskey declarations. This isn't a huge problem, but when you consider how long some websites can become when forced to only be 176 pixels wide, losing the ability to just hit a key on the phone and skip past parts of the content sucks. Of course, that also assumes that named anchor links work, which some browsers (Opera Mini I'm looking at you again) don't support.
The only hope we have is for people to create logical, symantic websites that degrade well.
Hopefully the next few years will show some sort of standardization occuring across the myriad mobile phones and browsers in how they interpret and interact with the web. Mobile web is still in its infancy, but it will grow up quickly.
