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Tom Green at Digital Web Magazine has a great tutorial on using the video captioning feature in Flash CS3 to create accessible Flash video content. Wow, I can’t wait until my copy of CS3 arrives, sometime this week, along with my new MacBookPro! Yaaaay!

With all the talk of Web 2.0 out there, it sounds a bit silly to be talking about something Web and 1.0, but there it is. A bunch of folks dedicated to making Web Applications easier to build, including some off shoots, such as Jesse Andrew’s Canvas.

I have been reading up on Web 2.0 applications and consuming them at a voracious rate. It is a very different beast than the traditional User Centered Design-methodology driven-world I’ve been a part of most recently at Orbitz. A few years ago I worked at a small shop where our staff had some common roots with the two Jakes ofthreadless. They did lots of fun social networking stuff and were tuned into things like Bonnaroo as well as people like 37signals.com’s basecamp, etc.

I will be extending and substantially updating this site in the weeks ahead as I take advantage of sites like del.icio.us and build out some of my content, like the links on the side nav over there, through them. Finally, I am switching this blog to feature only design-related items on the homepage. I feel like I’ve been ignoring my own trade while I was doing all this research on accessibility, interaction design and the user interfaces of physical products. While interesting and somewhat relevant, the internet is morphing this year.

Reading about it while not participating in it is not a comfortable or customary position for me. I intend to amend this situation post-haste. Thank you to Tim O’Reilly for this excellent article entitled What is Web 2.0?, which has reformulated the web for me. He shed the proverbial scales from my eyes on what this generation of the web has to teach us.

Now, on to figuring out how information architecture interacts with folksonomy; how to document these interactive AJAX applications. More soon…

Wow—Abode buys Macromedia!
It’s the end of an era, and that may be a great thing. I wonder which products each business unit will keep? It’ll be so nice to export from Illustrator directly into Flash or drop’n’drag stuff, etc. Is that what’ll happen? Man, I hope so.

The second wave of internet applications is coming, one which is revolutionizing HTTP as more than a method of asynchronous communication. Many older interactive types (Alan Cooper, for one, in The Inmates Are Running The Asylum) used to complain that we were throwing away 15 years of desktop technology to move our applications to the web.

No one is ever comfortable with throwing away much of what they’ve learned to re-learn it. Cooper, apparently, never learned this sort patience. We are rapidly approaching the capabilities of desktop applications on the web; a full circle. Perhaps the biggest limit today to these types of applications is the fundamental assumptions a generation of web designers and developers have after a decade (happy 10th anniversary Yahoo!) of learning to scale down approaches to a bare hyper-text minimum.

Today, the line between desktop and web app is blurring, perhaps nowhere more than at Google. Jesse James Garrett and the folks at Adaptive Path are attempting to brand this as AJAX, but that’s a bullshit acronym they’re putting out there to attract clients and attempt to own the space. They seem to be taking a page from the Republican Party’s attempts at semiotics and controlling the discourse. However, once the New York Times picks up on the trend, like in this article entitled Simplifying Web Checkouts, it’s hardly news anymore, at least, in the web world.

This form of communication de-emphasizes communication as transport (the MacLuhan-esque truth of early client-server web apps) and assumes simultaneous communication—a true dialogue without arbitrary system-capability based restrictions on the user’s ability to interact—as an ideal state. Technically, this concept is a group of SGML standards (XHTML, CSS, ECMAscript, XSLT, etc.) and XML-based server components (XMLhttpRequest) being reconfigured to radically change the interaction between humans and computers.

My first experience with this type of approach was for producing small interactive device and kiosks for multimedia products. We used it to send hog-loads of information to the devices and then let the user sort it out as they wished. Here’s Google’s HTML version of that early Microsoft case study.

However, the more interesting examples are:

• Google Maps


• Kayak


• Big coolness: Gibson custom guitar builder app

Not all these use XML, etc., but they are all great examples of customization and user-manipulation of a product or service-related set of objects in a manner unthinkable a few short years ago. This ol’ foggie is lovin’ the internet. For today, at least.

Thanks for the linkies, Taylor and Andrew!