Top Right Quadrant

Hype

Friday, 20 May 2011

Hype, from Tumult software, is an app that helps you create complicated HTML5 animations.

Using Hype, you can create beautiful HTML5 web content. Animations and interactive content made with Hype work on desktops, smartphones and iPads. No coding required.

Nobody wants HTML5 to fully replace Flash more than I (and by ‘HTML5’, I mean the entire “next generation” of web technologies, including CSS3, native video, <canvas> with JavaScript, et cetera), so I can’t not dispense big-ups for creating what is essentially an IDE to replace Adobe’s authoring tools.

Then I take a look at the gallery of web pages created with Hype, and I die a little inside. They’re all just splash animations and superfluous element animations whose trendiness subsided with the term ‘DHTML’. It was a grim reminder of why Flash is horrible, but jarring proof that bad design transcends technologies.

I instantly made my mind up that HTML5 animations should be used sparingly, and if you’re conjuring an animation that is so complex you require an IDE to do it, then… well… you should not be.

Three down; five letters; white and fluffy, lives in the sky

Wednesday, 20 April 2011

If you consult any number of technology news sites, you’ll be told that updates to Apple’s meagre cloud computing offering are likely to be on the horizon. Hopefully, they’re right. MobileMe woefully lags behind Google’s and even Microsoft’s cloud-sync packages in features, price and — frankly — usability (the MobileMe web apps have been highly unresponsive and sluggish as of late, to the point that I’d rather pick up my iPad than point my browser to me.com). Sure, as is standard with anything Apple, the sync experience within their own ecosystem is fine. The realisation grows, however, that it’s simply not enough.

I have no idea what iOS 5 will bring to the table. I’m no expert pundit or industry analyst (although, let’s be honest, neither are most actual analysts). But I know what I want as a consumer, and I’m not averse to telling other consumers what they want, either.

So what do I want out of MobileMe? I want it to be free. I want it to store my media. But perhaps most importantly, I want it to be open to developers.

Let’s ignore the inevitable move to a cloud-based iTunes for a minute (although having an unreliable DSL connection has presented me with a great argument against cloud reliance) and let’s not discuss the logistics of ‘free’ yet. I want to focus on the developer possibilities, and with WWDC coming up, with iOS 5 and Mac OS 10.7 taking centre stage, there’s no better time.

It’s been almost a year since Joshua Topolsky, former editor-in-chief of Engadget, penned his popular editorial in which he prayed for something he called a ‘continuous client’ — that is, the idea that you could be using your smartphone, tablet, laptop or desktop computer, step away from it, and resume whatever it was you were doing on another smartphone, tablet, laptop or desktop computer, seamlessly. Not an unreasonable bit of futurism.

Now, as successful as the App Store is and has been for many developers, it is one area where the inter-Apple product ecosystem has been frustratingly decoupled. There is this wonderful notion of a ‘universal’ iOS binary, which allows me to buy an app once and install and run that same binary on my iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad (and, one would assume, my Mac eventually. Maybe even my Apple TV, as the rumours persist). It’s the convenience behind device-independent¹ iOS apps that’s staving off the hurt the Android platform feels from its fragmentation problem.

Yet, when I buy an app that’s capable of running on all members of my iOS device family, to an extent I feel like I’m running two completely different apps because the instances of the application refuse to talk to each other. I submit to you, as an example, an app I use both on my iPad and my iPhone very often: Crosswords.

I’m on the bus one morning. I finish The Independent’s crossword for today - hooray for me! That’s a great big satisfying check mark beside that one. I get home, have some dinner. Maybe I’ll complete another before going to bed, so I grab my iPad and… wait, what’s this? The Independent’s crossword for today is ‘new’? But I did it this morning!

Sure, the creators of this particular Crosswords app have taken it upon themselves to offer a sync platform of their own. This is the best they can offer me in terms of keeping my puzzle completions up-to-date, but this is still an unacceptable solution. Am I to remember a user name and password for every single universal app² that I own?

My iPhone, iPad and Mac are already tied to a MobileMe login. Let’s open that up to developers in iOS 5. I’m not prepared to stream my music over 3G from the cloud, and neither are the mobile networks. But I would savour the ability for my Prompt server list (hell, even my sessions, why not?) to persist across devices, to retain my favourite Epicurious recipes, automatically set up my Twitter accounts when I get a new device, or to just keep track of my humble crossword completions when I get home.

To quote something Steve Jobs said on-stage at the D5 conference:

The marriage of some really great client apps with some really great cloud services is incredibly powerful.

Giving developers access to MobileMe would be one small step for word-puzzle lovers like myself, but a giant leap closer to Topolsky’s continuous client.

Berners-Lee says Internet access is a ‘human right’

Wednesday, 13 April 2011

Quoth Tim Berners-Lee:

“Access to the Web is now a human right. It’s possible to live without the Web. It’s not possible to live without water. But if you’ve got water, then the difference between somebody who is connected to the Web and is part of the information society, and someone who (is not) is growing bigger and bigger.”

Putting aside his haphazard reasoning, relating whether or not you have water to the size of whatever he means by ‘difference’ (read that quote carefully, see if you can parse it in a way that actually makes any sense), this train of thought is very dangerous.

Let’s not throw around the term ‘human right’ as if anyone - even the great Tim Berners-Lee, whom I respect - can define what our human rights are. Our human rights are innately existent and unrepentantly constant. As codified in the United States Declaration of Independence they are the right to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” (although I find that third item to be somewhat nebulous, so I prefer the more succinct “life, liberty and prosperity”).

You may not take my life. You may not take my liberty. You may not take my property. These are the principles governments are formed to uphold, and the conservation of them is the measure to which governments should exist (it can be argued that the very presence of a government is in violation of all three human rights, but that’s a high-horse I shall ride another time). They are passive protections of the self. To no extent do these principles charge me (or ISPs) with providing anyone else with free Internet access, electricity, clothing or even water for crying out loud. They simply protect the things I am born with, the things that are intrinsically mine, the things that I earn during my life.

The above quote demonstrates a major misunderstanding of the nature of the things to which you are entitled, as per your human rights. The (erroneous) belief is that if you do not have something, someone else ought to give you theirs. This is not the case. Human rights are what you are born with, what is yours by default. It is when these things are taken away from you that issue is to be taken.

Go ahead, Mr. Berners-Lee, donate your time and your money to making ubiquitous Internet access a reality. But, pretty please, don’t presume to make “free access to the web” one of my human rights - my rights that condemn such a thing in the first place, by the way.

And let’s be honest: who wants a government-controlled Internet?

(Source: networkworld.com)