DigiThoughts

Flash is Dead, Long Live Flash

 November 10, 2011 by David Pett

Yesterday Adobe made the (expected) announcement it was abandoning further development on its mobile browser Flash Player plugin.

As a Flash Developer, I feel the need to make sure that celebrations don’t ensue in behalf of the death of Flash. I get it, some people don’t want to depend on a plugin to have an online experience, but until recently, it was required. Flash has always been an innovator, breaking the barriers that have restricted web-standard browsing for so long. Great animations, awesome games, and video delivery are what Flash is great at doing. Web standard technologies such as HTML, JavaScript, and CSS are starting to add some of these features, and although they aren’t completely ubiquitous, they are gaining ground.

Adobe’s decision to abandon Flash on mobile browsers makes sense, not because the technology is outdated, but because they are refocusing their efforts. Providing support for the many chipset and manufacturer configurations that are found in the smartphone world is not cost effective, and they would rather spend those resources elsewhere.

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David Pett Multimedia Developer

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Photo Technology Comes Into Focus

 October 31, 2011 by Nicholas Davison
Lytro Light Field Camera

In traditional photography, you have to choose a focal point.  Everything in front and behind that point progressively moves more and more out of focus. This process can slow photographers down and sometimes cause you to miss the action, either as your camera hunts for too long or focuses on the wrong point, leaving you with a useless image.

But, recently Lytro announced their new Light-Field camera. With a light-field (or ‘plenoptic’) camera, you can take the shot without worrying about focus and then adjust the focus to your heart’s content, later. You can see this in action here. Just click on the part of the image you want to focus (requires Flash).

This is all cool stuff but we’re still in early days of this technology…

In order to gain the ability to store all possible focal depths, we’re essentially trading resolution. As an example, Stanford University researchers used a 16 megapixel camera and, after creating ~175 pixel microlenses to create the light-field data, were left with only a 90 kilopixel final resolution (back in the bad old days of 640x480 cameras, we still had 307 kilopixels, albeit with a single focal point).

There is a solution that allows for higher resolution images but it comes at the cost of unwanted aliasing artifacts. So, do you trade resolution for “truer” images or gain resolution at the risk of more distortion in certain cases?

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Nicholas Davison Director of Web Development

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Adobe MAX to the Max!

 October 13, 2011 by David Pett
Psych Vision Air 3.0 Adobe MAX

Last week was the annual Adobe MAX event, where design and technology moguls share new innovations, visions and announcements. Every year, MAX carries the promise of game-changing technology, so a few Digitarians—Matt James, Tom Siebert, Michael Brown and I—caught the pre-sunrise Surfliner up to LA to catch early word of some of the exciting new products and services Adobe has planned for the next year (or later. Or never).

The most significant announcement, as far as Digitaria and our clients are concerned, was the official release of Air 3.0 and Flash Player 11 (both of which had been teased and hinted on Adobe blogs). Air 3.0 and Flash 11 bring hardware-accelerated (GPU) capabilities, enabling rich 3D gaming and also better 2D gaming to flash (demo here).  Unreal Gaming Engine and the next Angry Birds online game are being implemented in Flash.

As an Adobe Agency Partner, Digitaria has been working closely with Adobe and utilizing a pre-release of Air 3.0 to develop a multi-platform app -- both IOS for Apple products and Android -- created through a single build for our client the USA Network, which Adobe featured during the keynote.

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David Pett Multimedia Developer

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The Towering Totems of Open Source Software

 June 24, 2011 by Dustin Currie

Building software is hard. Only an elite few organizations can genuinely qualify as proficient in creating software. Most groups struggle and plod along. Google the Standish Group's yearly CHAOS report to see just how common mediocre and expensive IT projects are.  If you aren't already familiar with the CHAOS report or a seasoned IT vet, you'll be stunned. As of 2009, 44% of projects are "challenged" -- meaning they are some combination of over budget, late or feature incomplete. Twenty-four percent get cancelled altogether.  Sixty-eight percent of software projects are not successfully deployed. Worse still, only a subset of the projects successfully deployed will deliver or exceed the anticipated results!

Software is expensive, extremely risky and - no matter your industry -- no longer an optional part of business.

Still, even with these challenges, the world of software is extremely bright. Why? Because software development isn't silo'd.

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Dustin Currie Senior Engineer

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Bursting the Filter Bubble

 June 09, 2011 by Chuck Phillips
Google Filter Bubble

In a recent Q&A with Mashable, Eli Pariser, author of The Filter Bubble, argues that we’re being isolated because of content filtering. That because of filtering, new ideas and opposing view points are hidden from our view. His premise seems to hinge on the ideas we only consume content passively and that information outside our world-view is difficult to find when we look for it. Neither of which are true in my experience.

Filtering is a convenience for content consumers when browsing the Internet passively, without agenda. When I’m in “passive mode,” I want the signal-to-noise ratio to tip towards signal. I want the irrelevant filtered from view. I don’t believe that I’m unique in that regard. We Homo sapiens are actually hardwired to respond to relevant content. Without relevancy, without accurate filtering, a content provider’s consumer constituency will not remain loyal. They will eventually leave for a content provider that delivers them content that they are interested in consuming while in passive mode.

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Chuck Phillips CTO

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Accessibility: Critical SEO?

 December 06, 2010 by Nicholas Davison

I'd like to propose a thought experiment: Think of Google, Bing and others not as search engines that crawl the web but as disabled users.

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Nicholas Davison Director of Web Development

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Digitaria Playground – HTML5/JavaScript Image Editor

 November 18, 2010 by Nicholas Davison
Screenshot of the image editor

Canvas had, I’ll be honest, kind of bored me so far. Really? We’re back to drawing primitive lines, rectangles and arcs? In the great Flash vs. HTML5 debate, despite being an HTML guy, my feelings had been, “Not much is going to happen until there’s a tool as easy as Flash’s for building something interesting.”

Then I came across getImageData and putImageData.

A Sunday afternoon's playing around later, I had a kind of cool image editor.

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Nicholas Davison Director of Web Development

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Accessible HTML5 Video

 October 18, 2010 by Nicholas Davison
Accessibility... it's about to be the law.

How would you feel if I told you that I had a web solution that could get you good publicity, improve your SEO, avoid the risk of getting sued and, best of all, I made it easy for you?

With accessible HTML5 video, we can give you all of that. This post shows you how.

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Nicholas Davison Director of Web Development

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HTML5 Video & Skinning Tutorial Part 5: Sound

 June 28, 2010 by Nicholas Davison

Last Thursday, we covered interactive progress bars.

Today we will be covering sound – muting, un-muting and adjusting the volume of our videos.

Throughout these tutorials, we will be continuing the concepts/implementation division: Explaining the ideas first, letting those who wish to run ahead do so – then going over a step by step implantation with jQuery.

 

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Nicholas Davison Director of Web Development

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HTML5 Video & Skinning Tutorial Part 4: Interactive Progress Bars

 June 24, 2010 by Nicholas Davison

Yesterday we covered rewind and fast forward buttons along with the limitations in current implementations.

Today we will be covering progress bars – updating them as the video plays and letting users jump to any position along them.

Throughout these tutorials, we will be continuing the concepts/implementation division: Explaining the ideas first, letting those who wish to run ahead do so – then going over a step by step implantation with jQuery.

 

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Nicholas Davison Director of Web Development

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