For years, Mac gaming has been primarily focused on iPhone OS devices. A large percentage of App Store sales are for games, and the iPod Touch (and now iPad) is being pushed as a competitor to the Nintendo DS and Sony PSP. The Mac desktop, however, was largely neglected. Big PC releases would find their way to Mac months or years later, after an intermediary company had ported the Windows version. Often, these ports had their own quirks and bugs. The Mac was never a first-class gaming citizen.

Steam just might change that, however. For those unfamiliar with Steam, it’s essentially an iTunes for gaming. Users create a Steam account that, through the Steam client software, offers a store for downloadable games, tracks purchases, and installs and updates purchased games. Steam games can even be launched through the client, making it a one-stop solution for gaming.

What really makes Steam special, though, is the amount of support they’ve received from game publishers. Steam offers its own DRM, with periodic online verification. The entire system is tied to a Steam account and handled in a transparent manner – users never have to enter a serial number or install game-specific, system-altering DRM software. As a result, big-name releases are often available for download through Steam on the same day as their retail release.

Since Steam has been so well-received by Windows users, the release of a Mac Steam client could signal the beginning of a major shift in Mac gaming. Publishers finally have an incentive to release Mac versions of their games, since a proven distribution system is now in place for end users to buy them. Mac market share is steadily growing, and if Steam makes the Mac a viable target for game publishers, Windows will lose yet another competitive advantage.

Well, to be honest I’ve actually been pretty busy. I started the “104 Designs for 2010″ project in the hope that building a solid portfolio would net me more work, and that’s exactly what happened. Word to the wise: the new secret to business success, as Gary Vaynerchuk eloquently put it, is working your a** off. I’m doing some (hopefully long-term) freelance work with a local agency and loving it.

Is this the end for 104/2010? No, certainly not, but it’s definitely been put on the back burner. I think what I most enjoy about 104/2010 is the way it lets me experiment with new web technologies, so as I find new techniques and tools, I’ll be sure to put them to use here. (I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the Pure CSS3 AT-AT Walker demo…)

I’m still writing articles as usual, and I’ll have another post up soon about Information Architecture.

Thanks for reading!

Most of the negative assessments of the device fall into one of two camps. The first camp says that the iPad isn’t anywhere near as innovative as rumor and speculation had indicated, and that the iPad is really nothing more than “a giant iPod Touch.” The second camp says that the iPad is too locked down to be attractive, since it only runs applications that Apple has blessed with inclusion in the App Store – notably excluding any version of Adobe’s Flash runtime. I’d like to address both camps in this post.

The iPad doesn’t have a camera / wash my car / cook me breakfast.

First, Apple products rarely live up to their pre-launch hype, but that doesn’t make them any less compelling or significant over the long haul. Look back to the iPod; when it was first released, I was happy with my portable MiniDisc player / recorder (which is still, to me anyways, the true successor of the cassette tape). The iPod was like any other MP3 player on the market when it was released, and while the Apple hype machine might not have been in full gear at the time, there certainly wasn’t much to be enthused about at the time. But as release followed release, the iPod became a thousand-ton juggernaut in the portable audio market. Apple refined iTunes until it was the best music management software available, on any platform, not to mention the premier online store for buying content. Apple invented the “podcast,” the sonic equivalent of blogging. The iPod itself became ever more capacious, and when it reached 40GB in its third generation, even I was tempted enough to ditch my minidisc collection for a device that could hold my entire music library (at that time, anyways… it’s become much larger since then). The initial product may have disappointed, but it quickly grew into something much bigger than even the most outlandish hype could have predicted.

The cycle repeated itself with the iPhone. Remember the Motorola ROKR? 100-song hardware limit, with a clumsy music-playing interface – an abomination that was quickly forgotten in Cupertino. Then Steve Jobs announced the iPhone. The hype was incredible – desktop-like web surfing, innovative new multi-touch screen, a whole new way of interacting with an iPod. Then the criticism began. Mobile Safari doesn’t have a Flash plugin; the phone is too expensive; there’s no way to write real applications for it; you’re stuck in a two-year contract with AT&T; it’s too slow. Within two years, Apple had introduced the blazing-fast iPhone 3GS at nearly half the cost of the original iPhone, the App Store had outperformed any analyst’s expectations, and Flash started its decline in popularity.

I predict a similar cycle with the iPad. Every “major” concern that would supposedly keep people from buying an iPad – its lack of a camera, the inability to make phone calls on 3G-equipped models, or the continuing lack of Flash support – will become a non-issue within two years. Sure, entirely new issues will arise during that time; witness the complaints about the App Store approvals process or the outrage at AT&T’s service that accompanied the growth of the iPhone. But the iPad will in all likelihood sell like hotcakes within one to two years, even if its initial launch is underwhelming, simply because Apple doesn’t sit around on their laurels when they release a new product line. Apple tweaks, prods, and perfects their devices, and if they still don’t sell well, only then does Apple lose interest (see the AppleTV or Mac Mini).

The iPad is a locked-down DRM love-fest.

Sad but true. The only way to get an application onto a standard-issue iPad will be through the iTunes App Store, meaning that if you consider the iPad a computer, it’s about the most locked-down computer to be sold in the history of computing. If Apple doesn’t like your app, it will not find its way to an unmodified iPad, period. The lack of a disc drive or even a USB port further solidifies that, and the iPad’s non-traditional filesystem won’t even let you shoehorn an unauthorized application onto the device. Note that I haven’t even mentioned content yet, the traditional place for talk about DRM. No, the iPad’s DRM limits what can come into the device as much as (if not more than) what you can copy off of it. No wonder the Free Software Foundation is up in arms.

All the same, devices like the iPad really are the future of computing. It’s certainly powerful enough to run nearly any traditional desktop application, along with relatively complex games (though it’s not any real competition to something like the Xbox 360 or PlayStation 3). It has the world’s easiest application installation process; click a button, potentially charge your credit card, and the application is on your device and ready to use. And since every developer in the world is forced to use the same application installer, you will never see the confused jumble that is Windows (or, to a lesser extent, even Mac) application installs, with product activation, serial numbers, and actual installer programs. The iPad “just works,” in an actually meaningful way, and that’s all most people care about. If the Web conforms more closely to Apple’s vision, which, thankfully for Apple, is also the vision of Google and others, then many users may not even need a “real” computer to complement their iPad. The stereotypical computer-literate family member who keeps all the family’s computers in good working order will become a thing of the past, because the iPad is built so that it cannot be broken. It can crash now and then, sure, but no one will ever need to “re-install iPhone OS” or make sure that they have the most recent browser or plugins.

I make only one caveat to the above paragraph: Apple, and computer manufacturers in general, cannot use the iPad approach for everyone. Plenty of people use computers because they enjoy keeping a well-maintained system, much like car enthusiasts who truly enjoy fixing up their cars with their own two hands. And specialists – designers, developers, and researchers – will always need the unparalleled flexibility of a general-purpose operating system. The geeks will be all too happy to recommend the iPad to their relatives, so long as they can keep the shiny toys for themselves.

Yeah, but what about Flash?

Over the years, I’ve had a love/hate relationship with Adobe. I first learned web design by using my school’s copy of Dreamweaver; without that experience, I probably wouldn’t be where I am today. At the same time, Dreamweaver keeps designers weak by holding their hands and creating shoddy look-alikes of well-implemented sites.

The Flash Platform is exciting because of its power and its near-universal install base. ActionScript 3.0 can do an awful lot, and the Flash runtime can execute some fairly complicated code (like full 3D gaming) at a reasonable speed. But Flash is, and likely always will be, proprietary. Adobe makes its income selling the tools that allow developers to target the one and only Flash runtime. If Adobe opened up Flash development, you would see multiple Flash runtimes for everything from supercomputers to toasters, and a proliferation of Flash development tools as well. This would be incredibly good for Flash adoption – it would have the opportunity to unseat JavaScript as the go-to scripting language of the Web – but it would bankrupt Adobe.

So Adobe has to walk a fine line. They have to push for adoption of Flash wherever possible, promoting it as an essential part of the Web like HTML or CSS, but at the same time they have to keep Flash protected from any attempt to open-source it or otherwise reveal its complete inner workings. It’s a strategy that makes Adobe act like it has multiple personalities, threatening open-source developers reverse-engineering Flash for being too open, but criticizing Apple’s exclusion of Flash from its mobile devices for being not open enough.

What will the outcome be? Ultimately, I don’t think potential iPad buyers are going to care about the lack of Flash. Adobe will either find a way to make Flash web-accessible while still remaining proprietary, or Flash will wither and die. You can see the beginnings of the first option in Adobe’s CS5 demonstrations, where Flash CS5 was shown compiling Flash apps into native iPhone OS apps, and Dreamweaver could convert interactive charts from Flash components to HTML5 components. If Adobe’s money-maker is tools for designers and developers, I think Adobe will be making its tools as useful and relevant as possible – and I think that means embracing HTML5 and finding ways to make Flash content work within that scope.

Rant mode off.

The iPad really is a unique device, even if it is nothing more than a giant iPod Touch. When the iPad evolves into a notebook replacement, the computing landscape will be changed forever, and I believe that such a change is inevitable. In two years, we will look back at the iPad announcement and tell ourselves that the whole time we were asking the wrong questions and focusing on the wrong things. It really is going to be a game-changer, even if I don’t find myself all that enthused about buying the first generation.

1. The look didn’t fit the theme. It was my first “grunge” design, and I was happy with the result, but it didn’t really have anything to do with clean, professional web design – a friend who saw it said “it looks like a site for genealogy buffs.”
2. Not enough contrast. The site was overwhelmingly blue, with little contrast between elements, so that everything just muddled together on a quick glance.
3. Too hard to maintain. The old theme was built from scratch, and while it worked, making changes to the theme required a lot of tweaking and work under the hood. It wasn’t a sustainable base for future growth.

The new theme is built on Thematic, which essentially takes care of the markup portion of the theme and lets you focus on styling. This makes updates a breeze – just wire up a new PHP filter or action hook and you’re all set. There’s a lot more contrast, a great photo to catch the eye (and an alternate header for “inside” pages), and everything is a lot more clean and professional.

So, I hope you enjoy the new look, and I’ll be posting my next design in the 104 Designs for 2010 series soon.

I’ve been thinking about this question a lot over the last few days, and I keep coming back to the same answer: get working. The best thing any designer can do is not to sit around on your laurels, but to keep coming up with fresh, exciting designs.

So, that said, I’d like to announce here my own New Year’s resolution:

Produce two new design mocks every week for a year.

That’s 104 quality designs for my portfolio, guaranteed. And by “design mock” I mean a functional, but small, website – not just a Photoshop comp but something that actually shows my skills.

What are your plans for 2010? Leave a comment about your brilliant ideas for next year.

Photo by  ீ ๑ Adam

Wasn’t that interesting? The part that most struck me was when Rodriguez writes the following:

[W]ho will tell us what it means to live as citizens of Seattle or Denver or Ann Arbor? The truth is we no longer want to live in Seattle or Denver or Ann Arbor. Our inclination has led us to invent a digital cosmopolitanism that begins and ends with “I.” Careening down Geary Boulevard on the 38 bus, I can talk to my my dear Auntie in Delhi or I can view snapshots of my cousin’s wedding in Recife or I can listen to girl punk from Glasgow. The cost of my cyber-urban experience is disconnection from body, from presence, from city.

For many of us, the world online has become more important than the city around us. It is no wonder, then, that newspapers – once the epitome of locality – are in a sorry state. Rodriguez argues that this is a loss of an entire way of life – that in the future we will have “one and a half cities: Washington, D.C. and American Idol.” The death of the newspaper is to him the death of the American city as a whole, the elimination of any uniqueness that a particular tract of land might have. The result is a café full of drones locked in a “wi-fi séance,” none of them talking or even looking at one another.

I can certainly see where Rodriguez is coming from, but I must disagree about the ultimate effects. The Chronicle began as the… chronicle, you could say, of a small town. Everyone knew everyone else, and the newspaper served as the codification and persistent memory of the place. As cities became larger and larger, newspapers by necessity became more and more selective about what qualified as “news” and about whose goings-on deserved to be recorded and shared. The “spirit of a place” became more about the spirit of the place’s most important people than about the everyday actions of ordinary people.

The Internet, and social media in particular, is re-defining the boundaries of the “small town” mode of living. Newspapers faced limitations of reporter salaries, materials, printing costs, and delivery for papers that would have to become much thicker in order to keep the same kind of focus. The burden of producing the news, however, has largely shifted to the consumers of the news themselves, as if the New York Times took submissions (and published!) from anyone willing to send them a story. Plus, since computers are very good at sorting and filtering records, consumers of social media are not required to thumb through hundreds of pages of newsprint. This lets social media act as a focused lens on the goings-on of select groups of people, while still having coverage broad enough to support hundreds of cities. A one-size-fits-all, take-it-or-leave-it newspaper that purports to cover an entire city (and surrounding metropolitan area) can’t hope to compete with the customized, precision focus of social media. To use Seth Godin’s phrase, newspapers are no longer a “Purple Cow,” they are now simply an average product for average people. And no one likes to think of themselves as average.

Yes, the shift to social media has definitely taken a toll on notions of place and space. But how accurate were those notions to begin with? Cities, like nations, are imaginary concepts; there is no physical line in the sand to separate the city from the plain, everyday land around it, anymore than there is a physical line in the ground demarcating one country from another (the proposed fencing-off of Mexico notwithstanding). If you live on the fringe, then people on the fringe are part of your community; it’s not that you are part of a city and your neighbors are not solely because of what side of an imaginary line they live on. Cities, then, function solely as generalized markers on a scale of place – it’s more convenient to tell someone that you live “near Atlanta” than to give them latitude and longitude coordinates (too narrow) or “in Georgia” (too broad). As the population of the US becomes more mobile and fluid, this is becoming the main purpose that cities serve. The majority of people I’ve met since moving to Miami are similarly not from Miami; everyone brings their own ideas of community and we throw them in a pot and stir them up, and I wouldn’t call the result “Miami culture” because I still don’t know what “Miami culture” would even be. In that sense, I’ve already lost track of place. My “place” is now the people I communicate with online, regardless of where they are – I’ve drawn my own imaginary lines to indicate who is and isn’t part of a city of my own making, of my own newspaper. And that social media “newspaper” works in much the same way as the original San Francisco Chronicle – I get a codified, recorded history of everything that happens in my “city.”

What about you, readers? Are you still firmly rooted in place-ness, or have you cut free of your physical shackles? (How’s that working out for you?)

Photo by Mike Bailey-Gates.

Interested in how exactly I did all of this? I’ll be starting a case study later this week as well that will walk you through the process from start to finish.

Thanks for reading, and please subscribe to the site’s RSS feed if you haven’t already!

Tomorrow, Adobe is holding a conference in Washington, D.C. to convince federal employees that proprietary technologies like Flash and PDF are “essential” to creating open government. Why are they so essential, you might ask? Well, according to Adobe, “[s]ince the advent of the web, an entire infrastructure has evolved to enable public access to information. Such technologies include HTML, Adobe PDF, and Adobe® Flash® technology.” Yes, that’s right, PDF and Flash technologies date back to “the advent of the web!” And as the Sunlight Foundation says, “Here’s a hint– if the data format has an ® by its name, it probably isn’t great for transparency or open data.” Yes, vast numbers of people have the Flash plugin installed on their browser; yes, vast numbers of people have a PDF reader installed on their computer. But the ability of the “average user” to access government data doesn’t constitute open government. Can screen readers understand Flash content? (This is a real question; I don’t honestly know.) Should the American public realistically be expected to support a non-governmental company like Adobe (by downloading and installing their software, and by making government purchase Flash / PDF creation tools) just to get some information about what Congress is doing? Sure, PDF is an “open standard” with multiple implementations, and it’s head-and-shoulders above Microsoft Word in terms of openness, but pulling text data out of PDFs takes a lot of work.

There are certainly alternatives. At the “advent of the web” that Adobe calls us to remember, linked text documents were the norm. Not Flash; not PDF; not any form of styled display technology. The Web was data in its purest state, marked up only in semantic ways to indicate lists, paragraphs, and tables (which didn’t even arrive until HTML2!). I happen to think that this format is perfect for government data as well. When was the last time you thought to yourself that a federal statute would be more open and accessible if it just had some animation? When was the last time you seriously cared about what font a government press release was issued in, or what each page’s headers and footers looked like? Perhaps there is a place for archival storage of documents in a true-to-life format – even so, those archives should be storing images in an open format like TIFF, while saving machine-readable (and general-purpose use) data for marked-up text.

Flash’s eternal game of catch-up

This news story makes me think about my experiences with the Flash Platform over the last year. Originally, I was anti-Flash. I couldn’t understand why anyone would want to pay Adobe large amounts of money for Flash Professional – the only way to produce content for Flash Player – just to make content that would only work by way of a plugin. Times changed bit by bit; Adobe started creating actually usable versions of Flash Player for Linux, and the Flex framework became mainstream and open-source. Finally you could write Flash apps entirely in ActionScript in a text editor! Of course, you still needed that plugin to make things work at the other end, but the plugin was available pretty much everywhere.

I really got interested in Flash when I saw a website that used Flex to make pie charts on-the-fly from numbers in a database. I was amazed – this was real eye candy created by programmatic means. I had been interested in data visualization already, and Flex seemed too good to pass up. I learned my way around Flex Builder 3 (available free to students), picked up some basic ActionScript skills, and started making simple web apps. Then the disappointment started hitting home.

“What do you mean there’s no Flash support for iPhone?” That was where things started going downhill. Apple, creator of quite likely the most impressive personal gadget ever devised, had flat-out said no to Adobe. Even Youtube, the first site to really show off the power of streaming Flash video, had agreed to convert their entire archive to another format just to please Apple. And it wasn’t even a hacky kludge – h.264 Youtube actually worked well. So why should anyone bother to lock their content into Flash Video? Then I started noticing more and more problems with the Flash plugin. It was unresponsive; it hogged system resources; it crashed my browser. Finally, I started reading about Google Wave. Here was HTML5 and the best of JavaScript together in one, and it did everything the Flash Player could do only better.

So I’ve turned my back on Flash for the time being. I’m interested to see what happens with Flex 4, but I’m not planning any big projects using it. As the browser wars have taught us, technology inevitably moves toward standardization and open formats. Adobe even seems to realize this – Dreamweaver CS5 can create HTML5 charts and graphs from data sources, instead of making Flex charts. Flash is in a sorry state, and I hope that Adobe will either find a new way to revitalize this platform, bringing in the designers and developers it has alienated over the years, or else put Flash out of its misery and develop the tools that will make designers fall in love with HTML5 the same way they fell in love with Macromedia Flash MX.

Ok, rant mode off. Any personal feelings about the Flash Platform or open government that you’d like to share? I’d especially like to hear from anyone in the Miami area; South Florida seems to be overflowing with Flash designers and Flash-only websites.

There’s been some interesting discussion recently on using gaming metaphors to change behavior — everything from the RPG-like metaphors of Weight Watchers, to the underlying psychology of Nike Plus, to the MPG readout of Toyota’s Prius and smart meters in homes reducing energy consumption. The first step in changing your behavior is generally to “instrument” and measure it.

The trend is only accelerating. Newer games (largely on Nintendo platforms) like “Wii Fit” or even “My Stop Smoking Coach with Allen Carr” already use the concept of bringing the player’s real-world life into a literal game, rather than the self-imposed games of the Nike Plus or Toyota Prius.

I think this is an idea that is just screaming for more attention on the web. Find a way to plug real-life homework completion into tangible benefits in an MMORPG and you’ll have a new set of straight-A students in record time. For companies buying their own islands in Second Life, why not implement a “points” system for task completion, or for coming up with truly great, new ideas? Granted, anything like this would require careful study before rushing to implementation; there would be nothing worse than to create an entire culture of living by the game’s rules, when the game may fail to keep up with the realities it is simulating. Nonetheless, this field seems set to become the new definition of “serious games”.