Why so impressive? Well, for starters, these games are built using nothing more than JavaScript and the HTML5 canvas element. While HTML5 alone does not make something an instant Flash killer (see the continuing saga of efforts to usurp Flash with the HTML5 video element), Akihabara is incredibly smooth. Each demo, while fairly rudimentary, controls flawlessly. There are no frame rate hiccups, no input lag, and no jerky animation. The demos are completely playable, easily on par with your average flash game, and decidedly better than some punch-the-monkey banner ad.

The fact that these demos were built with JavaScript adds another interesting benefit – the full source of each game is only a few clicks away! Because the Akihabara engine is doing most of the heavy lifting, the game code that remains is clean and very readable. Levels for 2d scrolling games are nothing more than an array of images, and enemy AI takes up just a few lines for each type of enemy. I don’t know the limitations of the engine yet, but it seems like most any 8-bit era game could probably be ported to JavaScript without too much of a hassle.

So, does this mean that the future of casual gaming is JavaScript? Unfortunately, probably not. While the performance of Akihabara is impressive, the fact that source code is easily available makes it unlikely that serious commercial projects will choose this route. However, the relative simplicity of making games with this JavaScript framework means that we can probably expect a lot of new games written by enthusiasts – like those who submit Flash games to sites like Newgrounds – to use JavaScript, for access to the iPhone / iPad market if nothing else.

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.

To solve the advertising problem, I created a vertical column on the right side of the design to hold 125×125 pixel ads. This size is smaller than the ads the site currently offers, but I feel this is offset by the positioning of the ads directly next to the content, rather than at the very bottom of the site. The redesign has space for five of these ads.

To solve the readability problem, I changed the central content area into a photo index of the issue’s ten top stories. The featured story gets a wider display area, and the remaining nine form a grid underneath. Furthermore, the “Community News” section, generally found in the middle of the paper, gets a sidebar on the left for excerpts from the first few stories, with a link to the full community news section.

The site’s original horizontal navigation at the top of the site was transformed into three lists of links each in the header. This groups the links by type, and also echoes the grid structure of the article photos underneath.

Finally, I kept the grid layout for the paper’s eight columnists below the main content area, but tweaked the layout a bit to give it a more open look. There is slightly more spacing between each columnist’s grid space, and I got rid of the large borders around each grid space as well.

So, that’s Design 006. Stay tuned for the License to Kill, Design 007.

The site’s title in the upper-left is positioned using CSS3 Transforms, rotating the headers -5 degrees and giving them 20 pixels of top margin to keep them legible. This solution degrades nicely in browsers that don’t support (all of) CSS3, appearing as standard, horizontal headers. The headers are also given a transparent background with RGBA color. The site uses the excellent Museo font for its headers thanks to Cufón.

The site navigation in the upper right has rounded corners thanks to border-radius, and the same transparent background as the headers.

The current film section is set to a fixed height with overflow: auto to get vertical scrolling. I chose this setup because it allows visitors not as interested in the current film to see that there is additional content underneath without scrolling, while allowing interested readers to learn more about the film without clicking to a new page. Upcoming films are presented with their film posters and the dates of their showings below the current film.

The background image for the site comes from the 1923 Harold Lloyd film “Safety Last!“, chosen because I feel it evokes a sense of whimsy and a connection to film history. The original image from the film was given a color overlay layer and some artistic filters in Photoshop to help it blend into the background.

Only 99 designs left to go for the year. Next, I’ll be taking a look at the world of online magazines.

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.