Today I read that someone has actually built such an application, SugarTrip, that runs on google’s Android phones (and others, I hope).

SugarTrip is a great example of a collective intelligence network. Google is probably the best at applying collective intelligence to solving problems – using the web browser as their input device. But mobile, connected devices may very well be the ultimate input device for such networks – pretty much everyone has one, they have web access just like a browser, they have GPS, they have cameras, and so forth. I see a ton of potential for such networks – geolocation provides a host of possibilities that many people are already exploring. Now SugarTrip is looking at applying the velocity data that comes from GPS systems as well. What if phones could provide other information – like temperature/humidity, or heart rate, or blood sugar?

I think the message of Blend has some nice takes, but in the end the whole concept of [the] Designer <> Developer processes to me is always couched in developer controlled languages which is Blend’s ultimate failing. It really is a tool to allow developers to be better designers, instead of a tool that really let’s designers do their job better.

I actually have very little time to watch TV these days. We watch Lost, Heroes, Weeds, and the Daily Show pretty regularly. We occasionally watch The Office and The Colbert Report. I’d like to watch more movies at home but by the time we’ve had the kids watch their shows and put them to bed, we’re too tired too stay up another 90-120 minutes. Pathetic, I know. Yet we still pay a lot of money every month for DirectTV, which we invariably watch in recorded form on our Tivo. I recently downgraded us so that we no longer get anything but the ‘plus’ package of cable channels, but no movie channels, which saved us something like $40 per month. I considered going even further and getting rid of DirecTV altogether, but decided in the end that we’d keep it for a while longer so our kids could have access to Noggin and PBS Kids. But that means we’re paying something like $50 a month for the privilege of getting those channels.

But a lot of people are going further. One friend told me last week that he did jsut get rid of his DirecTV entirely, and now just buys his kids the occasional new kid shows on DVD. Some friends without kids rely on Netflix for everything now. I’ve seen a number of blog posts like this one where people have done similar things.

Bottom line is that $50 per month buys a lot of movie rentals and pay per view. Now that you can get those downloads on demand, why pay money to cable/satellite companies with crappy service? I predict this behavior will spread from high tech early adopters pretty quickly, and will have huge repercussions for the TV industry, particularly the satellite/cable companies and the premium cable channels.

Things may turn out ok for the broadcast companies. People still need local news and such. Wouldn’t it be funny if ABC/NBC/CBS turned out to outlive Showtime, HBO, and Cinemax thanks to their affiliate networks?

Streamlined (read: “better”) interface, significant performance improvements (read: “Aperture 1 was slow”), and much more. $199, upgrades $99.

My even more succinct summary:

Man, Lightroom sure kicked our ass last time around!

Update: MacWorld has a pretty good overview, though it does quote a little too much from the product manager positioning.

BRIO beta is chock full of user interface innovations that make it bar none the easiest to use web conferencing application ever. My favorite is the little sharing panel that comes up when you start sharing:

But there is a lot more to it than just that. The whiteboarding/annotation features are really cool too. You should go check it out – its completely free and it rocks!

As an aside, note you can see my own room’s URL in the screenshot above. Please don’t abuse it but feel free to stop by if you want to check it out – if I’m busy I’ll just reject your entry into the meeting room

From a technical point of view, one of the more interesting facts is that it is built on our forthcoming CoCoMo platform. More discussion can be found on the Collaborative Methods blog.

But I don’t blame Apple or Adobe for the death of the goal. What really killed that goal once and for all was the web. Where once there were only a few popular Mac applications that broke with convention, on the web look and feel consistency isn’t even on the list of things to worry about. YouTube and flickr look and work completely differently. Users today have been trained to expect a different set of UI conventions from every web application they use, and they aren’t complaining about it.

The trend towards Rich Internet Applications using Apollo and its ilk will further cement this trend, as web applications come down to the desktop with their web UI conventions intact. To me, this is a good thing.

Over the last few days there has been a lot of discussion on related lines. Many people have been writing about the UI changes in Leopard and the iPhone, and what impact they will have on the traditional Mac UI.

First up was John Siracusa, arguing that the iPhone is a new frontier for UI development (my emphasis added):

The iPhone is not just a new platform, it’s an entirely new set of rules for interface design. That is what struck me the most once the actual iPhone demos started. There are no windows, no close/minimize/zoom widgets, no checkboxes, no radio buttons, no scroll bars, no nothing.

Yes, there are features that look and act sort of like the traditional GUI widgets from desktop OSes. For example, there’s this vestigial little scrolling thing on the side of some screens (see, I was going to say “windows”), but it appears to simply be a visual indicator of scroll position. The actual scrolling is done by flicking your finger as if the entire screen is a big plank of wood floating on the water. Flick anywhere and whoosh, watch it glide. This is no scroll bar.

[…]

Anyway, back on topic, the iPhone will definitely be a new frontier for developers. This is the most exciting part of the iPhone for me: a whole new set of rules for a new kind of UI. Who knows where it could lead—maybe even back to the Mac, some day. But as in the real frontier days, expect some hard river crossings, cholera, dysentery, and maybe, if we’re lucky, a bounty of wild fruit.

I’m not going to argue with John: he’s much smarter than me, and I agree with him (which makes him that much smarter, right?). But I can’t help but point out that its a little bit ironic that John, who has long been a stickler for UI consistency, is now looking forward to the day when these new UI paradigms come to the Mac, cavalierly tossing aside the existing HIG. Of course, you can make the argument that new UI paradigms are appropriate when new HI input and output devices come on the scene. But I also believe that this argument applies equally well to the paradigm shift brought on by the Web and from Flash in particular.

Next up is Wil Shipley of Delicious Library fame, interviewed in Wired talking about all the crunchy goodness to be had from using CoreAnimation, Apple’s SDK for creating Flash-like animations:

“The revolution coming with Core Animation is akin to the one that came from the original Mac in 1984,” says Wil Shipley, developer of the personal media-cataloging application Delicious Library. “We’re going to see a whole new world of user-interface metaphors with Core Animation.”

Shipley predicts that Core Animation will kick-start a new era of interface experimentation, and may lead to an entirely new visual language for designing desktop interfaces. The traditional desktop may become a multilayered three-dimensional environment where windows flip around or zoom in and out. Double-clicks and keystrokes could give way to mouse gestures and other forms of complex user input.

Doesn’t sound much like the current HIG, does it? Of course, Wil isn’t the kind of developer who keeps a copy of the HIG in his bedside drawer. Delicious Library definitely takes liberties with those guidelines, but it does so to bring a better experience. Not coincidentally, that better experience definitely took some of its cues from the Web.

The article also points out that at least one of the whizzy new features in Leopard has abandoned the HIG entirely (I don’t agree that Time Machine is banal, though):

Functionality-wise, Time Machine is a banal program — a content-version-control system that makes periodic, automated backups of a computer’s hard drive.

But Apple’s take on the age-old task of incremental backups features a 3-D visual browser that allows users to move forward and backward through time using a virtual “time tunnel” reminiscent of a Doctor Who title sequence. It’s completely unlike any interface currently used in Mac OS X.

Finally, see this article on Blackfriar’s Marketing where they predict a core animation overhaul of the entire Mac OS UI.

I bring up all these examples not to decry Apple’s efforts, but to point out how much such efforts are needed to bring the Mac UI paradigm in line with the needs of today’s applications and today’s hardware. Nor am I trying to give Flash credit for all the UI innovations in the iPhone or Leopard: Apple is doing fantastic work these days and the iPhone in particularly looks truly ground-breaking. But I also want to make sure that when people look at these new products, that they realize what its influences truly were.

In any event, I’m greatly anticipating Monday’s keynote to see what Apple’s cooked up and how it might impact third party developers big and small.

Ozzie’s speech was good but not great. He was confident, his slides were a lot less busy than those billg used in his keynotes, and there was clearly a lot of thought put into the messaging. But he ultimately failed to explain why his vision of finding the balance point between desktop APIs and web APIs was compelling or inevitable – you basically had to take it as an article of faith. I did like the way he broke down the Silverlight story into three parts: media, .NET, and services.

The demos weren’t hugely compelling for the most part – the Netflix, Metalliq, CBS, and MLB.com demos were all showing media capabilities that Flash has been doing for years, and they all felt very “canned” – Microsoft made a point of saying that the demos were done in 2-4 weeks, and it seemed like all of the actual work was done by agencies – Razorfish, Metaliq, and frog (not sure who did the CBS work). Now I want to make it clear that I don’t have any moral, ethical, or political issue here – i think it is perfectly fine to use agencies to build technology demos for new products. But as a developer I’m not excited by such demos since they have little to do with real world products. Same goes for the big video of WPF applications shown early in the keynote – it was a dull dull dull rehashing of the same WPF apps they trot out every time, most of them developed by agencies as demos with Microsoft footing the bill.

I did like Scott Guthrie’s more code-focused demo of building a Silverlight application – it showed the power of the platform from a developer’s point of view. I especially liked the demo of debugging Silverlight code running on a Mac. Of course the ultimate flaw in Microsoft’s tools strategy is that the Expression and Visual Studio tools only run on Windows, and designers generally prefer Macs. In fact, I was quite surprised at how little time they really spent on designer stuff in the keynote, given the stated desire to improve designer-developer workflow. Several demos used or mentioned the Expression products, but it was almost always in passing and the balance of focus was on developers. I guess you could argue that this is just Microsoft playing to its strengths, or you could argue that they don’t really understand designers. Based on some discussions with Microsoft folks I had during the day, I believe it is more the latter than the former.

In the end, though, the most compelling thing about the day’s events was the announcement of the .Net support for Silverlight. This wasn’t unexpected – Microsoft employees pretty much spilled the beans on that one on their blogs after the NAB show. What I didn’t expect was that they’ve brought over a lot of the basic WPF controls to Silverlight. This corrects one of Silverlight’s most glaring flaws, so props to Microsoft for that. I also like the fact that Silverlight’s .NET CLR includes the LINQ technilogy. But these features also makes me wonder about the future of WPF. Why would anyone in their right mind develop for WPF when you get nearly all the same benefits in Silverlight AND you get cross-platform, in the browser applications? I’m sure the Microsofties will talk about 3d, hardware acceleration, etc. and those are valid points but IMHO not enough to overcome the benefits of being web-based and portable. In fact, considering how much talk there was about Silverlight in the keynote and how WPF was barely mentioned at all, I wouldn’t be at all surprised to see WPF repositioned as “Silverlight for the desktop” come next year’s MIX. For now, though, the announcement will do a lot to bring existing .NET developers into the Silverlight fold, and that is a good thing for Microsoft.

Obviously, as a Ruby fan, I’m curious to hear more about the IronRuby announcement. Too soon to say how good the compatibility story is, but Microsoft did a good job on IronPython so lets hope they do just as well with IronRuby. There is a session tomorrow that will talk more about it and I’m definitely going to attend.

And now on to the open source panel after the keynote. In a word, it sucked. The panel members were all way too deferential and circumspect in their comments. Miguel de Izaca of Novell said he was excited to do a version of Silverlight based on Mono but wasn’t announcing anything. All participants (except for the Microsoft fanboy on the panel from Subsonic) were pretty unhappy with the fact that Microsoft didn’t have a Linux story for Silverlight. The Microsoft guy’s response was pretty definitive: there are no plans to open source Silverlight, and we’ll support additional platforms over time based on business drivers. I did think there was a good discussion of the issues with IE not supporting web standards, but again the response from Microsoft was non-commital. Not one word on Microsoft’s anti-Linux patent FUD, not one word on the whole OOXML fiasco, etc. Overall the session was a waste of time. Too bad – I would have liked to see Microsoft really do something here to make things more open when they had such a good pulpit in the MIX conference. Of course, as an Adobe employee, the fact that they have no response to the open sourcing of Flex has to be seen as good news.

Finally, the best part of going to these conferences is meeting people face to face, both old friends and people you’ve never met before. I saw Jeff Atwood in the morning and he gave me a Coding Horror sticker for my new notebook. I met Scott Hanselman in the afternoon at the open source panel. Two of my favorite bloggers in the Microsoft community, neither of whom I’d met in person before. I’ve also seen a number of former coworkers from Adobe and Microsoft.

Going back and rereading my post, I’m really glad I focused on the video issue. Otherwise I too might have gotten hit with the dreaded John Gruber “Jackass of the Week” title. I thought it worth noting that Jobs did in fact address the video DRM issue at the announcement, and his point of view won’t please the anti-DRM forces in the world. Here’s one choice quote from Jobs:

Video is pretty different from music right now because the video industry does not distribute 90 percent of their content DRM free. Never has. So I think they are in a pretty different situation, and I wouldn’t hold it to a parallel at all.

He is basically saying that video DRM is OK because people are used to from DVDs. Not a very compelling argument, as it completely ignores all the questions about fair use.

Finally for the conspiracy theorists out there, could the timing of the Apple/EMI announcement be related to this news that came out the same day and got buried? (Tip of the hat to Paul for sending me the link…)

That said, I find it interesting that no one is pointing out what Jobs didn’t say anything about: DRM and video. Last time I checked, Apple also sold TV shows, music videos, and films on iTunes Music Store, and they are all protected by FairPlay DRM. Why didn’t Jobs make the same courageous stand against DRM on video? Unfortunately, the answer isn’t very pretty: Apple doesn’t have anywhere near the same clout in the movie and TV business that it has in music, and has only signed film deals with two of the major studios as a result. Taking a stand against DRM for movies would anger the same people he is trying to make deals with. So much for courageous principles – the people who think his message was mostly about positioning in Europe are spot on.

[Update 2-6-2007] I just realized that I kind of cribbed the title from my post from Tim Bray, who posted an article that used it as a subhead only two weeks ago. Credit where credit is due… I’ve also added a digg link as an experiment, and corrected a few typos.

digg_url = ‘http://blogs.adobe.com/shebanation/2007/02/jobs_drm_elephant.html’;