Shebanator

For many years, we’ve been hearing about how Tivo and Premium Cable TV were killing broadcast TV (though honestly the “invention” of reality TV didn’t help either). But lately I’ve been noticing a sea change among early adopters which may mean that the end is near for both broadcast TV and the cable/satellite systems. That change is a switch to using services like Netflix and hardware like the AppleTV to switch to a completely different model of watching TV.

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?

Posted in Dynamic Media
Tags: appletv, cable, netflix, satellite, tv

Wow. This is an unbelievable response from Microsoft support :

The 2008 version of Powerpoint does not correctly support several of our 3rd-party fonts, including Agfa’s “Sacker” font, all of which worked just fine in Powerpoint 2004 for the Mac. When selected in the font menu Powerpoint 2008 displays them with a substitute/generic font that looks nothing like the selected font. This occurs without any warning or dialog box that a substitution has occurred.

Upon calling Redmond for help, Microsoft’s Mac Tech Support laughably told me after emailing them a bunch of sample files and enduring several long periods on hold that “the engineers writing the program decided no 3rd-party fonts were being supported in Office 2008 and that I could only use Microsoft fonts.” I find this hard to believe and wonder if this was just something he said to placate me. I hope that the issue is resolved in a forthcoming bug fix release so that we will not have to continue to keep Powerpoint 2004 around indefinitely.

We have the same problem here at Adobe: the Myriad Pro font used in our standard corporate template looks terrible in PowerPoint 2008 but looked fine in PowerPoint 2004.

That is NOT Myriad Pro! Good thing I use Keynote…

Posted in Technology
Tags: arrogance, compatibility, fonts, mac, Microsoft, powerpoint

I’ve got a couple of jobs open I want to advertise. I mentioned them a couple of weeks ago when trying (and failing miserably, I might add) to lure Yahoo! engineers into the fold, but the reqs are officially open now and I want to start banging the drum, since this is a great chance to work with Flex and AIR on the client side and with a distributed web service on the server side. Buzzword, SHARE, and Brio are just the first taste of the products we’re working on, with much more cool stuff to come.

Here are the two jobs available:

• A Web Services QE engineer with extensive experience proving the scalability of web applications and web service APIs. This position is in San Francisco.
• A Flex UI engineer who has an evolved design aesthetic and wants to build killer web applications using Flex. Knowledge of Flex not required, but the ideal candidate will be able to show me at least one great user experience they built using Cocoa, WPF, AJAX, or similar. This position is in San Francisco or San Jose.

Our larger group also has five summer intern positions open: one for a QE automation developer, the others for Flex/Java/.NET developers working on our next generation hosted services platform. These positions are in Seattle, San Francisco (2), San Jose, and Newton.

If you are a kick ass developer, send me email (shebanow AT adobe.com) and tell me why you are the person I should be hiring. Adobe is an awesome company to work for, and the project is very cool.

[Update 29-02-2008: fixed job links to work better with the adobe jobs site, which behaves oddly the first time you click the old links. Thanks David!]

Posted in Administrative
Tags: flex, java, jobs

I love my current car, a 2000 BMW 528, but it has gone over the 90K mile mark and repairs are starting to get mighty expensive. So I decided to “fix” the problem by buying myself a new car, a BMW 335 Convertible. I bought it via European Delivery and am picking it up in late April in Munich at the fancy new BMW Welt:

Given that I’ve never spent any time in Germany (not counting layovers at the Frankfurt airport), I thought I’d post my planned route and see if people have comments on places to stay, things to see, etc. Here are some of my personal musts for the trip:

• drive from Munich to Fussen on the Romantic Road
• drive on the Autobahn
• spend a day in Strasbourg, France on family business
• drink some good wine
• take lots of great pictures

Click the JPEG map below to see my planned route on google maps (I’d embed the map directly but WordPress.com won’t allow it, darn it!):

Posted in Personal
Tags: bmw, travel, vacation

Seems like every time I turn around I see someone trying to recruit away Yahoo! engineers. I hate being left out!

I’m hiring two great engineers to work on the leading edge of our next generation of web applications:

• A QE engineer with extensive experience proving the scalability of web applications and web service APIs. This position is in San Francisco.
• An application UI engineer who has an evolved design aesthetic and wants to build killer web applications using Flex. Knowledge of Flex not required, but the ideal candidate will be able to show me at least one great user experience they built using Cocoa, WPF, AJAX, or similar. This position is in San Francisco or San Jose.

If you fit this mold, send me email (shebanow AT adobe.com) and tell me why you are the person I should be hiring. Adobe is an awesome company to work for, and the project is very cool and very high visibility within the company. You don’t actually have to work for Yahoo!

Posted in SHARE
Tags: jobs flex

Rafe Needleman has written a great article about RIAs being the future of the internet. Couldn’t agree more: the Buzzword app is a perfect example of the kind of richness that you just can’t get in an HTML/AJAX web app, and it shows a degree of innovation that desktop products like Microsoft Office and Sun StarOffice can’t even begin to approach.  I loved this quote:

I’m not seeing nearly the same creativity today in traditional software that I am seeing on Flash and in browser-based apps. Flash-based apps are finally beginning to compete head-on with standard software. Many new Flash apps aren’t just different. They’re better.

Of course, he then goes on to say that even “desktop media apps” like Photoshop aren’t safe from this trend. While I think that is true up to a point, its going to be a long time before web-based RIAs like Photoshop Express can really compete, since the files being manipulated get quite large and download/upload times become an issue on even the fastest broadband connections. That goes even more so for high definition video.

This is an incredibly exciting time to be working on Flash-based RIAs.

Posted in Rich Internet Applications
Tags: Flsh Flex RIA AJAX

This is all over the place. Apple has dropped the price $100 and improved the UI. Curious to see whether pro photographers think it is now better than Lightroom or not. Here’s John Gruber’s succinct summary over on Daring Fireball:

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.

Posted in Dynamic Media
Tags: lightroom aperture photography