All posts tagged ‘video’

File Under: Humor, Multimedia
Apr
9
2012

Video: The Show With Ze Frank Returns to the Web

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Humorist and web artist extraordinaire Ze Frank is returning to the internet airwaves with new episodes of The Show. The Show, which Frank wrote, produced and starred in, was a daily video show about, well, everything.

Although much-loved by sports racers everywhere, Frank stopped making The Show in 2007, after roughly a year’s worth of daily episodes. But now The Show is back. After a wildly successful Kickstarter campaign, Frank has released the first episode, “An Invocation for Beginnings.”

Not only are we happy to see The Show return, the first episode also serves as an inspiration for any who’s is trying to start something. As Frank puts it, “anyone who’s stuck between zero and one.” So enjoy the first episode of the new The Show and then get out there and make something awesome and “enjoy the cheese of accomplishment.”

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File Under: Programming, UI/UX, Web Basics
Mar
26
2012

Video: Progressive Enhancement 2.0

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A webpage doesn’t have to look the same in every browser. In fact, a webpage shouldn’t look the same in every browser, according to former Yahoo developer and JavaScript guru, Nicolas Zakas.

Zakas, who spent five years as the front-end tech lead for the Yahoo homepage, recently spoke at the March BayJax Meetup group about what he calls Progressive Enhancement 2.0 — offering users the best possible experience given the capabilities of their device.

Not the same experience, mind you, but the best possible experience. That means progressively enhancing sites according to the device’s (browser’s) capabilities.

Progressive enhancement is perhaps best summed up by the famous Mitch Hedburg quip, “an escalator can never break, it can only become stairs.” In other words, if you’re building websites well they never break, even if you look at them in Lynx. The site may not look the same in Lynx as it does in, say Chrome, it may not function as smoothly, but the core content is still there and can still serve as a stairway that gets people where they want to go even when the enhanced ease of the escalator is absent.

More practically, progressive enhancement means starting with the least capable devices — an older phone, Lynx running on Windows 95 — and then adding more sophisticated features based on screen size, bandwidth and so on.

Zakas also takes on the common assumption that a web “page” is analogous to the printed page. In fact Zakas argues the web is more like television, which has a similar separation of content and device. In that analogy old browsers are like black and white TVs. No one expects a black and white TV to play HD content, but everyone would be disappointed if you served black and white content to an HD TV. Hence the need for progressive enhancement.

If you’re well versed in the history of the web the beginning of the video may be a bit slow, but stick with it. Also be sure to watch the questions at the end where Zakas addresses how to progressively enhance more application-like web pages.

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File Under: Programming, UI/UX, Visual Design
Mar
2
2012

Connect With Your Creation Through a Real-Time Editor

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Inspired by Bret Victor's demo, Chris Granger's live editor helps connect you with what you're building.

Last month we pointed you to a video of Bret Victor’s talk, “Inventing on Principle.” Victor has worked on experimental UI concepts at Apple and also created the interactive data graphics for Al Gore’s book, Our Choice. In the talk Victor showed off a demo of a great real-time game editor that makes your existing coding tools look primitive at best.

Inspired by Victor’s presentation, developer Chris Granger has put together a similar live game editor in Clojurescript.

If you haven’t watched the video of Victor’s talk, you should start there, but the basic idea behind his real-time editor is to make your code more closely connected to what it creates, in this case a simple game. Granger’s take on the idea is similar — all changes you make to the code are reflected immediately in the running game. You change a line of code and the game immediately changes right with it. Here’s Granger’s video demonstrating the editor:

As Granger writes on his blog, “essentially I learned that Victor was right — there’s unquestionable value in connecting yourself with your creation.”

Granger’s demo code is available on GitHub and there’s a .jar file available for download if you’d just like to play with the demo.

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File Under: Programming, Software, UI/UX, Visual Design
Feb
15
2012

Video: Inventing on Principle

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We just had a moment similar to the time we first saw content-aware scaling in action, but this time it’s even better — we’ve seen the future of programming tools and it looks awesome.

Check out the video above of Bret Victor‘s recent talk, “Inventing on Principle.” Victor has worked on experimental UI concepts at Apple and also created the interactive data graphics for Al Gore’s book, Our Choice. The video above of Victor’s keynote at the Canadian University Software Engineering Conference, captures a wonderful talk on living your life based on principles, but for many developers what’s most arresting are the software development tools demoed.

Do your current tools suddenly feel incredibly outdated? Perhaps you thought you were using a well-tuned coding machine but suddenly realize you’re really just hitting two stones together? Thought so. Sadly, the apps demoed in the video aren’t available. That’s all right, though; it just means someone needs to build them. Be sure to let us know if you do.

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File Under: Browsers, HTML5, Multimedia
Sep
16
2011

Metro-style Internet Explorer 10 Ditches Flash, Plugins

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Windows 8 will have two versions of Internet Explorer 10: a conventional browser that lives on the legacy desktop, and a new Metro-style, touch-friendly browser that lives in the Metro world. The second of these, the Metro browser, will not support any plugins. Whether Flash, Silverlight, or some custom business app, sites that need plugins will only be accessible in the non-touch, desktop-based browser.

Should one ever come across a page that needs a plugin, the Metro browser has a button to go to that page within the desktop browser. This yanks you out of the Metro experience and places you on the traditional desktop.

The rationale is a familiar one: plugin-based content shortens battery life, and comes with security, reliability, and privacy problems. Sites that currently depend on the capabilities provided by Flash or Silverlight should switch to HTML5.

Microsoft has been vigorously promoting HTML5 for the last year and a half as the best way of providing rich interactivity on the Web. HTML5 potentially has reach far beyond that of Flash, since it can target both conventional browsers and closed ecosystems (such as iOS) alike. However, until now, Microsoft’s messaging has been tempered somewhat: use HTML5 when you can, but if you can’t—if you need support for DRM-protected media streaming, for example—then it’s reasonable to switch to an alternative, plugin-based technology.

With Windows 8, however, those reasonable decisions to use Flash or Silverlight will now be heavily penalized. Technically, there’s nothing wrong with the desktop browser, of course; the rendering engine and performance will be identical between both Metro and desktop. But the experience will be substantially inferior. The desktop browser isn’t designed for touch inputs, meaning that users will either have to switch to a mouse and keyboard, or fumble around with an interface that wasn’t built for fingers. The switch to the desktop browser also appears to discard things like back button history and current page state.

This puts the Metro browser in a peculiar position. Microsoft has positioned tablets as merely a different kind of PC. That, the company argues, affords capabilities and features not possible on iPad-style devices. But PCs have browser plugins—more generally, they have the ability to use the right technology for the job. If Metro doesn’t include that flexibility, that could be seen as diminishing the “PCness” of the platform.

HTML5 still isn’t a total replacement for plugin technologies, either. The gap is certainly narrowing: Web Sockets, Web Workers, built-in support for webcams and microphones, and more, are all coming to HTML5 browsers (or are available already), and these features will obviate the need for plugins for many applications. But certain corners are likely to remain; DRM-protected video, for example, might forever be impossible in HTML5, and while many people find DRM distasteful, many broadcasters feel they have little choice but to use it.

The solution to this conundrum on the iOS platform has been the app: companies like Netflix and the BBC have applications to watch video on these devices. The result is that in the desire to push an open, plugin-free Web, companies are being forced to migrate away from the Web entirely. Silverlight developers, at least, will have an easy migration path available to them: the new Metro development environment, used for producing native Metro applications, borrows heavily from Silverlight, and making the switch from an in-browser plugin-based application to a standalone Metro application should be relatively easier. Flash developers will have to wait to see what tools Adobe delivers.

HTML5 design and developer tools also remain weak, though this situation is improving with the creation of products like Adobe Edge.

With Microsoft’s promotion of HTML5, and the precedent set by iOS, the decision to get rid of plugins in the Metro browser is perhaps unsurprising. But it’s not clear that this will truly help Windows 8; the awkward user experience penalizes users who, for no fault of their own, need to use plugins, and detracts from Windows 8′s PC claims. A switch to a more HTML5-powered Web will happen regardless—does Microsoft really need to force the issue like this?

This article originally appeared on Ars Technica, Wired’s sister site for in-depth technology news.

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