Creative nerds of the internet have been abuzz for the last few days after the release of The Wilderness Downtown. It’s a half video clip, half HTML5 experiment for Arcade Fire’s song, We Used To Wait (link to bad YouTube bootleg)

It’s gotten an interesting response. Mostly, people that have bought into the hype of HTML5 love it and tout it as another reason why Flash is dying. However, others aren’t as impressed.

I for one, think it’s pretty great, but I don’t think it has anything to do with HTML5 or the lack of flash

It’s just the right amount of “interactive”
Halfway through the piece it asks you to write a letter to your younger self, and the interface is fun and playful and most importantly totally intuitive. This small amount of emotion and playful engagement keeps you hooked and helps you remember the experience

The use of multiple windows
This is an old trick, but still a great one. Since early JavaScript we’ve been able to do this, but the way it’s used here is pitch perfect. This is mostly because the overall experience is passive and you’re just watching. There’s a good reason why we can’t use this in ads, but I think its underused enough that its still memorable for most people when they see it in this kind of movie watching context.

The art direction is great
Not “change the world” great, or even D&AD award winning great, but defiantly “highlighted in a good portfolio” great. The grading on the video combines well with the sketchy style of the illustration. The small amount of 3d is tastefully handled if a little low resolution. Even the slight treatment to the Google maps and street-view images is great.

It makes me think of home
I ran it using my actual childhood home address, and the gimmick totally worked on my. I became that runner. I imagined myself going for a run near my old home and flashing back to my childhood. This may not be as effective for you as it was for me, and I suspect mileage may vary based on how long you lived in one home or how good the Google coverage is in that area.

The song is great
As with all music video clips, the star is the song and this is a damn great song. In fact, I love the album. You should go get it. Go on. I’ll wait.

It’s effective
I’ve been listening to the album all day, and recommending it to people. I even wrote a blog post about it.

Yes, a lot of this could have been done with flash, possibly even better. But as a creative its not the technology that impresses me, it’s the idea. Something we need to remind ourselves of continuously as the HTML5/Flash war continues.

webqem‘s ColdFusion and Flex trainer – Andrew Muller (sitting second from left), has made a guest appearance on the first episode of Adobe Refresh TV. In the episode, Andrew, and the panel, discussed the recently released public beta’s of Flash Catalyst, Flash Builder 4 and ColdFusion 9. And talked about the impact of these tools on the designer-developer workflow and discuss the improved Flex Framework and ColdFusion 9 languages. They also showcased local sites and applications built for the Australian market.

You can watch the recording here. Adobe Refresh TV will be screening on a regular basis covering news, reviews & tutorials.

It not just the iPhone that will be benefit from this: Google Android, Palm WebOS, Microsoft Windows Mobile, Nokia’s Symbian OS, and RIM with their Blackberry OS, will also be able to run a connect meeting from their phones.

For more information, visit the Connect Pro User Group, where there is also is a really good tutorial and a cool interactive demo.

Good news from the Adobe MAX conference – Adobe is now closer than ever to running Flash on the Apple iPhone. At Adobe MAX, the company’s worldwide developer conference, Adobe announced that the new Flash Professional CS5 software will enable developers the ability to create applications for the iPhone and iPod Touch. The new functionality opens iPhone development to millions of designers and developers who currently use Adobe’s popular Flash authoring tools. Adobe already has some examples of Flash applications available on the Adobe Labs site.

Flash is an integral part of many webqem projects, so we are very excited to hear this news. However, we are still holding out to witness a Connect Meeting on our iPhones – we hear that Adobe is not far off, so let us wait in anticipation!

October eSeminars Design for Beginners topics:

• Getting started with CSS 1st Oct

• How to create tabbed menus and AJAX controls in Dreamweaver 8th Oct

• Flash for Beginners 22nd Oct

• Getting started with Illustrator 29th Oct

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Google Wave is in its early days and it will be some months before it is available to the general public, however Google knows that in order to drive adoption of Wave once it is released it will need the support of third-party developers. With this in mind, Google have built a set of APIs in order allow Wave to be extended.

To help introduce Australian developers to the APIs, Google held a Wave API Developer Day at the Sydney Google office on 19 June 2009, which I attended. The day involved learning about the available APIs and then working with them to build something cool to show off at the end of the day. There was last minute “audience favourite” voting added, and I was pleasantly surprised to find that my demo, the Napkin Gadget was voted the favourite!

The Napkin Gadget is an implementation of the idea of a quick sketch on the back of a napkin. With the Napkin Gadget you can do quick freeform sketches in a Wave. The Napkin Gadget is an Adobe Flash based Gadget, implemented using Flex – the only example of a Flash Gadget on the night!

The Gadget has been open sourced at Google Code, and as part of the informal “prize” it is currently the Featured Sample on the Google Wave API Samples Gallery.

An example of the Napkin Gadget embedded in a wave

This is considered a major blow for Microsoft, whose Silverlight was used by NBC to stream Olympics content in 2008. MLB had previously been one of the most high profile Silverlight customers.

MLB.com streams live every Major League spring training, regular season and postseason game, via subscription, with over 1.5 million total subscribers since its debut on Opening Day 2003. Since that time, fans have accessed more than 1.8 billion streams of live and on-demand multimedia offerings on MLB.com, representing nearly 200 million hours of participation.

Adobe’s Flash Player is by far the largest video platform, installed on more than 98 percent of web-connected devices, while Silverlight is installed on about 25 percent.
The MLB two-year deal will see Adobe powering the MLB.tv live streaming service as well as its highlight and library video clips. MLB and Adobe will also work on rich Internet applications, providing content and features outside of the Web browser.

“Flash provides a TV-like experience. You turn it on and it works,” said Bob Bowman, president and CEO of MLB Advanced Media. “We want it to be flexible so we can add features…and it’s got to be scalable. We are the largest server of live entertainment in the country. Whether we are serving 20,000 for one game or 250,000 for another game, it’s got to be scalable over periods of time like nothing else.”

CCTV needed a solution that supported a large-scale, highly flexible, robust balancing network of high concurrent streaming media. Partnering with Adobe allowed them to deliver a compelling consistent Web 2.0 user experience, such as a 3D TV wall and seamless integration of viewing with live chat functions. The architecture involved a multi-city node origin/edge distribution mechanism.

During the games there were over 832 million visits, with over 46.6 million on-demand video playbacks delivered via Flash Media Server technology, with the maximum concurrent users of live chat room reaching 90,000 and over 10,000 video clips, including whole matches, highlights, extra new and interviews.

Read more about CCTV and FMS

As part of that commitment, Rob and Chris attended the WIPA (Web Industry Professionals Association) Accessibility 2.0 Seminar in Sydney on 12 November, to discover the latest news about accessibility.

The seminar covered three main areas:

1. Moving from WCAG 1.0 to WCAG 2.0
2. Preparing accessible Flash
3. Preparing accessible PDFs

WCAG stands for Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, which a recommendations from W3C, the World Wide Web Consortium, for making web content accessible to people with disabilities. This covers physical, cognitive and technical disabilities.

The WCAG 1.0 Recommendations, have been in effect since May 1999 and needed revision to address changes in technology and future flexibility. WCAG 2.0 is in “Proposed Recommendation” status, and considered highly likely to be approved as a “Recommendation” by the end of the year.

The Disability Discrimination Act (DDA) (1992) says it is unlawful to discriminate against a person because of their disability. The Australian Human Rights Commission notes that provision of information and online services through the Web is covered by the DDA. The Australian Government Information Management Office has a guide to minimum websites standards for accessibility.

The old WCAG 1.0 Priority Levels of 1,2,3 are to be replaced with WCAG 2.0 Levels of Conformance (A, AA and AAA). These levels are not directly equivalent. Conformance is determined by fully meeting a level, for full pages, complete processes, accessibility supported, not interfering with the ability to access the rest of the page.

WCAG 1.0 was more concerned with specific technologies, such as HTML and CSS. To cater for future technologies, WCAG 2.0 requirements are technology neutral, phrased in terms of content being supported by assistive technology (such as screen readers) and having available accessible user agents, such as browsers or plugins.

Whereas previously PDF documents, Flash and Javascript were considered inaccessible, WCAG 2.0 no longer automatically precludes used of these. Not all Javascript, Flash and PDF documents are accessible, but components can be made accessible, or deemed accessibility supported.

Improved use of labels, tags, titles, summaries and captions can assist in making forms, tables and buttons more accessible. Skip links are encouraged, for navigation. Guidelines for making audio and video accessible are included.

Accessible PDF documents
This was a presentation by Andrew Downie, who is totally blind and uses screen readers to access computers. He amazed everyone with the speed with which he listens to screen readers. His primary recommendations for people creating PDF documents were:

• Focus on document structure
• Use structured headings rather than font sizes (in both Word Documents and PDFs)
• Provide alternative text for images
• Provide document and table summaries
• Provide table of contents
• Use bookmarks
• Use tagging
• Not to use text boxes
• The importance of reading order, and how to correct it

Accessible Flash
Simon Reid from Adobe gave a presentation on creating accessible Flash. Since CS3, accessibility features have been a feature, and it has improved in the new CS4 release.
He emphasised features such as:

• Using accessible components
• Enabling control over reading order, tabbing order
• Giving each item a unique instance name

Flash accessibility features unfortunately are not turned on by default, when installing Flash. Editing the config.xml file can turn them on.

For more details we were referred to the Adobe Flash accessibility design guidelines
Simon said he was happy to come to our workplaces to demonstrate the use of Flash accessible components.
Adobe also has a page on PDF accessibility guidelines.

1. Google does not execute some types of JavaScript. So if your web page loads a Flash file via JavaScript, Google may not be aware of that Flash file, in which case it will not be indexed.
2. Google does not currently attach content from external resources that are loaded by your Flash files. If your Flash file loads an HTML file, an XML file, another SWF file, etc., Google will separately index that resource, but it will not yet be considered to be part of the content in your Flash file.
3. There are difficulties with Flash content written in bidirectional languages, for example Hebrew or Arabic languages.

Discussions

Feedback from various forums and blogs includes concerns that:

• Flash developers will get even lazier about SEO;- Some Flash sites may see large improvements in their rankings;
• Accessibility will suffer, as designers no longer bother to replace Flash navigation with alternatives;
• Black Hat SEO techniques will flourish, as they hide text in Flash files and create tiny 1 pixel Flash files loaded with links and keywords;
• SEOs will be unable to analyse why a site ranks highly, when the site uses a Flash file containing content that they cannot see;
• What Google will do about duplicate content in HTML sites created for non-Flash users;
• Whether SWFObject , the most commonly used Javascript technique for loading Flash files, will be affected by Google’s inability to execute some types of Javacript;
• Whether alternate text used with SWFObject will be considered duplicate content by Google;
• Whether XML files loaded by Flash, will be excluded, or treated separately, as per the Google limitation above;
• Whether SWF files loaded by small SWF preloaders, will be excluded, or treated separately, as per the Google limitation above;
• How will Google prioritise the content of Flash files. Will it just be one large file of data?
• What about Microsoft and Silverlight?

Making Use of the Announcements

Use deep linking to create direct links to specific parts/states of the Flash application.You can use Adobe Flex components that will update the location bar of a browser window to generate URLs at runtime. The objective is for the search landing page to be exactly at the page/state in the Flash File where the content was found. (A similar flaw with PDF files, where you land at the start of the document.) List the deeplinks in your sitemap XML file.At this stage there are more questions than answers. It will be interesting to see how the rankings for various websites change as the new algorithm rolls out.

This version also includes hardware acceleration for better performance on multi-core machines.

A HD gallery has been launched to help demonstrate the capabilities of the new version of the player, it’s well worth checking out at http://www.adobe.com/products/hdvideo/hdgallery/

Flash Player 8 has better video compression algorithms (codecs), which are being utilised in this update to Connect for improved quality screen sharing during live meetings.

Another benefit is that Flash video files (FLVs) compressed with the Flash 8 codec are now better performers when served up as content from the Adobe Acrobat Connect server. Connect can stream FLV files, detecting user connection speeds and optimising performance on the fly, with better quality visuals coming as a result of the codecs used for Flash 8.

While there are a number of applications available for compressing video into the FLV format the majority, especially the freeware and shareware variety, are still only using Flash 7 compression. Adobe ship a Flash Video Encoder with Flash CS3.