journal

So if you haven’t noticed mtv.com has re-engineered its whole website. They’ve jumped back down to a lo-fi, html based site. Why did they do it? The number one complaint was that people started complaining that Flash was too big and slow to load. Well that was a given. Its very easy for someone to make that mistake with Flash. I’ll fully admit that I have too. And I’d like to give a quick warning to all new Flash developers out their to limit how much cool stuff you do. Cause you can really go nuts with Flash. Stop yourself. Redesign it. Simpler is always better for the web. Mtv.com put a huge video, 4 ads, 4 other images and a large menu system on its Flash front page which probably killed 56k modems. And they’re out there. So watch your stats closely and design around that.

So what was the 2nd biggest mistake ever? Well the first from my generation was to stop playing music videos. Being big music fan, I personally just stopped watching MTV all together. But the move to lo-fi was probably the second biggest mistake. Rich Internet Apps are the way to go especially for MTV, they needed to redesign the application for speed but still be able to provide the great broadband experience. Its possible to have the best of both worlds. There are people out there using Flash with no “slow to load” complaints. So watch how you design your sites!

What’s more interesting about the ‘lack of design’ subject is that just this morning Ryan Stewart is talking about the lack of designers in this space.  So I’m thinking to myself…Wow, companies are going to start throwing money at these SilverLight/Flex projects and the developers are gonna go nuts and all of these projects are gonna piss off their users.  Maybe there should be some type of RIA design guide we should be following?

Too Funny

Found out about this cool project extending Flex/Apollo called the Artemis Project by EffectiveUI. Essentially what they’re doing is creating libraries you can include in your Flex/Apollo apps that provide additional functionality. So far they have…

• Screenshot Library - Take screenshots of the whole screen, not just the Flash Player
• Generic JDBC Connection Library - Call SQL directly from Flex and receive result set Objects
• XSTL Library - Perform XSL Transformation on Flex XML Objects

Ars Technica has a nice guide about high end printers for photographers.

After Effects & Premiere CS3 Pre-Release on Adobe Labs

So I’ve got another prediction, WPF is going to be rebranded as Silver … and run on the mac (like my second prediction). I’m on a roll!!!

Funny….I don’t see a boom…

I just had to point out the simplictiy and brilliance of this splash page.

Microsoft has rebranded WPF/e as Silverlight. Also note that their is going to be a secret about WPF announced at Microsoft’s MIX conference. Personally I think that they’ll announce an Apollo like runtime where WPF applications can run on the mac and linux.