YouTube – the death of Flash

Following on from my post about the iPad & while I’ve time to write …

There are a number of posts around at the moment talking about the ‘death of flash‘ many that have come out in the past 48 hours (like this one) talk about how Apple will be the death of Flash.

Apple’s closed ecosystem will be the death of flash

They base their thinking around the fact that Apple’s mobile Safari browser doesn’t support the flash plugin. This is true and it would seem Apple leveraged this fact to give a big ‘finger’ to Adobe on the public stage with the launch of the iPad.

As Daring Fireball pointed out, “If you think Apple didn’t expect that, you’re nuts” (link). Apple new it, I’d almost go as far to say as they planned it.

However Apple, in my opinion are NOT going to be the death of Flash.

Sidenote: Adobe haven’t helped themselves here – some of us have been calling for massive improvements in Flash on the OSX platform for years. Flash is not as good on OSX as it is on Windows, AIR is terrible on OSX – why should Apple willingly inflict this experience onto mobile users?

Youtube, the saviour and executioner of Adobe Flash

If you ask anyone what was the number one driver in the uptake of Flash, YouTube has to be very high on their list. Sure for those of us who started with Flash back in the day (I started working with it when it was called Future Splash – before Macromedia bought it) it was probably something to do with animations, the ability to show an idea, or maybe to play games? There was a lot of thinking for a while around Flash being used for form data capture to improve User Experience, but really, think about it, what really propelled Flash to the dizzy hight’s of success? The answer has to be video. Yes there is more to Flash than video, but really what is it that people are concerned about?

I want my rich media content – or – I want my online videos to play on my device.

Video really became the saviour and champion of Flash. Sure Flash is great for gaming, it can be good for simplifying user experience (sometimes) but really, it triumphs in the area of Video delivery. It is the KING for this and is used by everyone from YouTube to NYTimes. YouTube wouldn’t be what it is today without Flash

However, while people are saying Apple is the death of flash, they don’t realise that YouTube (and Vimeo) have just nailed a significant nail in the coffin of Flash this week. Both video sites announced the roll out of HTML5 inline video support & YouTube.

The shift to HTML5 signals some interesting changes in the life of the internet:

• YouTube has the potential to be a game changer in the browser market (Internet Explorer doesn’t support HTML5 video)
• YouTube has the potential to be a game changer in the rich media market (no more dependency on Flash)

Think for a moment. When was the last time you engaged with any Flash based content in your browser? I’m going to hazard a guess that content you interacted with was video based.  You had to wait for the controls to load, you had to wait for the video to buffer and then you had to play it.

What if you didn’t need too? What if the video was just there, and it played natively?

This will be the death of Flash – if we no longer need Flash for our rich media (video) content, then .. what is the future of Flash?

What about games & rich content?

I hear you. I’m not necessarily saying that this shift to HTML5 is going to kill flash overnight. Hell, it’s going to take time – YouTube are not about to instantly switch from Flash to HTML5 and loose the hundreds of millions of Internet Explorer visitors – but you can bet they will PUSH Google Chrome to these people and set too, migrating them away from Internet Explorer.

I also hear you saying “Flash is more than video” – and yes, trust me, I’ve been in the Flash community long enough to know this. I experimented with very early interactions between Flash and databases, I built visually rich, content rich web solutions for the likes of Toyota, and many other large companies. However it no longer makes sense to do that today. AJAX gives you much greater user experience than Flash, an experience that is more natural and fluid. HTML5 builds on this to give the browser back the power it was intended to have all along.

Flash is an incredible platform, and it will continue to be that, for games. But I’m really struggling to see any real future for Flash outside of “in browser gaming”. Even Adobe’s own AIR platform provides the ability to build in HTML and AJAX … why would you build in Flash?

What about rich content & graphs? Google Analytics is probably a great example of Flash used well, however, show me almost ANYTHING in Google Analytics that the guru’s at Google couldn’t do with HTML5 and AJAX? They use Flash simply because it works in the current Internet Explorer versions (5, 6, 8 etc), the same as it does in Firefox, Safari or Chrome. You do realise Google could simply say “To get the best from Analytics, you should use Google Chrome” and once again, we hear the death null of a nail in Flash’s coffin (not to mention a big wakeup call to Internet Explorer – 9 btw: is supposed to be very good!).

Seriously, can you really think of a reason to use Flash – outside of a Game in the browser? Maybe the odd speciality thing like TinyChat or Adobe Connect … okay, I’ll give you that.

Games in the browser on mobile? Are you really going to play a game in the browser on your mobile phone? No, you are going to download the game and play it as the developer intended. Besides, any Flash developer worth their salt now knows that you can render Flash content to native iPhone and iPad apps – they’ll get a much better user experience by delivering their game to the device, than to the browser.

Summary

Sure, Apple’s closed ecosystem has it’s draw backs, but it’s not Apple’s closed ecosystem, nor Mobile Safari’s lack of Flash (am I right in thinking that ONLY Andriod and SkyFire mobile browsers support flash, none of the rest do) that will be the death of Flash.

The iPad and iPhone won’t kill Flash, infact the ability to build in Flash and deliver rich content to the iPad and iPhone could continue to keep Flash developers in money & work for a long time yet.

If you want games on your iPad or iPhone, you’ll download them
If you want voice chat, or Video chat, you’ll get an app that does it smoothly and simply

No, I think that it’s Youtube that will be the death of Flash, at least the death of Flash as we know it. Flash will be relegated out of prime time and off into the murky world of “browser plugins” and “game platforms” – the return & rise of the “click here to install flash” link is nigh.

So long Flash, and thanks for all the fish

Cavet

I was for a long time Flash developer & champion, Studiowhiz used to be a large Flash focused community. I have been involved in the past with Beta testing Macromedia & Adobe products. I’ve always said, and still maintain, Flash has a place in the web, as a solution to a need. YouTube is a perfect example, Flash for media, html for content. This is the game that is changing, it always changes, Flash needs to change if it is to survive.

HTML5, GeoLocation and Google

UPDATED ZIP file of code now available here

It seems now it’s all the rage to start leveraging some of the new HTML5 spec in your designs, especially now that Firefox 3.5, Chrome & Safari on iPhone 3.0 all support many of the new HTML5 tags.

I started looking into geolocation for html5 recently and most of the blog posts I found relate to grabbing the geolocation from the browser (which by the way is the Lat & Long) and popping it on the map using Google or Yahoo maps.

However the reality is that while that’s a nice novel factor, you often don’t want a Lat & Long, what you want is an area, where is this user & what features are around them. I personally wanted to avoid Google Maps like the plague as their terms & conditions are nasty when it comes to corporate applications.

So, I set about trying to find out how I could get the area where a user is, without using Google Maps API. And it turns out it’s not really all that hard. Due to privacy reasons I can’t show you the actual application where this is used, but I can give you some code and a sample file and you can knock yourself out having fun with it. Here is a demo of what we are doing

The idea:
1) Does the users browser support geolocation?
2) Get the geoocation using either navigator.geolocation.getCurrentPosition or navigator.geolocation.watchPosition
3) Hand the Lat & Long off to a reverse geocode service
4) Get a result back allowing me to say “You are in: (area)”

The code
Is really pretty straight forward for the geolocation data from the browser. First up, check to see if the browser supports geolocation and if so then ask the browser for the geolocation.

  if (navigator.geolocation) {
            // YES
            // snapshot of position:
            navigator.geolocation.getCurrentPosition(renderPosition, renderError);
            // updating position:
            // navigator.geolocation.watchPosition(renderPosition, renderError);
        } else {
            // NO
            // PUT ERROR MESSAGE HERE - OR SIMPLY DO NOTHING
        }
    }

You’ll see above that I have both getCurrentPosition and watchPosition, just uncomment the one you want. Note that watchPosition will continually poll the browser for updated positions, if you are feeding that to Google Maps, apparently it’s against their API rules to send continually updating data (you need to check that for yourself).

At this point we now have a Lat & Long (note: you also get other data around accuracy, altitude etc – more on that in the attached zip file) … but I don’t want that, I want an area. So I use a WebService from GeoNames to do the reverse lookup. This is a nice service that can return XML or JSON for you, and includes a bunch of details about that area.

Now this is where I got caught out. I use JQuery to handle my javascript to get the updated location and write it to my page. Of course javascript is limited in what it can do from one domain to another. A lovely friend of mine kindly pointed out that I’d need some form of proxy to grab the data. He threw together a very simple PHP one for me. So at this point you need jQuery and PHP to get the data.

The PHP file looks like – note you could use readfile(), however many servers have that disabled so I wrote up a simple function using CURL to get the file:

< ?php if ($_GET['type'] == 'JSON') {
    CURL_file_get_contents('http://ws.geonames.org/findNearbyPlaceNameJSON?lat='.$_GET['lat'].'&lng='.$_GET['lon']);
} 

if ($_GET['type'] == 'XML') {
    CURL_file_get_contents('http://ws.geonames.org/findNearbyPlaceName?lat='.$_GET['lat'].'&lng='.$_GET['lon']);
}

function CURL_file_get_contents( $url ) {
           $open_file = curl_init();
             // Tell CURL the url to open.
           curl_setopt($open_file, CURLOPT_URL, $url);
            // Tell CURL to return the file in a string.
           curl_setopt($open_file, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
            // Execute the CURL command and retrun the page in a string.
          $return_var = curl_exec($open_file);
          curl_close($open_file);
           echo $return_var;
} ?>

Right, so now we just need some javascript to tie it all together (oh it’s assumed you have jQuery installed).

//jQuery to render the output
        function renderPosition(position) {

            if (!window.count) window.count = 0;
            var urlJSON ='';

            count ++;
            // var urlJSON = 'http://ws.geonames.org/findNearbyPlaceNameJSON?lat=-36.9104718&lng=174.9133483';
            var urlJSON = 'geonames.php?type=JSON&lat='+position.coords.latitude+'&lon='+position.coords.longitude;
            var urlXML  = 'geonames.php?type=XML&lat=' +position.coords.latitude+'&lon='+position.coords.longitude;

            $('#d').html( 'Latitude: ' + position.coords.latitude + '
'+ 'Longitude: ' + position.coords.longitude + '
' + 'Accuracy: ' + position.coords.accuracy + '
'+ 'Update number: ' + count + '
'+ 'Altitude: ' + position.coords.altitude + '
'+ 'Altitude accuracy: ' + position.coords.altitudeAccuracy + '
'+ 'Heading: ' + position.coords.heading + '
'+ 'Speed:' + position.coords.speed + '
');
            // now get the XML reverse geo data
            $.getJSON(urlJSON, function(json) {

                /* Parse JSON objects */
                $.each(json.geonames,function(i,item) {
                    // get the name - which is the suburb - and update the page
                    // alert('name: ' + item.name);
                    $('#jsonResults').html(You live in: ' + item.name );
                });

            });
        }

        function renderError() {
            $('#georesults').html('Err houston, we have a problem');
        }

This is kind of overkill, but it shows you all the data we get back from the geolocation service within HTML5.

Now you have results, and as you can see from $(‘#jsonResults’).html(‘You live in: ‘ + item.name); I simply output the name element from the JSON back to the html.

From here you can do anything with this, write it into a form, mimic iPhone apps etc. I’ve not tried this, but someone did tell me that this also works fine on Android.

Download the zip file and have a look or take a look at the demo (note you need Firefox 3.5, mobile Safari etc)

Links

• Download the ZIP file
• MaxHeapSize geolocation on the map demo
• Veerasundar’s look into HTML5 GeoLocation

To video or not to video?

I only need to cast my mind back a day or two in my web history to remember the web the way it was. Way back in 1994 I tried to start a music sharing website for christian music – I even had some chats with big radio stations and such like, but the web then just wasn’t ready.

Fast forward a few years (dang is it 15 years already?) and the web is a fundamentally different place and rich media has taken on a whole new meaning.

Tonight on Twitter @CoryOBrien sent out the following tweet

Safari 4 has a video intro similar to the vid that plays the first time you start your Mac. Slick! http://www.apple.com/safari/welcome/

I took a look (I’ll pause here while those of you with Safari 4 go take a look at the link) and thought, you know what … yeah that’s kinda neat. But then it dawned on me, something wasn’t quite right. So I took a look a little deeper and discovered it wasn’t actually a video, but rather a collection of media and some very subtle use of HTML5 and CSS3.

But more on that in a second.

Cory then pointed me to an article he’d written about the Honda Let it Shine commercial on Vimeo – which if you haven’t seen you should take a look on Vimeo, go on, we’ll wait for you ….. Cory talks in his post about how this advert breaks past the traditional video box to take ownership of the screen to really draw the user in.

We started to wonder how they both did what they did, which might be better and which if either we might use.

So how do they do it?

I was simply going to explore the Safari 4 ‘video’ when Cory suggested a comparison of the two techniques. Now I’d love to spend a few hours and dig around work up some examples etc – but someone else can do that, I’m sure someone really smart will write some tutorial about it too. Me however, I was up at 4:30am this morning getting ready for a code release, so my brain blurry good it not is ….. STILL, I did want to explore a couple of things.

Fundamentally these two systems use the same idea – that is Javascript to place content into an existing or create a new HTML element. What they do with those elements is … well where the magic lies.

Vimeo & Honda

Lets look at this one first as it’s shall we say, the more traditional of the two. The way they do this is they’ve allowed the Vimeo player to have an extra attribute set ‘allowScriptAccess’ is set to always. This means their video controller can now interact with javascript on the page.

So when you click the PLAY button, it doesn’t play, instead it triggers a bit of Javascript that writes into the page a new SWF object that overlays the entire page. This object is full screen, set to scale and has some trickery around it to make sure it lines up with the Vimeo page.

Combine the line up magic and some nice masking and transparency in the now full screen (not full page, if you scroll down far enough the effect falls off), and theillusion to be complete – making it look like a set of different movies working together when it’s simply one overlay. For example, the “avatar” icon suddenly is a live and is an animated version of the insight logo – the background is alive with animation. No not really it’s one big animation, it’s just got some masking and animated transparency allowing you to see (or not) the HTML underneath.

Safari 4

This one is a little more clever, and only works in Safari 4. Actually technically speaking it probably could work in Firefox 3.5 and Opera – although you’d have to hack the JS a little. There is nothing (that I can see) that is particularly Safari 4 specific.

Okay in a nut shell this is what they do: They have an HTML page, with some empty DIV tags, they have an AUDIO tag and a VIDEO tag – these are both new to HTML5. The audio is an MP4 that plays in the browser and the video is an MOV that again just plays in the browser – no plugins needed and controllable by CSS. The Audio is hidden by the CSS – yet the audio still plays. The video (a small compass with the needle moving) has no controllers either.

There is some Javascript that sets up a CANPLAY function – used to test if this is Safari 4 a WELCOME MESSAGE function and a couple of other things – nothing overly complex really – other than some language stuff. Without looking too deep the WELCOME MESSAGE bit swaps out the welcome image based on your language settings.

The CSS is where it gets a bit funky. They make use of some really nice CSS features and this really shows the POWER of where the web is going. The ENTIRE animation is done with CSS, including the timings. Okay that’s a lie, the JS does a little of the timing work to ensure it’s all loaded before starting (I think) .. but CSS pretty much does it all.

Sure they have chosen to use CSS such as -webkit-animation-delay, however according to the working draft for CSS3 the code animation-delay css tag should work. (When I’m awake – I’ll work up some examples)

Which would I use

Right now I’d have to say – reluctantly – that if I was building something like this I’d have to go down the JS & Flash path. Why? Well because we have a lovely browser called IE – the bane of the interwebs. We have older browsers etc etc. However having said that, I’m currently building a site and am using CSS3 in it a fair bit.

Which is better?

The Safari 4 model is better! It’s faster to load, faster to build, it requires NO plugins, it’s … elegant. It’s great from an SEO point of view, your content is still your content in an open HTML format, your JS is light and your CSS simply does what CSS does – tells the browser put this here, now, do this with it.

Digging Deeper

Want to take a look for yourself try these:

• Safari 4 ‘video’ Javascript
• Safari 4 CSS
• Safari 4 mp4 audio
• Safari 4 Compass mov
• Safari 4 flare background
• Safari 4 Apple icon

With this collection of media – just jpg’s png’s and mp4’s Apple web designers have built what looks to be a high end video with HTML5 and CSS3

Summary

The reality is most of this is nothing new, and yet at the same time it’s brand new. Finally with HTML5 and CSS3 we have browsers that remove the barrier to content, we don’t need to rely on 3rd party stuff. Flash can do what it was designed to do – be a PART of the web, not be the web. Although having just said that – is this the beginning of the end for Flash & Silverlight? I mean why would you even bother to invest time and effort into developing these rich media “videos” when a few isolated elements whipped up in Photoshop with some CSS can do such rich content? Ajax, HTML5 & CSS3 could well spell the END of an area for Flash & Silverlight

My last comment – I love that CSS & the browser can do all the animation, timing and scaling not just of graphics but also of Video. If you haven’t seen it yet, grab Firefox 3.5 Preview and check this link out demoing some of the video ability in Firefox 3.5. This will show you some of the true power of a REAL modern web browser.

Links

» Safari 4 welcome ‘video’ – only works in Safari 4
» Honda Insight advert on Vimeo – click play to see effect
» Cory O’Brien looks at the future of adverts
» Download the latest Safari 4
» Download the latest Firefox 3.5 beta

32+ amazing free fonts for designers

Fonts & typefaces are great fun, and they can transition from being simply copy to becoming art themselves. Here is a collection of over 32 fonts to bring some fun to your design. [...]

Mr K’s guide to CakePHP

I’m playing around a bit with CakePHP again today … and for some reason a few things REALLY did my head in. Like REALLY did my head in.

Stupid really because about a year ago I built a full web solution in CakePHP with users, ACL, AUTH and all that stuff – and deployed it. I guess that’s what you get however when you don’t develop full time. You loose things.

So, I started again – grabbing a copy of CakePHP and hitting the ground. Here’s a few things I found useful along the way:

1. forget all about ACL, ACO and ARO’s – you don’t need them for user login/logout
2. run through cakePHP’s own auth tutorial (all you need is a User table in your database)
3. the AUTH component will do all your heavy lifting (eg: password encryption etc) provided you have a USERNAME and PASSWORD – if however you instead use EMAIL and PASSWORD, it wont. And it won’t give you any decent errors. It’ll just do your head in!! However you can quickly and easily fix this – read how to quickly change the AUTH variables here – just tell AUTH that it’s username is actually your email address field.
4. HTML helpers are fantastic, quickly rename a default form label using:
   echo $form->input(‘database.feild_name’, array(‘label’=>’Use_this_name’));

I’ve also seen 101 different ways to output the data for the currently logged in user. From completely re-writing your Controllers and Models to … well all sorts of complicated ways. But I’m telling you there is a FAR simpler way to do it.

AUTH – it’s your friend, it really is!

Check if a user is logged in from your layout file:
- if( $session->check(‘Auth.User.id’) )

Write our a user name from your layout file:
- $session->read(‘Auth.User.username’)

Or if you are in your Controller simply use:
- $this->Auth->user(‘id’)
- $this->Auth->user(‘username’) // insert what ever database field you want

I knew there had to be simple ways to do this stuff!! Do you have any really simple, handy CakePHP tips you want to share?

23 amazing modern clean fonts

Fonts have come a long way, today’s designers are looking more and more for fonts that are full of life, with subtleties of space and shape. Fonts are as much about what’s not there as what is.

This collection celebrates the clean modern fonts, that give a striking elegance to any page, with bold lines, white space and clean curves. What’s better – all these fonts are free (NOTE: Ambrosia is a trial font sorry) [...]

17 incredible nature photos

Nature, it’s all around us all the time and yet we are often moving through life at such a pace we completely and utterly miss what’s around us. From the city the mountains, garden to meadow here is a collection of truly incredible nature photos.

Simply click the image to go through to the full image

Sleeping Beauty Sunrise

Cape Town Ocean Side

Nature Morte

Cuillin

Boraginaceae

Hold your breath while I bring out the light

Sit and Relax

Snow, misty and sunlight

Nature’s Secret

Portrait of hornet

Nature

Duck

WaterFall + Maple Leaf

Sweet Nature

False Widow

When Nature Makes you dream

montagna

12 Stunning Flowing Fonts

I love fonts, I love typography & if there was one area of design I wish I could improve on it’d be typography. What I love about fonts is their ability to at one time be both informative in language and yet artistic in layout. Fonts give words the ability to become art.

Here are a collection of stunning flowing fonts.

Fantastic Pete

• Designed by: Mighty Pete
• Download: Fantastic Pete

Jellyka, Saint-Andrew’s Queen

• Designed by: Jellyka Nerevan
• Download: Jellyka, Saint Andrew’s Queen

Mutlu Ornamental

• Designed by: Gazoz
• Download: Mutlu Ornamental

Sleepy Hollow

• Designed by: Filmhimme
• Download: Sleepy Hollow

Champagne

• Designed by: unknown
• Download: Champagne

Brock Script

• Designed by: Dieter Steffmann
• Download: Brock Script

Chopin Script

• Designed by: Dieter Steffmann
• Download: Chopin Script

Spring Light

• Designed by:
• Download: Spring Light

Roadsterism

• Designed by: DigitalDreamDesign
• Download: Roadsterism

Freebooter Script

• Designed by: Apostrophic Lab
• Download: Freebooter Script

Adine Kirnberg

• Designed by: unkown
• Download: Adine Kirnberg

Lainie Day

• Designed by: unkown
• Download: Lainie Day

Why Facebook sucks

You might think that I’m not qualified to write a post about why I think Facebook sucks – and rewind two weeks and you’d be right. Sure I’d created some account many moons ago for me to dabble with, but after rumors of CIA involvement and other “conspiracies” I decided that was enough for me.

Recently however I have once again joined up, as more and more of my friends were online I began to be missing out on happenings in their lives. Facebook had become their means of primary communication. Photos were no longer added to Flickr or Picasa accounts – they were simply added to Facebook. Without a Facebook account I was left out.

So after much thinking and discussing with  my wife we decided to plunge into the world of Facebook and our lives haven’t been the same since – and NOT in all the ways you think.

Facebook: we aim to annoy

I’m coming into Facebook with over 14 years experience in online user interfaces (read: web design & development). I’m utterly amazed at how Facebook has met and overcome many hurdles facing technology – getting those that are non-techy to use their site … esp considering the Facebook interface is a great big pile of steaming crap.

How on earth do the Grandmas & Grandpas that are now flocking to Facebook ever keep up, let alone understand what their grandkids are up too?  My wife and I are pretty computer and web savvy – and we struggle to get our heads around the mess that is Facebook.

Why do I see my friends, friends comments?

This question was put to me by my wife after day one with Facebook. She’d added her sister to her friends list and suddenly her “home page” was full of comments to her sister that were completely unrelated to her. All my wife saw was a page full of utter crap. I see since we joined Facebook have now added 3 little buttons allowing you to fine tune this a little – but it’s still a mess.

Why do I get email notifications (again you can turn this off but when you login your notification box tells you) telling me that someone who is friends of my friend, has commented on my friends photo. I could understand if that friend was a mutual friend of mine too … but 9 times out of 10 they are not.

Okay … wooo up for a second.

I really do like Facebook

Facebook has been very good for me, as I’ve reconnected with some very good friends of mine who I’ve not talked too (in depth) for a good number of years. I’ve caught up with the amazing growth of their kids, seen a mates photos of a recent trip to Ireland and much more … but I swear I’ve become so frustrated with the idosy…crap that Facebook puts you through.

Reasons I hate Facebook

• URL has serious flaws
  Not sure if you noticed but Facebook often puts a # in the url, and simply appends page structures to this. For example I recently was on a fan page, then navigated to my profile, Facebook simply added # to the end of the fan page and then took me to my profile. As I navigated around I notice Facebook simply adds more # and pages to the URL.
  This has bad consequences when you try to add a new app, as the app assumes a certain URL structure & I frequently have apps failing to install.
• Uploading Video PI
  Today at work I looked into adding some video to a fan page created for one of the sites we manage. Sounds simple enough. I head to the video page – btw: we host all our videos with Vimeo. I was expecting to be able to select either UPLOAD or EMBED. Nope, Facebook forces you to upload any video to their servers. Why? Why can’t we simply pass a Vimeo or YouTube URL and have Facebook put this into the video page – it’s not that hard!
• Uploading Video PII
  During the upload process we ran into countless issues. The video upload progress bar actually only worked once out of the 8 videos we uploaded. When it did work it meant the Save Info button would kill the upload and drop you out to the video page. Clicking back to video took you to a page saying “You’ve uploaded no videos” – when we already had 3 videos uploaded.
  After each video we had to go back to the fan page and start the process again – otherwise the video wouldn’t upload.
• Flickr, Twitter, Wordpress … Integration
  Why should I have to rely one some 3rd party application to integrate Facebook with my existing online media? I should be able to go to my Photos tab and select UPLOAD or EMBED (or LINK) and be able to simply copy and paste a Flickr URL & have Facebook show the image as if it had been uploaded to Facebook.
  Likewise Twitter should be a heck of a lot easier to integrate than it is. Again there should be a native integration allowing Twitter & Facebook to be closer tied together. Afterall “status” on Facebook is really just like your twitter “What are you doing”
• Twitter & Pages
  I have a number of Twitter accounts – one is a personal account that I have linked to Facebook so my tweets can update my status. I have another account that is .. well another account. I’ve set up a Facebook page for this & I’d love to have that Twitter account (which has 1 post a day) to update the status of this page. Nope, sorry can’t do it – already have a Twitter account associated to my profile and Facebook/Twitter app can not handle more than one account at once – how stupid?
• Link integration
  There are a number of online bookmarking (or link saving) solutions. The most popular of course is Delicious. Great news, there is a Delicious Facebook app (which doesn’t really seem to work). This app will publish your links to your BOXES tab. Well this is just dumb. Why can’t Facebook itself allow me to tell it to fetch my LINKS from my Delicious account (or other) and populate them into my LINKS tab.

Summary

I could go on and on I’m sure. Facebook as we all know is huge & my little rant is unlikely to change anything. However I do feel that Facebook could build into their system far greater native support for many of the existing tools that are already used. You can only expect developers to do so much with your API – many of these apps are so full of crappy adverts they are useless.

Facebook expect us as developers to build solutions, share our bandwidth so that Facebook users can leverage their existing content OR force users to upload into multiple locations so that those with Facebook accounts and those without can share the media.

I think Facebook should take a leaf out of Wordpress’s books – make things simpler – not more complex. Wordpress makes adding media so simple – Facebook makes adding media .. too difficult.

Facebook – it is what it is, you love it or hate it – but I’ll keep using it.

A change in development

It seems, or would seem that there is a shift beginning in the development community. How many times have you read a story about some great online success where the actual idea has come from someone with almost no coding experience or ability? These people are often forced to find someone else to create the solution for them, costing a reasonable chunk of money up front.

Frameworks have increasingly lowered that entry barrier to full application (web suite) development. You can now grab a framework that does a huge chunk of the work for you. We’ve all seen the videos for building a blog in 10 minutes but even these require some development. If you want to build something reasonably full on you need to know code, or at the very minimum learn some HTML and CSS.

Now a new change is coming, introduced today at “Future of Web Apps” in Miami, 280Atlas is a solution that allows you rapidly develop web based applications with little to no code required. It’s a beautifully designed system that runs on top of the Cappuccino web framework, and gives you point and click control over many aspects of your application development.

Sure, if you want to get technical and start doing more complex things, then yes, you are still going to need code, but for those who want to throw together a proof of concept, build and interface that consumes existing data, create mash-ups, etc, 280Atlas is going to take the entry barrier and smash it to bits.

Take a look at the video below that shows 208Atlas in use. The video walks through the basic premise and then in the last handful of minutes, builds a fully functioning RSS reader – requiring 0 code, 0 html and 0 css skills.

I am going to guess that 280Atlas will allow you (if not at launch then very soon after) to render your project as an Adobe Air (or Mozilla Prisim or …) type desktop application, heck possibly even as a Web Snippet for pseudo iPhone and Android applications.

The next step in the future of web interface, web application development is just around the corner, and I think it’s called 280Atlas – note, it’s still hidden, not in beta yet!

Top 5 Avatar Generators

Avatars are everywhere now, from your Twitter profile pic, to Skype, Gravatar to Facebook. If you don’t have one you want one, if you have one no doubt you like to update it every now and then.

I recently had to recreate my avatar for my Twitter profile (oo00_Mr_K_00oo), and I whipped open Google to try and find a generator I had used before – well do you think I could find it?

So I spent a bit of time this morning hunting around for what I thought were the best Avatar Generators I could find.

With out further ado, allow me to present the top 5 Avatar Generators (in no particular order):

1) The Simpsionizer

Starting out with everyones favourite, the Simpsons. The Simpsionizer asks you to upload a picture of yourself from which the site will then create a new version of you so you look like a member of the Simpsons Cast. It’s fun but I didn’t have any pics handy so didn’t really try it.

It does look heavily sponsored by Burger King, so you have to look past all the BK stuff branded al over it.

» Visit Simpsonizeme to create your avatar

2) Face your Manga

If you don’t know what Manga is, then this probably isn’t the avatar generator for you. This is the generator I often use as the range of options to add to your character is extensive enough to allow you to craft a face that kinda looks like you.

Easy to use, this system has the ability to create boy or girl avatars, and it has a fun range of backgrounds for your avatar to rest against.

Once complete the site will email the PNG file avatar to you so you can use it on your many profiles. This generator supports multiple languages

» Visit Face your Manga to create your avatar

3) Noble Avatar

I’ve included this in here for no other reason other than it’s not flash based. Most of the online character creators use Flash – it’s a good tool for this sort of thing.

Noble Avatar uses a Java Applet, meaning you have to download it, but hey, if you don’t have Flash then this could be the way to go.

The characters look good, and it seems to be pretty powerful and being a Java Applet it should run in any browser.

» Visit NobleAvatar to create your avatar

4) South Park

Okay, we couldn’t include the Simpsons without including that other irreverent cartoon, South Park.

This Avatar creator is really well created with a lot of care and attention going into it. Very simple to use, you can craft an avatar based one and existing South Park character. You start off with one of their characters, complete with face, and then begin to customise.

You’ll have heaps of fun with this one, and end up with a full character for use in your profiles.

» Visit South Park to create your avatar

5) Mess Dude

Mess Dude is a load of fun, it had me smiling the whole time I was playing with it, I think it’s just that goofy as look on your characters face as you work with him.

This generator is one of my favourites, with heaps of options to craft the perfect character for you. Change so many aspects from eyes to tattoos even give your character things to hold onto and places to visit – like London.

» Visit Mess Dude to create your avatar

So there you have it, 5 really great avatar generators, but you know what. There is just one more I’d like to share with you.

BONUS: Unique

Unique is one of those sites that makes you go “Oh Wow”. Created by the guys at Raster Boy Unique is so well created, with such incredible attention to detail, all aspects of this generator have had some TLC, and it shows.

Create a boy, or girl, massive range of options from eyes to hats, and more you’ll never run out of options to add to your character. You can even add these cute little pets to your character – hmm I think I’m going to have to make a new one soon!

I HIGHLY recommend you check out Unique for your next avatar – hell, Unique is a reason to go and CHANGE your avatar.

» Visit Unique to create your avatar

Free 2.0GB DropBox accounts

Carrying on in the trend of giving out some beta invites I was this morning granted some invites for dropbox. DropBox is an online storage system that integrates with your desktop.

I have installed it on my Mac, and It’s simply shows up as an extra directory for me. With 2.0 GB of space and a great drag ‘n’ drop interface DropBox couldn’t be easier to use.

Your files are put into a secure & private file store – however  you can through the DropBox meu get a public URL for files you store in your Public folder.

There is a very clean web interface for DropBox that allows you access to your files from anywhere, and you can connect more than one computer to any given account.

So, anyhoo – I have a handfull of intvites to give away – so if you are looking for simple online solution for file storage – with 2.0GB free (no word yet on upgrades or expansion packs), drop me a note in the comments and I’ll hook you up.

BrightKite Invites – you keen?

Following on in the tradition of giving out invites. I was recently invited to Brightkite – a new online service, sort of in the same vein as Twitter. While Twitter is all about what are you doing, Brightkite is about where are you.

Brightkite has the ability of course to integrate with Twitter, and you’ll notice now that my Twitter feed has the occasional update about where I”m at.

Anyhoo, I have a few invites to give away – so if you would like to join up, you can – just drop me a note in the comments.

Now a little brightkite tip – for those of you outside the USA, who want to add some local places – for me this morning it was adding the fav. coffee shop – it’s easy to do. In the Places search you simply enter

1 Something Street, My Town, My Country [Business.or.place name]

If you want to follow me:
» Follow Studiowhiz on Twitter
» Follow Studiowhiz on Brightkite

Free Photoshop eBook

Those crazy folks over at SitePoint.com have released a new Photoshop book, a book I’ve heard positive things about.

Okay you say, that’s nothing new, Sitepoint relese books often. Ah yes they do, but this one is FREE … as in nadda, zip, nothing.

So why don’t you head over to sitepoint.com & download your copy of the Photoshop Anthology today – oh yeah, it’s a LIMITED offer.

Evernote invites …

Evernote is an interesting concept. You pass notes, images etc to Evernote and their very clever system will store them, helping you to remember everything and anything.

The great thing about Evernote, is the fact that it can read and index your images. I’ll give you an example. I had a brochure that I needed to store digitaly but it was a printed copy. So I simply hold it up to my iSight and snap a pic – not very good, as the page was curved.

I sent the image to Evernote and badda bing they index it. What do I mean by index? I mean they scan the image and find words in it. Now 2 weeks later I’m looking for this document, I simply type in some keywords I remember from the brochure and Evernote brings the photo forward for me.

Invites:
Currently in beta only Evernote is not easy to get into. Matt sent a Tweet out this morning asking for an invite. I’d forgotten I had any. Anyhoo, I have a handful of invites for Evernote left, so drop me a note in the comments if you’d like one.

PS:
Yes I’m now on twitter.