Scott Morgan

When I think back and reflect on the last 10 years of my life, a lot has changed, or has it? I have been involved with the internet in some way or another since the early to mid 90’s, essentially the beginning of when it began to take off for the general public. My first question is, has the Internet changed in the last 10 years. Of course it has! But wait, the Internet itself hasn’t changed. It is the same setup, however, how we use it and the technology to access it has changed (thank god). I remember my first time connecting to something outside of my computer, a network, sort of. It was a BBS, and I connected to it via my 900 baud modem connected to my Commodore 64 computer. On the BBS I could download games, leave messages for other users, ask questions, request games or software. Sound familiar? This was in the 80s!! File sharing as we know it today wasn’t even a twinkle in Shawn Fanning’s eye. I also thought by looking up a company in the phone book, I could dial their regular phone line and hack into their systems. I called banks, I called car companies, even my school, sorry to all those receptionists who had to listen to the soothing sounds of connections attempts. Ok, enough reminiscing. What’s my point.

The Internet came out of nowhere, and literally changed the world as we knew it. Sure it took a little while to take off, but what new medium doesn’t. When TV was invented in the 50’s, not everyone had a television set, there were only a few shows. It probably wasn’t until the 70s when most families had TVs in their living rooms. In 15 years (or so), the public facing Internet has gone from a couple sites to more than a billion users online everyday. There is a generation growing up right now who will never know what it is like without email or SMS messaging. What it was like to write a letter and wait weeks for a response.

OK, enough history, what are you getting at Scott? Good question, but in my incoherent rambling I do have a point. The Internet has changed society, no question about it. If you think otherwise shake that thing above your shoulders. It was only 8 or so years ago when you actually had to go into a bank to do your banking. If you were single and looking for a partner, you actually had to get off your ass and meet someone at a club or on a party line phone service. It was only 10-12 years ago if you wanted to research a car before you bought it you had to go into a dealership, grab some brochures, and low and behold, talk to a sales person in a bad sports jacket. What else could we possibly do with this ancient (I use the term loosely) technology? A better question, what can’t we do?

I have been in this industry long enough to experience some extreme ups and some very painful downs. And right now, we are in a very lucrative up. However, it’s different this time. The industry is smarter. The crash at the turn of the millennium, the dot bomb if you will, was partly because everyone was jumping on the Internet bandwagon. Only problem was they didn’t understand what they were jumping on. They were building web sites because it was the cool thing to do, because the second you had a web site you were global and you were going to be instantly rich. Some people did become instantly rich. And they went instantly bankrupt just as fast.

This time around it’s not only about global reach. It’s not about having a web site because you need to, unfortunately there are still a lot of companies that have web sites because they feel they have to. This time around it is about us, the users, it’s about community. It’s about sharing, about user contribution. It’s about access to information, wherever, and whenever you want. We used to access the internet from our big clunky beige computers. Some still do. But now we are accessing it from cell phones, from refrigerators, from cars, from air planes, everywhere. Take a look around, user contribution is driving the internet. You don’t have to be a geek in the basement anymore to have online presence. In the past 10 years, the internet has done a complete 360. Ok, I know what you’re thinking. No shit Sherlock!

I’m a developer, we all know that; if you don’t you do now. More importantly, I am a Rich Internet Application Developer. And my point is? My point is this. The internet started out with text, a few graphics, and form fields. HTML hasn’t changed that much, sure there is CSS now, JavaScript, server side options out the wazoo, but the basic ingredients are still, text, graphics, and forms. What I am getting at, is we all want the next big idea, the next billion dollar idea.

I am not going to tell you how to come up with the next billion dollar idea, if I could, I wouldn’t be writing this. But what I do want to share, and it may piss some people off, but that’s ok. The way we use the internet has changed; user contribution is as popular as olives in a martini bar. However, the interfaces users are presented with have not changed all that much from the early days of the Internet (of course there are a ton of exceptions to this statement). This is not a Flash Developer bashing HTML, and saying every site should be Flash. Anyone who thinks every site should be Flash should turn off their computer now, find the busiest street in your area and see if you are as tall as those dashed lines in between the lanes.

Ok, so how I see it, we are part of the A.D.D. Generation, as sad as it is. In order to get users to contribute to our billion dollar idea site, we need to keep them interested and engaged. Not always an easy task. Sure with great design, a standard text/graphic/form site could do the trick. And lots do. But I think things have to be kicked up a notch. Great design is only part of a user experience equation. And unfortunately, a lot of times great design takes away from the experience because it takes forever to load the page. I am not sure of the actual numbers but I have read you have 4 seconds before you will lose your user. 4 seconds! That is an awfully short amount of time. How many forms have you submitted where nothing happens and you sit there waiting, watching your browser load animation play, wondering if anything is going to happen? Then you click the submit button again thinking that something must of went wrong. Before you know it you see 4 postings from you in your favorite blog. Oops. Now with a true rich internet application, the second the user clicks the submit button, you could present the user with a status, a load bar, a bird pecking at a slab of slate Flintstone style. Something, anything to indicate to the user what is going on.

I hate the whole Web 2.0 term, but I am going to use it right now to get my point across. We are in the so called Web 2.0 era, so why the hell are we still using web 1.0 interfaces?? It feels like technology is moving full steam ahead, ideas are grand, bandwidth is spreading and speeding up, however, we are afraid to try anything new. The whole purpose of the internet is changing, so it is about time we change how we design and develop for it. We have to start thinking more about user experience, about how the application is going to be used. You can’t use the same application on a cell phone and a pc with a 24 inch monitor. We have the ability to determine what the user is on, so we should be enhancing the user experience for these devices. Making our presentation layers truly scalable to whatever method the user is using to access your application. Devices can share logic, they can share data, but please don’t allow them to share presentation.

It’s a very exciting time to be a developer, especially a RIA developer. There is a definite shortage out there, which for us developers isn’t a bad thing, economics 101, Supply and Demand. Lack of developers == higher wages and better opportunities for us all. With any labor shortage comes below standard hiring and this is what could ruin it for the rest of us. Hopefully this rambling will mean something to someone. I guess this is what drinking a few beers does to my already scattered mind.

Here is the cliff notes version of this rant. The direction of the Internet is changing. Technology is changing daily. However, I don’t see a huge shift in user experience design on the internet. The internet of yesterday is not the same as the internet of tomorrow. The internet is available everywhere and user experience design and development should be accommodating for this or else you are going to get left in the dust if you haven’t already. Sorry if this doesn’t make any sense, it sure does in my head and that’s all that matters right now

Tags: beer, design, history, internet

Now that I think about this, it only makes sense. But it was a bit of a piss off when I first discovered this. Actually a co-worker of mine noticed it.

With Flash 8 you can finally use gradient masks. The only way to pull it off however is to use code. Here is an example:

myClip_mc.cacheAsBitmap = true;
myMask_mc.cacheAsBitmap = true;
myClip_mc.setMask(myMask_mc);

Pretty straight forward. In the example, myMask_mc would be a gradient shape drawn inside a movieclip.
In 32 bit this works great. Anything less you will see no masking, just your drawn mask shape or some other oddities like the mask flickering on and off.

Not 100% confirmed, but I’ve heard it from a few sources. This is only an issue on a PC. Gradient masks work fine on macs at all colour depths.

In order to get around this issue we are going to grab the colour depth with JavaScript (screen.colorDepth) and pass the value into the flash movie. Unfortunatly you can’t detect the colour depth with ActionScript, it is not a property of System.Capabilities. Any who, if the colour depth is lower than 32 bit I will draw/attach a hard edged mask. If the users system is running at 32 bit colour I will draw/attach a soft edged gradient masks.

At the time of writing this I haven’t implement this fix. But if you stay tuned to http://codex.ashesandsnow.org you will see it in action. For now change your colour depth settings and check out how *great* the site looks at 16 bit. Blah.

Added June 9, 2006

After thinking about this a bit more, the same effect could be accomplished by using blend modes and the bitmapData class. You could load an image into a movieclip, clone (draw method of the bitmap data class) the clip or attachBitmap if your image is in your library. Use the layer blendmode on the bitmap data, attach a gradient mask in the same movieclip that is holding the image (obviously on a higher depth) directly over the image and use the alpha blendmode on the attached gradient mask. This will accomplish the same effect and will work on systems lower than 32 bit colour.

import flash.display.BitmapData;

bmp = BitmapData.loadBitmap("imageFile");
this.createEmptyMovieClip('holder_mc', this.getNextHighestDepth());
holder_mc.blendMode = 'layer';
holder_mc.attachBitmap(bmp, holder_mc.getNextHighestDepth());
var mask = holder_mc.attachMovie('maskClip', 'mask_mc', holder_mc.getNextHighestDepth());
mask.blendMode = 'alpha';

This implementation would work on the site I mentioned above, however blend modes are very processor intensive and the gradient masks we are using are very large, therefore we are still going to use the solution I described above.

Happy masking!!

Tags: 16 bit colors, 256 colors, design, Flash, gradient, masks, thousands of colors