Google’s in the News Again

Google’s in the news again.

This time for combining all of its privacy policies for various services into a single policy that will apply across its brands. So the privacy policy for you Tube will be the same one that covers your Gmail account. While I can see how this can give the opportunity for Google to provide a more seamless service and new options, there are some problems associated with this idea.

Some include the concept that if Google is using your information to alter your search results to ‘fit you’, you might never stumble across things unknown. If all I’m served up is what i want to hear, i potentially won’t get much variety as I explore the web, or come across as many viewpoints that differ from my own. The other is the well known concept that having one company control and access such a large amount of your personal information is just bad sense. Yet another is advertising. If  Google is using this information to better target people with advertising, I’d like them to just come out and say it clearly. “We will use this information to target ads to you and make a profit so we can keep offering you services”. Better yet, how about giving us a piece of the profit for engaging in this grand information collection experiment? I think eventually some brave company will tell it like it is, and I suspect I know why companies don’t have the vision to be honest and up front about this today.

Credit where credit’s due

In general I like Google. The company has definitely paved the way for better services like Google earth and Gmail, and smartly bought out some of the good ones like You Tube and kept them going. This isn’t a witch hunt. This is about even companies with the best intentions sometimes going down paths that may have bumps in them. We as consumers need to be savvy about our responsibilities and rights. And while I immensly appreciate all that Google is doing for the web, even Google employees can benefit from a critical look at what they’re doing. After all, they don’t have All The Answers any more than you or I do. We have to figure this out together.

When news of the new privacy policy broke, it added to a few concerns that I’d developed over the past few years. One major one happened when Google disabled my AdSense account. I’d had AdSense for a few years on my websites. I’d installed the code and hadn’t thought much about it, getting a few payments here and there that didn’t add up to much. Last year Google suddenly disabled the account, rejected my appeal using their appeal form, and as policy refused to tell me why. Now, losing the AdSense was not a big deal for me since I didn’t rely on it.

What did bother me is that my account could be suspended with little recourse and no explanation. A quick search revealed that there are many people who have the same story. And for those who wonder, I’m no spammer or click frauder or off-shore tycoon -  just an artist who likes to make games and great designs.

Then last year stories began to surface about Google disabling peoples Google accounts who had not used their real name on Google plus. Frustrated after frustrated blogger wrote about the situation, and it re-affirmed my concerns about relying on something that can so quickly and unilaterally be taken away. You don’t miss it ’til it’s gone.

 

Problems Not Unique to Google

Just prior to the AdSense  cancellation, I had been getting ready to move my company emails to Gmail. The AdSense incident though made me realize the dangers of relying to much on a single company for your services. So i ditched my plans to go with Gmail for my company and went about my way. Then the other day, I was speaking to a friend who an open source version of Facebook would never succeed because Facebook does everything so well. I told him my theory: That yes, as long as Facebook respected everyone’s privacy and did not exploit their position, they will be number one. But i suspect based on world history that at some point they may exploit the wealth of knowledge they have accumulated as a private company. At that point, if it ever happens, an open source version will take on a new benefit that Facebook will not possess: the power to limit exploitation by virtue of belonging to all and not one company.  At that point we might begin to see a shift in what we desire out of our social media services and a change in what services we use.

Google Dashboard – Your Digital Identity Center

So, armed with a healthy does of paranoia (or is it just common sense?) I decide that it’s time to calmly at least assess my digital identity – see what’s out there and clean it up where I can. A great place to start is the Google dashboard: https://accounts.google.com/ServiceLogin?service=datasummary&passive=900&continue=https://www.google.com/dashboard/&followup=https://www.google.com/dashboard/

Google Dashboard offers you a birds eye view of your Google services and the information stored with them. I rarely surf the web signed into Google but I’ve noticed that some of my friends do. Take a look – you might be surprised at what you find. At the very least it’s great to have an overview of your information, and it’s  good sign that Google offers this service in the first place, so +1 for them.

What surprised me in Dashboard is the number of services I’ve used with Google over the years – Gmail, Youtube, Docs, Calendar and more. What stood out was my AdSense account. It’s still there, disabled and floating somewhere in digital limbo. “Great place to start” i thought. I’m going to delete my AdSense account since it’s no longer used. There are have been a few road block though:

Easier said than Done

So, how do I contact AdSense support?

I defy you to find a contact email on this page: http://support.google.com/adsense/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=9722

I eventually figured out that I needed to post my question on the forum (unless I am missing something). A simple email or form would have been nice, but it’s also nice to share the answers with people who might have the same question, so I posted it:

http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/AdSense/thread?tid=715f3bfa46e5d246&hl=en

I made sure to search the FAQ and Help first.

So far I have one answer: “I think they can’t be removed. They are kept in the Google directory forever. May be I am wrong.”.

I’ve asked if a Google Admin can verify that and will keep you posted. In the meantime, strike one for being able to easily delete one of my defunct services.

What has this taught me?

It’s a case of convenience versus control. It’s very simple to have one company control all of your data, unless something goes wrong. It’s like making a run to the corner store when you know the Grocery store has healthier, cheaper items just a bit farther away. So far we haven’t seen the Big One – a major blunder by a corporation holding our digital data, one so vast that it makes even the mainstream user avoid this companies services. But given the wealth of literature, novels, stories, predictions and history, I think it is bound to happen eventually. In the meantime, I’m going to keep examining my digital life bit by bit.

Our digital identities are new – they’ve only developed in the last 20 years or so, and we as a society don’t have a lot of experience dealing with them. I don’t think we need to run screaming for the hills from every digital service and profile request that comes our way. We just need to practice good new fashioned common sense when it comes to keeping track of our Digidentities, maybe spread out our services between different companies, embrace open source services when available, and as we go, learn from our mistakes.

I’ll keep you posted.

 

A quick update on Moti Voto, a slick corporate climber, sniffing his way up the social ladder in the sky high towers of Junx City. Here is the latest version, lovingly rendered by Geoff Carley.

 

 

When i set out to design a logotype (a logo consisting of letters only) for my Science Fiction world Junx City, i put together a list of requirements first. I had already created preliminary logos using the Typefaces Klavika and Neutra, but I hadn’t decided on one final logo. Since I was moving ahead with my new projects, I decided it was time to come up with a finalized logo for Junx City once and for all.

First I took a look at what I wanted from my logo and what I had achieved already. I stopped thinking about the metal texture and the styling of the logo for the time being. Once I created a solid logo in black and white, I could decide the styling afterwards. I wanted a logo that was modern so i knew I wanted to use a sans serif typeface, one without the flourishes and edges you’d see on many older typefaces. I wanted a bold typeface that looked sturdy, plain enough to be flexible in many different scenarios and easy to read from a distance. My first step was to try several different typefaces and see if anything jumped out at me.

Personally I like the font chooser at http://myfonts.com. After looking through many typefaces for inspiration i realized 2 things. 1, I wanted to use a very simple font as the base for the logo, rather than a wilder display font. And 2, i liked some of the details that the more varied fonts had and wanted to incorporate them into my design. With that in mind I noted the following:

1 – I liked the Klavika font as the base. Facebook uses a modified version of Klavika and I decided to take a similar route. Klavika gave me a solid base to start from, but on its own I found it too anemic and plain.
2 – I liked the shape of the ‘X’ here and found it very mechanical
3 – The division of this ‘X’ had a nice stencil feel to it
4 – I wanted to try something different with the ‘N’ like this

Using Klavika as the base, I made a few modifications quickly to get an idea of what I could achieve:

I choose to dd the slices on the X, the different X shape, and the new edge on the ‘T’. I also customized the letters so that they had even widths, something Klavika didn’t have but that I wanted here. I constructed the letters from scratch, paying careful attention to alignment, using grids and guides to help. I straightened out the edges of the ‘C’ to run parallel with the ‘I’, and very subtly rounded the corners. Klavika has sharp edges and I wanted a touch more friendliness:

Finally I had my logo base ready for the final touches:

I liked that it had more substance and sturdiness than my previous logos. And the customization made it uniquely mine. Next I carefully added in the elements of white trim and slices to the ‘X’ and the ‘T’. Although these are small details the add to the uniqueness, also the sliced ‘X’ gave me opportunities to use the center of the ‘X’ as a pipe, a very industrial element that fit right in with Junx City.

Finally I adjusted the spacing between letters to be more balanced and equal:

And here is the final product:

From here I can apply styling (rusted textures, metals, etc..) that will fit in with Junx City. But that’s a story for another post. In the meantime if you like this one, follow me on facebook – I appreciate the supoort:

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I thought it might interest some of you to see the process by which I create my characters for Junx City, my Sci Fi satire universe. Moti Voto is the owner of Bullsh!t – Junx City’s largest Public relations firm. If you have a problem, he can put a good spin on it. But originally Moti would go back and forth in my head between this job and others. What I knew most was that he was a high powered executive type with not much of a conscience. So when I created my First person shooter game ANDAGEL, I used Moti as the lead villain – Owner of Junx City’s pollution powerhouse CHEMICOY. For the game I knew a few details about his appearance. He had pale skin and dressed well. At that time and in game, the character looked like this:

Skip forward a few years and I decided that i was ready to have Moti Voto as a prime time character in Junx City. First I had to clarify who he was before he could be drawn. I knew he was a pill popping social climbing sneak with a high position at Bullsh!t. He liked good clothes, was extremely clever and disarming, and was from a race of genetically bland overlords I called the Yanta (named after my brothers middle name – although he’s nowhere near bland). Once I had this, I contacted artist Geoff Carley who had done other characters for me, and set to work. First I created an Idea Board that put together many of the concepts I had about Moti Voto in my head. That board looked like this:

I knew that the Yanta were gentically pure species that used dna from other species to fullfill what they were not born with. Toothpaste and general goop came to mind when I thought of how there bodies would be composed. Geoff took this and after some refinement we came up with a few versions:

Geoff captured so much of my vision. But the style was a bit threatening and angular for Junx City, which I had always seen as more satirical and toungue in cheek. The next version came much closer:

We were almost there. I added a few notes and sent back the sketch, mostly about taming his hair. I also wanted some sci fi additions to him. Moti Voto was also a bit sexier – he could disarm you with a smile, useful when climbing the corporate ladder. The third version nailed it:

The floating wine glass gave it the sci fi touch and the 3 fingers established him nicely as alien.

I’ll post an update when the final color version is ready. As you can see character creation is really about gathering your ideas and figuring out how to express them. It can take a few tries to really distill the ideas that are in your head. In Moti’s case, he’s a nasty creature and I can’t wait to formally introduce him to the rest of the cast in Junx City.

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FOLLOW ME:

Protpop Games (PLAY) : http://www.facebook.com/protopopgames
Poplogik Design (WORK) : http://www.facebook.com/poplogik

Adobe’s HTML5 editor has burst on the scene, carefully touted as a powerful complement to Flash by Adobe Fanfolks,  heralded as the end of Flash by everyone else. For the past several years, mobile developers have been encouraging clients to use HTML5 as a replacement for Flash wherever possible, and many of the new creative web projects have been made with HTML5. Ive downloaded Adobe’s Edge preview which focuses on animation. I’ve worked with Flash since version 3. What do I think? In a nutshell, Edge offers an exciting and refreshing approach to web animation that demonstrates incredible potential, once the kinks are ironed out.

After (annoyingly having to) logging in and downloading the Edge software, installation was a breeze. I also took a look at the samples that come with Edge. As soon as I saw the first one, a bouncy Edge logo scene created by a developer called Rain, I knew Flash had some serious competition. These are similar to Flash animations in the early days (anyone remember Gabocorp http://www.thefwa.com/flash10/gabo.html), and we all know how fast those developed into what we have today. It’s not a question of if but when folks – HTML5 as a powerful open spec WILL take over proprietary tech like Flash eventually.

What’s great off the bat about Edge is that it is filling a need in the market. An IDE for HTML5 is something that’s been asked for from the community for a while now (I’m not sure why they didn’t do this earlier, but I have my suspicions…). Everyone who has been creating HTML5 effects and interactivity has done so in the IDE of their choice – Dreamweaver, Notepad, etc….  Now we have a dedicated HTML5 tool becoming available. But I don’t want to pop out of my web program every time i want to add some effects or animation, I want to do it inside the IDE of my choice. So in that light, where does a separate dedicated IDE like Edge fit in? the only way to find out was to try it.

The interface is well done and clean. I’m not a fan of white text on dark backgrounds – I find it harder to read, even if it looks slick, and an intuitive option to change this would be welcome. Right off the bat I realized that it was very similar to embedding a flash movie inside a web page. You’re given a stage and you can set its size, instead of working on a sizeless full web page. Its HTML roots are visible and welcome – you can change the stage size using em units as well as pixels. And the standard CSS options for overflow (hidden, visible, etc) are available as well. It feels like you could easily go into the generated code and change things in a text editor if you had to. The whole thing feels lightweight. This will sound crazy to some but I suspect completely sane to anyone who has worked in depth with a computer – your nervous system almost integrates with any computer you use and when you are deep in code and testing, you can get a sense of where the program is pushing against you or struggling on its own. Here the sense is of working with the software not against it – Adobe is off to a good start.

So, what can you create? Adobe has stated that this version concentrates on animation, so that’s where i started. The timeline is prominently displayed, something many HTML editors tuck away and with good reason. They are rarely used to date, and a bit intimidating. Well, the time to be intimidated by HTML animations is apparently over, with this timeline displayed proudly, as if this were a video editor. It’s quite comforting in fact.

I tried something very simple. I drew a rounded rectangle on the stage. The property inspector  lit up with a ton of beautifully arranged options. Animation was as easy as dragging the scrubber to a new time and changing the box on the stage. That’s it! Tweening is automatic once you set keyframes, which you can do by clicking the keyframe button on the elements timeline. It’s very intuitive and I was easily able to tween the Stage background color, set simply by choosing interactively from a color palette. Basically it feels like working with a version of Flash that outputs to lightweight html. This is a very good thing. Adobe has effectively combined the Dreamweaver and Flash IDEs into something that makes sense.

Getting your work out of Edge is simple enough. There is a preview in browser option – again a sign that we are moving away from the closed ‘test movie’ proprietary player of Flash into more open waters. It’s easy to see that the browser IS the new ‘player’, and I suggest we start thinking of things this way. I imagine this is where Google sought to go when the developed the chrome OS – the browser being the runtime environment for everything.

Then I hit what I think is the best part of the Edge workflow. “How do I save this?” I wondered. “Where is the export button?”. Nope, folks. You just save it as an HTML file. THAT is Edge’s native file. You can open it up elsewhere and play with it, copy/paste, whatever you like. For years I have dreamed of saving flash files as an open set of files I could work with. Flash had introduced an open .xml file format but I found it difficult to work with. Edge does it right.It saves your HTML along with the necessary jQuery javascript files to make it work. What’s nice about this is I can picture Edge developing as the web does. An update could make use of newer versions of jQuery as they arise, or other javascript frameworks. People could write their own and offer them as plugins.

Some things need polish, or if they aren’t thinking about implementing them, they should. Drag and drop of files into the IDE didnt work. Edge instead relies on the outdated import pipeline. Imported images weren’t visible on the stage until the file was tested, and the IDE didn’t quite crash but chugged to an unacceptable  halt with a few video issues several times. These things can be fixed but I hope they make stability and usability a priority from the get go.

A few words about the HTML5 revolution.  I imagine Flash today looks to new developers like Director looked to me when I first started programming. Director seemed powerful but old school, wrapped up in its ways. Flash seemed open, exciting, full of promise. HTML5 seems that way today for a variety of reasons.

HTML5 is open source. this is the biggie. Ive always thought that Flash should have been opened up as a completely open source project and Adobe would concentrate on making the best IDE possible (please no bullshit about how Flash is so open, it isn’t. It’s proprietary). Now Adobe is ending up doing the same thing for HTML5 anyway, a completely open spec that anyone can create with any number of software (even notepad!) and a bit of elbow grease. Unlike Flash Professional, Edge manipulates an open spec rather than containing the actual runtime engine and player within itself. If Adobe had followed this path for Flash, I think Apple and many others would have been much more welcoming of it. People tend to champion open projects in ways that proprietary technology can’t hope to maintain indefinitely.

So what’s missing in HTML5? Two things, and three if you’re a suit. 1 – Sound. Flash has excellent sound capabilities. HTML5 not so much. Many HTML5 projects use flash as their sound engine – in itself it cant do much more than stop/play sounds and not with much precision. 2- power. this is quickly changing with each new browser iteration, and indeed its this increase in javascript engine power that has brought on the html5 renaissance. Javascript and actionscript are so similar there really isn’t much in theory you could do in one and not the other, but flash actionscript still has more raw power than any javascript engine. Basically, once HTML5 browsers have great sound and equivalent (and standardized) power, Flash will have to struggle to keep up. And – for the suits as promised – 3 – DRM style technology. I wondered what the big deal about leaving Flash video for HTML5 video was until I realized it came down to cash, folks. Flash has DRM style technology options whereas HTML5 video does not. And where an artist does not care about DRMing their latest video project, Big Business understandably does. Similarly HTML5 is open and impossible to control. And if Adobe does try to implement some kind of DRM scheme with their HTML5 editor, there will be hell to pay. I’m waiting on the first 2 items and forgetting about the third.

A lot of what you can get out of software depends on what you THINK you can get out of it. This was the power of Flash – artists with little to no programming experience began to see potential in the software and pushed it beyond its animation based roots in fascinating ways. We can see this example with HTML5, which is basically HTML, javascript and CSS – standards that have been around for years. There’s little reason one couldn’t have created more web animations using javascript earlier in the web’s history. Its just that people didn’t think to do it as much because of less, but not no, standardization. Indeed, jQuery is an example of how we have been animating things for years. But now this is all happening under the exciting umbrella term of HTML5. Developers eyes are being opened to the possibilities, and thanks to a push by Apple mobile, being almost forced to test them out. Now the cat’s out of the bag and companies like Adobe are sitting up and taking notice.

One big issue that Adobe is going to have to deal with is that the excitement is for HTML5, not Adobe HTML5. Unlike Flash, Adobe doesn’t own the HTML5 spec. They are going to have to make sure that their software is the best way possible to create HTML5 projects. Edge is going to have to be seductive, sleek, powerful and take into account the desires of it’s users more so than Flash ever did. In this sense Adobe is off to a good start by encouraging talk in their forums and offering Edge for download at such a pre alpha stage in order to get feedback. They have refreshingly  embraced a new paradigm of open source development and made a terrific first attempt at it. But they will have to be careful. In the past Adobe the Corporation has muddled the development of Flash, accused of dropping artists interests for business ones. Adobe will need to carefully walk the fine line between shareholder/corporate interests and those of the artists and programmers who work with it’s tools.  Hopefully they can get it right. So far, so good.

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In June Google launched a redesigned Google News U.S. edition, a design that immediately  came under fire for its busy layout and 1 column design. Users are forced to sign in if they want to customize the page for a more usable experience.   And while the new experience on the desktop has disappointed , the Google News redesign has become an inefficient multi-step process  on the iPad.

The Original Google News on the iPad

Google News originally has a two column page spanning layout that worked well for many years. Headlines were easy to scan bold type. Columns were fluid and adapted to your browser page width. The page was highly readable without having to sign in. I can still access this old layout by visiting the Canadian version of Google news.

On the iPad, reading this layout is a 1 step process

Step 1 – The Original Layout (via Google News Canada)

The original layout is ready to read from the get go. The 2 column layout is very readable and fluid. Bold headlines are consistent down the page and easily read. News items are grouped into sections as in traditional newspapers. The option to customize the page is subtle and non intrusive. Since the focus of the page is news stories, and not the power of customization, this enhances the usability of the page. As soon as I arrive on this page I’m ready to browse it. As usual, Google has done an excellent job and provided a clean, much needed service.

The Google News Redesign on the iPad

The Google News redesign on the iPad forces me to undergo extra steps every time I reach the page before it is ready for scanning. Google has also backtracked somewhat by reintroducing the option for a 2 column layout. However, since the immovable right column  remains, what we really have is a cramped three column layout (with one non-fluid right column and wasted whitespace on the left) that I can’t imagine will satisfy many people.

Step 1 – Close the Personalization box (1 click)

If you clear your cookies or have cookies disabled in Safari on the iPad, the rather large personalization box will appear each time you visit Google News.  With the wasted space , intrusive personalization and weather boxes, I am still a few steps away from settling in to scan the page. Please note that I’m using the terminology “click’ here to refer to the ‘touch’ action on touchscreens that is the analogous to mouse clicks action on desktops.

Step 2 – Close the Weather Widget options (3 Clicks)

Much better. Questionable design elements like non-bold headlines outside the top stories, lack of subject grouping and wasted whitespace remain. But thanks to an update today, we can now get rid of the weather widget on the right. Incidentally, the weather widget determines your location and delivers temperatures in Fahrenheit. If you are reading the page in most countries other than the United States, you will still see the temperature in Fahrenheit even though you use the metric system, Celsius. If the box is smart enough to figure out my location, it should return the results in units that hold relevance to me. That said, to close the weather widget

1. click on the ‘edit’ link on top of the weather box to open the options
2. deselect ‘show weather for this location’ in the options
3. click on ‘save changes’ button to close the options

Step 3 – Enable Sections (1 Click)

Now we have a news page that has no personalization or weather boxes. However there is no grouping of news items by subject. Essentially the page is one big smorgasbord of stories. Why does this matter? Compare the original Page grouping with the current ones

Original Google News Groupings

• Top Stories (analogous to a newspaper front page)
• World
• US
• Business
• Sci/Tech
• Entertainment
• Sports
• Health

These are based on near universal groupings of some of the largest human disciplines. It has worked well for newspapers for over a century. And while I don’t think that the physical pulp and paper aspect of newspapers will be around much longer, I do think that many of the journalistic and organizing principles that newspapers have fine tuned and honed over the years are very valuable, and have value in the Google News format as a way to organize stories by subject matter.

Current Google News Groupings (iPad Default)

• Top Stories
• Recent
• Local
• Spotlight
• Most Popular

For me, the difference between these grouping is far less powerful that the original ones. There is more difference between, say, SciTech and Business than there is between ‘Top Stories’ and ‘Recent’. In fact, if I were trying to simplify things, I’d argue that the differences between ‘Top Stories’ and ‘Recent’, as well as’ Spotlight’ and ‘Most Popular’ are negligible in comparison and quite arbitrary. It’s as if Google News is giving us a page full of arbitrary stories so that we’ll be encouraged to sign in just so we can maintain a personalized experience that has some semblance of organization, something we were originally getting for many years without signing in.

Armed with the ‘why’ of ‘why we need to enable sections’, we can now do it by clicking on the ‘sections’ button in the ‘News for you’ area. Unfortunately this will only organize the stories below by topic, the immutable right column remains organized by the vague topics above.

5 Clicks Later

So what does 5 clicks get you on the iPad? Let’s compare the original and new layout (with our clicks applied)

In my opinion, the original provides a better news browsing experience on the iPad.

• I need to go through 5 clicks upon visiting Google News US  every time I clear my cookies or have cookies disabled on the iPad in order to get something that resembles the usability of the original Google News
• I need to go through 1 click if cookies are enabled and i have preciously closed the personalization and weather boxes. 1 Additional click every time i visit Google News US adds up
• The resulting layout still does not serve me as intuitively as the original

The 2 Column Option Returns

When I read this morning that Google had relented and provided a 2 column option I breathed a sigh of relief.  However, the implementation is near useless on the iPad. Since the immutable right column remains, what we essential get is a very cramped 4 column layout. A better option is for the 2 column to really mean 2 column, not 2 with  side columns. For some reason Google is very adamant about the presence of their new right fixed width, random story column. Until they become flexible on this point we won’t have the true 2 column usability of the original.

Cookies and New Pages

It’s worth mentioning one more time that all of these personalizations are useless if you are not signed in and clear your cookies and/or have cookies disabled. Upon revisiting Google News US you’ll be presented with the default layout again, including the lack of sections, intrusive personalization box and weather box. Opening a new page in Safari will also reset the ‘Sections’ to the default ungrouped layout upon returning to the Google News page.

Summary

Google is great. It’s not a stretch for me to say this. Google News. Search. Gmail. Google Earth. Google has provided us with so many terrific services for free. But now we seem to be getting to a point where signing in is becoming an increasing necessity in order to get usable services. This is completely within Google’s rights as a for profit company, but it’s not what i signed up for, and is not what attracted me to Google in the first place.

I am perfectly happy to sign in when it’s necessary – I sign into Gmail, Twitter and Facebook all the time and am glad to do it. But those services REQUIRE personalization (ie sign in) in order to function because my emails and tweets are my own. Reading news should not require personalization.  It even brings with it sizable and problematic philosophical issues about reading only what we want to read and limiting our exposure to new ideas.

The hobbled usability of Google News is in my opinion a painfully transparent attempt to force personalization and sign in where the need did not exist in the first place. I hope Google will learn from this just as I learn from them, and implement a solution that will leave users impressed and gasping for more. Most of us are or have been Google fans at one point or another. Let’s hope they are able to continue the tradition of simple, usable and useful services.

A big part of game design is the environment. For Nimian Hunter 2, Ive been testing both a sunset and blue sky look. Both have their advantages.

Sunsets are glorious, rich in color and contrast, and very dramatic. Glows and highlights add a real sense of mystery to the landscape. The downside is that detail can be lost in the dark shadows, and the sense of distance isn’t as great with the sunset colored fog.

Its almost as if our minds are hardwired to see blue haze as meaning greater distance. In the blue sky tests with light blue fog, the sense of distance across the land is much greater. There’s also less detail lost in shadows when you have a bright blue sky, but blue skies can also lack drama and seem everyday.

By testing out both versions I’m getting a sense of what works technically in the level design and what doesn’t. What I’m aiming for now is a combination sky with lighter shadows and some elements of sunset and blue sky – probably the beginning of a sunset. The painterly look and feel is an important element in Nimian games. But in the end, the environment will have to serve the theme and mood of the game. So while testing is great, I’ll have to wait to finish the story and art direction to really understand what works best on a technical and thematic level.

It’s that time of year again:) These are the first screenshots of the upcoming Nimian Hunter 2, the prequel to Nimian Hunter that continues the adventures of Rando.  It’s a Unity 3D action adventure game.

Alongside Nimian Garden, they tell the story of Rando’s past and his involvement with the war and his part ion the destruction of the land. The adventure takes place in a region known as Costalina, near the republic of Physus and involves a rather nasty behemoth known as The Mentipede.

Currently I’m working on the game Art Direction. I’m establishing the silhouettes, proportions and color palettes. Establishing the back story and surrounding environment helps with this. Thers is also a surprise coming up in the future screenshots that reveal a touch of Nimia Flyer influencing the game – I think Protofans will like it. More on that soon.

The lack of Flash support on the iPad is a serious blow to the identity of Flash.

I became a Flash designer because of 2 things – its unrestrained creative freedom to deliver almost anything i could think of making, and its cross platform and deep penetration across the internet.  Now I could create beautiful things and share them with the world.  Well, that world has become increasingly mobile in mind and market share. And it’s a world from which Flash is being largely excluded.

First, kudos.  I love Flash, I do.  And if you didn’t love it too it wouldn’t inflame such passion and give rise to so many blog posts.  Flash isn’t under attack because of it’s a poor product. On the contrary, it’s like an athlete at the Olympics going for gold.  Flash is so great at so many things that we just want it to be even better – perfect perhaps.  But Flash has been denied perfection because of 2 fatal flaws in its DNA.

First, it’s proprietary technology, and this is an ugly truth that I try to forget every time I use it.  It’s owned and operated by ‘Big Design’ (you know who you are) and although their intentions and efforts are noble, it still remains a closed platform and cannot achieve the adoption rates and democratic zeitgeist of open source standards like HTML.

Second is performance which, backroom deals aside, has been a large deterrent to its adoption on mobile devices.  Yes, apparently Flash and Flash lite players are available on millions of mobile devices.  Well I’ve been developing flash apps for years and honestly I wouldn’t know it.  Flash has a history of poor performance on Macs so I can understand why the Mac faithful haven’t been rushing to defend a platform that’s forsaken their interests for a long time. Performance anxiety is not only the result of the Flash player itself either, which is a beautiful and compact piece of software engineering (if it wasn’t we wouldn’t be having this discussion).  Flash developers are an industrious creative lot who love nothing more than to create something they said couldn’t be created.  As such you have a huge ecosystem of flash media on the web pushing the boundaries of even new PC performance.  How could this ever be restrained to the emerging mobile ecosystem that thrives on prudent power consumption?

Enter the iPad.

The wild success of the iPhone and iPod Touch had Flash developers scurrying into Apple App development, and with good reason.

Beyond the ability to browse in the bathroom (you do it too), they offered a relatively open ecosystem and a ‘for-dummies’ ecommerce infrastructure that let small developers make more than a few dollars while expressing themselves creatively.

Now the iPad offers people a sexy new way to experience the internet, and at 499 and up, it’s going to sell millions. Apple’s share of the mobile market space is already huge and the iPad will just see this share grow.  And guess what? Flash will not be invited to the party.  So it’s decided to crash it in the form of Flash CS5′s admittedly nifty Mac App export tool.

The problem with Adobe’s answer to Flash on the iPhone is this: By restricting it (not by their choice) to the app store ecosystem they are erasing many things that make Flash Flash, the most important being delivery by web browser, perhaps THE defining quality of Flash, erased like it never existed.  No longer the clever way to circumvent Big Media and deliver content straight to The People without big budgets, it becomes a ‘me too’ entry into Apple’s App Store ecosystem. It becomes subject to the developer fees and approval process of the App Store queue, which, while hardly exorbitant or stifling, represents quite a change in pipeline for developers accustomed to few restraints on creative freedom.

It also positions Flash as an application development platform rather than a web browsing experience.  This is a well deserved position since Adobe has made great strides to develop Actionscript 3 as a robust and powerful language in its own right.  Just be aware it comes with it’s own identity crisis for Flash.  Is it the best way to reach millions via the web, in which case it should be available on the exponentially growing mobile market, or is it an application development tool, in which case we should see performance boosts equal to other app development frameworks like c++ and Cocoa.

Hello Standards

So then, what’s the sexy new way to circumvent authority?

Well it turns out that it’s something that wasn’t so sexy in the first place.  Standards, in the form of HTML 5, CSS and a renaissance in Javascripting that sees it compared to early versions of  actionscript.  Because standards are open source and accessible to all, they are used by literally everyone. Compare the number of people who have created a web page or read one to the number of people who have created a App or used one and the difference becomes apparent.  Like politicians swayed by populist chants, big companies like Apple, Google and (even though they seem to resist it tooth and nail) Microsoft embrace and adopt standards like HTML or face the consequences. Imagine a web browser that didn’t run javascript.  Now THAT would be a deal breaker.

Standards become the new-meets-old way to again reach the masses, unrestrained by corporate interests or approval. Look at Google’s latest version of Google Voice.  When Apple said NO! to the App Store version, Google went ahead and created a web browser version that sidesteps the App Store and proves to be almost just as functional.  What’s Apple going to do? Restrict people from visiting certain web pages that break their terms of service or compete with their app store infrastructure?  Web developers are finding out that their javascript transitions and database signups work just as seamlessly on the iPhone as on the PC. Standards are getting a lot of love.

So we’re left with the big quandary.  Flash does so many things right.  It’s increasingly open source. Performance has increased. 3D in flash is really coming on strong. All’s right on the left side of the brain.  But on the other side, the concept of Flash as a technology that can reach anyone anywhere (in other words, via the web browser) is eroding.  And the thing about standards is that they are great when it comes to accessibility, but unless you’re a creative genius they just aren’t up to snuff (yet) when it comes to delivering the rich media (ugg…) experience that proprietary plugins like Flash and Unity can deliver. I waited YEARS for 3d to come to browser via software based Flash and hardware accelerated Unity 3D.  Now I’m told i can’t have it if i want unfettered reach to the mobile market, and I have to run back to standards.

Where do we go from here?

Here’s what I’m going to do for the time being.  I’m going to continue to use Flash with the queasy, back-of-my-mind understanding that it’s a proprietary technology with performance issues, and both will need to be addressed eventually with the mobile market.  I’m going to adopt HTML 5/CSS/Javascript everywhere possible whenever it can replace flash. This means cookies/databases instead of shared objects.  jQuery instead of Flash transitions.  Open video instead of swf players. I’m going to enjoy the power of plugins like Unity and Flash as a way to deliver a powerful creative experience while hoping against hope that they too will become so essential that companies like Apple will be forced to adopt them in the browser.  All the while knowing that if people want platforms like the iPad to adopt Flash without question there is only one surefire way to do it.

Turn it into an open standard.  I mean an open standard like HTML, not corporate initiatives with the word OPEN attached to them.  Actionscript that everyone can contribute to.  Free players for all.  Open source the entire thing and make money Adobe by selling the best IDE’s to harness the power of a newly open sourced phenomenon.

Let’s face it.  There’s an opening for an open source, non-proprietary, performance savvy method of delivering rich media experiences on the mobile and non-mobile web.  Who ever fills it is going to have the future in their hands.