Publishing with Silicon

I’ve made shoes for everyone, even you, while I still go barefoot
Bob Dylan

I am still pinching myself to see if I am awake as I look at the whitepaper on our web site. I have worked as the tireless scribe of other companies for so long, working on 10+ whitepapers for Adobe and others in the early 2000s; it is refreshing to get to the point where we can have a whitepaper of our own. By John Parsons, no less.

Pleased as I am with John’s work, I am more happy still about the topic of the whitepaper, and the state of the technology it describes. FXG is a joy to work with, now that we are past the struggles with the beta forms of the associated products, and on to real implementations.

Web to Print Workflow

The Scene7 platform was built really well, and almost anything once can imagine in Web to Print can be accomplished between Scene7 and Flash. It will no doubt evolve, but ever since FXG 2.0 we have a very practical strong foundation.

I am not a patient person at all. It was a good year and a half of naively thinking that FXG 2.0 was right around the corner: I am the sucker that believes the projected delivery dates of software products, just as I naively believed in XML rendition standards in the late 90s and early 2000s. But better late than never, and of course there’s an explanation: it seems that Flex 4 was more ambitious than anticipated, and it got late enough that CS5 integration made sense, and meanwhile S7 was waiting for the standard to be complete for the sake of interoperability.

Adobe Scene7 FXG Web to Print Workflow

We are working on several Silicon Designer implementations on top of Scene7 now; I think it has just eclipsed InDesign Server in popularity, but the two are not mutually exclusive and our latest solution uses both. XMPie and Scene7 can interact as well: the beauty of more recent technology is that with Web Services and the various techniques of translating the different forms of XML (semantic, transformation, and rendition) interoperability has gotten much less opaque than it once was in this industry.

Silicon Designer

I like John’s observation that WTP was born in the dot com era: it has suffered from the same brittle, rush-job poor foundations of such an era until now, when Adobe finally comes to their senses and acquires a company like Scene7 with true vision, and has the guts to empower them to build something of this caliber.

Here at MAX for the 5th year in a row – I didn’t go to these until Adobe bought Macromedia and it has been very interesting to see the changes over the past 5 years.

Keynote – Kevin Lynch started in with discussion technology trends, then moved into presentation of the Digital Publishing features. Wired magazine was presented, and really didn’t show much different than what we’ve seen already. They seem to have reacted to some of the initial bashing. They showed dynamic text wrapping in HTML, identical to SVG text wrapping demos from 10 years ago. Not exactly thrilling, though they do say they are contributing to WebKit. He presented the Adobe Digital Publishing Suite, starting from InDesign, collaboratively produced and distributed, and of course they want to use Omniture to analyze the results. It is quite a stretch to think they will do the full-cycle at all as well as they have built the low-level tools.

Kevin spoke of video… quite an awesome amount of video going out in Flash, but unlike last year they are not showing the trend towards ubiquity, but rather “most video on the web is still shown in Flash.” Flash 10.1 was very quickly adopted, apparently, yet we know where it did not show up. Internet television keeps advancing, and Flash does have quite a head start there: the streaming is really impressive. AIR for TV is out; first launch partner is Samsung. Marc Goldberg of Epix spoke of multi-screen, saying their subscribers watch on a number of different screens: the demo broke, however.

Flash Media Server is working on on-the-fly encoding. Wowza seems to have made some real inroads, based on discussion with some attendees. P2P-assisted video looks kind of cool.

Kevin showed a number of small apps built targeting the tablet computing environment… it would appear they are rewriting things to be more lightweight. He demo’d a table device / PC wireless app, where the iPad served as a palette for a user in Photoshop.

Adobe MAX 2010 - Tablet as artist palette connected to desktop via wireless

He spoke of the enterprise… the impact of multi-screen, as well as LiveCycle. He mentioned the Day Software acquisition, which we have been watching with eager anticipation at Silicon Publishing, and brought their CTO David Nüscheler to present.

David Nüscheler from Day spoke of the need for discrete control of how things work across devices: he explained that the communications are truly different, it is not as trivial as spewing forth variants of the same thing entirely, but there is a true need to have some separate content specifically targeted. David demo’d CQ5, showing editing of HTML and mobile content. He did not dwell on the DAM, which has been our primary interest in Day. We are in the midst of a very exciting integration with the Day DAM, and so far we have been extremely impressed with the DAM aspects of Day. Adobe has done several acquisitions really well, and even though it’s the LiveCycle group that they are subsumed into, we are optimistic they will take over appropriate leadership roles. Wouldn’t it be cool if we can connect the rendition power of Adobe to structured information in LiveCycle? We have witnessed a long and pathetic history of the Acrobat monopoly being squandered on silo-based random junk (Central Output Pro? Graphics Server? Document Server? Forms with dirt-crude formatting?…) for rendition, yet there is good security and DRM in LiveCycle, hopefully the Day team will gut it and connect appropriately to the rendition side of Adobe (Flash, After Effects, InDesign desktop and Server, and above all… Scene7).

Day does introduce a real philosophical paradox. After the keynote, they presented content that had probably mainly been presented before, starting with a 45-minute argument for Open Source. LiveCycle has traditionally been the precise opposite of Open Source, and just the day before at the leadership summit we had heard that the “open source” Flex project had approximately 0 contributions from anybody but Adobe: will Day change this? It will be interesting. It was sort of strange to hear conway’s law cited and consider what that would mean as the organization is not the Apache Foundation any more, it is Adobe. We will see some interesting software!

Kevin demo’d medical imaging technology. Flex really does create powerful front ends for enterprise apps. Flex 4.5 beta is out, I am not sure after the year of Flex 4 beta lifestyle how deeply we will want to dive in. Back then we really needed the TLF badly, so it was probably worth the rush, I think with future Flex betas we can build a bit less production code on top of it.

Mike Lazaridis, CEO of RIM, came on and showed the Blackberry Playbook. Adobe and RIM have been working together with Flash/AIR; fairly obvious that Apple motivates them. “Not trying to dumb down the internet for a mobile device” – NICE stab at Apple. That was, as the 2 of you who read this blog know, my big reaction to the iPad.

Kevin showed some cool games, rendition gets faster over time with more use of the GPU, and AIR is evolving. AIR for Android looks good, Apple has some good competition, hopefully. Deploying from Flash to iPhone OS is once again possible, too.

Social gaming has always been one of Kevin’s interests: he showed the work idol worship, a nice-looking virtual reality game that uses old school animation techniques coupled with slightly newer technologies. He showed some very cool GPU-accelerated 3D capabilities of other games. Flash is really getting nice: the virtual reality driving demo was compelling. With the next Flash 3D, code named Molehill, the immersive 3D graphics should be very good for games and general 3D imaging.

Chrysty Wyatt from Motorola came on to speak of Android and the request of Motorola to put Flash on mobile devices – “anyone who fails to put Flash on a mobile device is not giving you the Internet.” And they are not above bribing us – all attendees at MAX are getting a Droid 2.

What is the world coming to? Never thought I’d see IE supporting SVG. We lobbied so hard 9 years ago, 8 years ago, and 7 years ago, until it felt like we were getting nowhere.

I remember Microsoft tried to hire me in 2002, having found me on the… SVG developers list. Now that was strange, what on earth were they doing stalking us XML geeks?

In a year or so, it became clear; XAML was highly derived from SVG, and would form the basis of WPF and Silverlight later. Unable to embrace a standard, MS had decided to copy standards activity into their own proprietary technology.

The poor SVG black sheep was even abandoned by Adobe itself when they eyed Macromedia/Flash, and enjoyed almost ZERO serious support over a few years, unless you count intensive emulation with XAML and later FXG, or the tireless efforts of a few diehards in places like the Mozilla project and Opera that kept SVG alive.

Fast forward 7 years, and we find Microsoft in the same boat with Apple, falling further behind Adobe’s Flash on the RIA front, with Silverlight piling up on the junkheap of obscurity along with Quicktime. With both proprietary efforts dead in the water, SVG is suddenly appealing to these would-be monopolies, and we find a bizarre rally behind a 10-year-old standard.

Why did they even bother to throw SVG into the mix with HTML5? Certainly the Canvas functionality can accomplish most or all of the core Flash capability that everyone (other than Adobe) wants. SVG and Canvas seem to have complimentary performance depending on what you’re doing. Still, who wants to learn how to do everything two different ways? Perhaps those railroading HTML5 through “spec” processes realize they won’t catch everything with the canvas approach, but more likely, they realize that this 2010 form of “standard” with Apple/Google pushing their rush “standard” out as Microsoft tails along, can have a better chance of flying with some stapled-on integrity from a bygone era.

It is still great to see, there is something really nice about the simplicity of core SVG, and it is fully ironic that its enemies have ended up having to support it despite their traditional opposition to standards. Apple, Google, Adobe, Microsoft have the same monopolistic agendas, yet are forced to co-exist, and let flowers like SVG grow through the cracks.

Today Steve Jobs called Adobe “Lazy.”

Flash has dramatically improved since Adobe bought Macromedia. Papervision 3D is a 3D engine that runs on Actionscript, this sort of capability was unheard of back when Macromedia ran Flash. 

Flash is spreading all over the place: set top boxes, TVs, phones, everywhere except the iPhone. It is ubiquitous for ads and video on the web. No wonder Steve is jealous. What is the install base of Quicktime?

Flash runs fine on every other phone. Is the iPhone buggy? no, it is intentionally dumbed down in the interest of rabid monopolistic tendencies of one eccentric genius.

Steve should remember that Apple would have died save for its use as a graphics platform running Adobe technology for a long stretch of time.

The iPhone will be a better device when it supports Flash.

As much as he has done for the company and the world, Steve Jobs really has conquered everything that needed conquering; the world needs a little less conquering and fewer dumbed-down, closed-source, “no VM allowed” systems like the iPhone and iPad.

With the iPad we witness the first case in history of computing where the limitations of a small device float upwards into a bigger device, instead of the opposite (remember when Moore’s law was a good thing?): who is lazy?