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Archive for March, 2010
Zugara - Wednesday, March 31st, 2010
Zugara - Tuesday, March 30th, 2010
matt - Tuesday, March 30th, 2010
With all the focus on emerging media and technology, new online media models, new mobile ad models and so on, sometimes effective yet basic online advertising is overlooked. I thought this online ad from Southwest was one of the best I’ve seen in awhile mainly due to the relevance to what I was viewing at the time (Marketwatch.com) and context around publishers desire to build ‘pay gates’ for content. Nice way to tie that message in with the “your bags fly free” messaging of Southwest.
Zugara - Thursday, March 25th, 2010
Zugara - Wednesday, March 24th, 2010
Zugara - Tuesday, March 23rd, 2010
matt - Tuesday, March 23rd, 2010
 
The above pictures represent what crack cocaine would look like it were available in the iPhone App store.
The premise is simple – a Scrabble like game that you can play with friends at any time on your iPhone. But this application brings out all the best features in mobile social gaming:
- Ability to play simultaneous games (up to 20)
- Chat feature to talk smack
- Push Notifications directly to your phone when it’s your turn
- Social Media integration with Facebook & Twitter
- No time limit so you or your opponent can play at your own leisure
It’s a pretty big hit in our office here and unfortunately, I was turned on to it and can’t stop. There’s a paid version (2.99) and free version that’s ad supported. You can view a CNET review of the game here for more info. iTunes link is here (NOTE: link will spawn iTunes software…)
Fancy a game? You can find me on the game with username Kobrakai…
blake - Thursday, March 18th, 2010
There’s been a lot of talk lately about HTML5 and how it will completely change the landscape of the web. Folks as high up on the technology food chain as Steve Jobs tout it as the ultimate replacement for Flash. So, in an effort to be a good programmer, I spent some time learning HTML5 (specifically the canvas component) to compare capabilities. I can emphatically say that HTML5 will not be a Flash killer, with the only possible exception being video, and here are the reasons why:
Just try to get a programmer to drop OOP
Flash is run through the ActionScript language, and AS3, the version of ActionScript that’s been around for almost four years, is object oriented. For those not familiar with OOP, it’s by far the most preferred method of coding for experienced software engineers, most of who consider non-OOP languages archaic (probably the nicest thing they would say).
On the other hand, JavaScript, which runs the HTML5 canvas component, is not a fully object oriented language, though in some ways it attempts to mimic OOP. Creating a fully functional Rich Internet Application (other than basic information aggregators) in JavaScript is frustrating at best, and down right futile at worst. Any way you slice it, moving from AS3 to JavaScript is a step down in capability, and no experienced programmer will rush to do it.
I have to manually support different browsers?
A Flash application will run on any operating system in any browser. The only possible issue is the display of system fonts, which can easily be averted by embedding fonts in the application. HTML5, though, brings with it all the same browser compatibility problems that currently plague web designers. A HTML5 application playing sound or video will have to support every codec used by all major browsers. So, instead of having one mp3 for every sound in Flash application, the developer will have to make a mp3, wav, and ogg for every sound that needs to be played and write code to test the browsers supported codecs.
The same goes for video. Websites that want to support video playback will have to encode all their videos in both the h.264 and Ogg Theora codecs. Imagine a site with a video repository the size of Hulu’s deciding to go through every single one of their thousands of h.264 videos and re-encoding them for Ogg, especially when their Flash video player works just fine for them already. YouTube recently launched an HTML5 player, but decided not to support Ogg, so the only browsers it can be viewed in are Safari and Chrome. Beyond the codec issue, the HTML5 video component actually does work very well, and I suspect that we’ll begin to see it used more often.
I’ve also noticed some screen redrawing issues that vary between browsers. When redrawing large bitmaps on the canvas, the area would flicker sporadically, as if the browser couldn’t catch up to the redraw calls. Once again, this is not an issue in Flash, since it takes care of redrawing the stage automatically.
Code obfuscation, anyone?
Code obfuscation is a process by which interpreted code, such as JavaScript, is modified to make it difficult to read without modifying the functionality of the application. It’s used to keep code that has to be public from being stolen. With JavaScript, you have no choice but to make the source code public and anyone with a moderate knowledge of web browsers can easily steal it, so obfuscation is a fairly common practice.
To help illustrate the current issues with code obfuscation and the canvas component, here’s a little Pong game I wrote in HTML5. You’ll only be able to play it if you have a capable browser, such as Firefox, Chrome or Safari.
I attempted to use every online JavaScript obfuscation tool with the source code for that Pong game (only 280 lines long), but not one of them returned me code that worked. I suspect that’s because they’re not able to handle HTML5 calls yet, or perhaps they don’t really work that well in the first place. For the sake of argument, let’s assume that you, a developer, have successfully obfuscated your JavaScript code and have put it online. An inventive hacker could find out which tool you used and reverse the process to get, at least, something close to the original source (encoded variable names might not be restored). While Flash has it’s own obfuscation built in, and there are many decompilers for it, it’s a semi-interpreted language, so deconstructed applications reveal only snippets of the original source.
While I’m all for open source, site security dictates that some code has to be as close to impossible to hack as humanly possible (no code is 100% hack proof). Most secure functions on websites are done on the server to keep hackers from reaching it through the browser, but with Rich Internet Applications that deal with secure information, there has to be an intermediary point where the application sends and receives sensitive data. It’s much easier for a hacker to retrieve that procedure through JavaScript, obfuscated or not, than from a plugin.
Flash to the rescue
The idea behind HTML5 is a solid one. The kind of functionality that Flash delivers is ultimately something that should move out of a plugin and in to the browser, but this isn’t an easy change to make. The main roadblock is the core difference between web and application programming. HTML has never been more than a document format, and through the last fifteen years of mass marketed internet, developers have tacked on external languages to give it greater functionality. In the last few years, Flash has become the most used way to bring native application functionality to an HTML page, and it was able to do it because AS3 is a language of substantial depth, based on OOP principles.
Because of this, I think the best hope for HTML5 is for Adobe to add an “Export To HTML5″ feature to the Flash IDE and Flex SDK. I suspect talk of it is already floating around their headquarters, because, despite what someone said, they are most definitely not lazy.
Zugara - Thursday, March 18th, 2010
- Was the Nexus One’s Initial Sales a Flop? Hardly. Here’s Why It Wasn’t A Flop it and here’s Why It Is
- Rating Movie Apps: Paramount vs. Sony vs. Warner Bros.
- Mobile Apps Are Hot, But Don’t Forget Emerging Markets
- Social Media, Mobile, Bar Codes Vie For Attention At SXSW Festival
- Supermarket Chain A&P Debuts Mobile Coupons With Brand Participation
- Samsung Announces Plans for iPad Challenger
- And The Top Branded iPhone Apps This Week Are…
- Mobile Ad Network Mobclix Releases iPad SDK
- Dear AT&T, Whatever You’re Doing AT SXSW, Do It In San Francisco (I bash AT&T all the time and to give credit where credit is due…SXSW was near flawless…dream was shattered however when I arrived into DC yesterday…wtf is with this network already!)
- NPR and WSJ Building iPad-Only Websites (Great…we’re back in 1999 again but now with 5X as many platforms to develop for…can’t we all get along?)
- Google Says There Are Now 30,000 Apps In Android Market
- Beer And Exercise Finally Join Forces In Miller’s MGD iPhone App
- 9 Killer Tips for Location-Based Marketing
- Ubisoft Click-To-Play Mobile Video Ads See 1.3 percent CTR
- PayPal iPhone App Transfers Money By Bumping Against Another iPhone
- Facebook Kicks Off Implementation Of QR Codes
- Analysis: When Working Day’s Done, iPhones, and Soon iPads, Light Up
- Prepare For An iPad App Explosion: Developer Activity Up 185%
- iPhone App Developers: Where Do They Come From?
- Scamville Marches Onto The iPhone, Sneaks Back Into Facebook
- Battery Breakthrough Could Revolutionize Mobile Computing
- For Apps, iPhone Bigger Than Facebook Platform
- Infographic: The App Store Economy
- What Type of People Want iPads? [STATS]
- More Than Enough Apps, Apple Pushes for Quality (So you let 150,000 crap apps in and now you want to focus on quality???)
- SMS vs. Barcodes In The Mobile Charity Arena
- American Airlines Expands Mobile Boarding Pass System To 19 New Airports
- Repo Men’s Interesting Barcode Campaign
- Are Mobile Coupons Finally Ready for Prime Time?
- MyBrandz: Finally, You Can Find People Who Love Nike, Apple, And Ferrari As Much As You Do (Maybe it’s just me…but I’m not the type of person that’s going to connect to other people for love of a brand…)
- Geowars…Really?
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We Are Organized Chaos (WAOC) is Zugara’s (www.zugara.com) interactive marketing and advertising blog where we’ll be featuring some great projects and discussing upcoming trends in the digital world. Work — good and bad — will be critiqued. Hope you’ll enjoy reading our insights and thoughts on interactive.
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