I have mixed feelings about Flash on mobile devices being killed. I have an Android tablet and it’s nice to not see blue Lego bricks all the time. Basically having Flash on Android means I get a more desktop-like experience on my tablet. However, Flash has always been a messy solution to a collection of problems the web has had. Flash filled in the blanks in what HTML, JavaScript, and CSS couldn’t do, but designers and developers wanted to do. It handled animation, video, complex interactions and other client side processes that that the browser just couldn’t do. I’m a little surprised it has taken this long for something like HTML5 to come along and fill those blanks without the use of a third party plugin.

As for Flash being dead, it clearly has a shelf life. Most of what the software does can be done using HTML5. Adobe knows this and is lining up a product, Edge, to replace Flash as I write this. DreamWeaver kind of, sort of already lets you do some fancy HTML5 stuff, both naively and via some of Adobe extensions. But, for better or worse Flash will be with us for along time, regardless of how many people declare it dead. There are certain markets that are going to be hard pressed to give it up, for example online marketing. Those floating banner ads and faux page peel-backs aren’t going away anytime soon (which is really too bad.) Also, Flash may be around a while longer for no other reason than it’s video streaming capabilities (read YouTube’s reasons for sticking with Flash.) I could even see Flash being reduced to nothing but it’s video streaming functionality.

In summary, Flash, it’s not dead, it’s alive and well on the desktop. But if you’re heavily invested in it, you might want to start looking at other solutions. At this point I’d like to remind everyone to get the latest version of the Shockwave plugin. Yeah, Adobe Director still exists.

At SXSWi 2011, I walked out of more than a few panels. Perhaps by not going to SXSWi for many years, and with expectations set low, SXSWi 2010 could do nothing but impress me. And by being so impressed at SXSWi 2010, SXSWi 2011 was destined to let me down. But I don’t think so. This year’s interactive conference was in many ways a re-run of 2010’s. A lot of the topics were covered, such as marketing using social media, “gamification” of the user experience, and location based services, were all covered in-depth in 2010 and 2011. I know those topics are still trendy, but they were covered well last year, I don’t need to spend hours in the Austin Convention Center again this year listening to largely the same stuff.

Some of the panels just failed to deliver at all. As much as I liked Steve Krug’s books, I don’t want to hear an hour-plus long reading of them. I’ve read the books; I didn’t pay for a badge to hear Krug re-read them to me. I also am very much not interested in hearing sales pitches instead of panel discussions, which seems to be very common. Instead of hearing industry experts reveal what has and hasn’t worked for them, I get to hear about their patented process or suite of software that their company is peddling. There were also a few panels that failed due to poor presentations. I won’t name names here, but I went to a couple panels where the presenters could not stay on topic. One presenter actually worked vacation photos into their slides. It was as if the topic of their panel was the last thing they wanted to talk about. Other presenters just failed to offer any practical application of the concepts they were discussing, instead dealing only with vagaries.

And finally there were the panels that were mis-named, poorly described in the program guide, or revised at the last minute. A couple presenters actually commented on what they had wanted the title of their panel to be and what SXSW decided it should be. Apparently SXSW likes names and descriptions that are “sexy.” This led to panel names that were misleading if not outright wrong. Lately, I’ve been going back and listening to the audio of many of the panels I missed and have realized that I went to a lot of the wrong panels. I skipped some and went to others, because the names and descriptions led me astray. As a side note, it’s great that most of the panels were recorded and posted to SXSW.com, it would be even better if they were available for download and were paired with the slides that go along with them.

On another side note, everyone needs to stop saying things are “dead.” The web is not dead, Flash is not dead, the desktop computer is not dead. Enough with the hyperbole. I really don’t want to hear about how location based services are “dead” at SXSWi 2012. Technologies change, evolve, and yes, they sometimes die (remember Macromedia Shockwave?) but it never happens overnight and even technologies that lose popularity linger for years before they disappear.

This post reads negatively, I know. SXSWi trys to cover the entire online industry, or rather the collection of industries, media and technology that make up whatever “Interactive” has become. SXSWi goes wide instead of deep, and maybe I’d just be better off going to one of the many conferences that focus more on what I’m interested in, user experience design. I now need to convince someone to start a UX conference in Austin, so I won’t have to pay for (or convince the company I work for to pay for) a plane ticket and hotel accommodations, along with the price of admission.

Though it looks pretty simple, the technology behind the iKat opens up a lot of possibilities for augmented reality apps. The technology allows a phone to recognize spaces in 3D and add virtual objects into them in realtime, which could be used to show directions in perspective, play games based on your local environment, and everything in between.

TechCrunch has a somewhat related article, In Mobile, Fragmentation is Forever. Deal With It. With new platforms and OS’s come new design and development challenges. Graceful degradation of the user experience, which never worked well to begin with, won’t cut it when you have many, many levels of degradation to support. User experiences will have to be more specific to a platform. And the fragmented nature of devices outside of the conventional PC will likely not go away.

A few years back, Levis opened the new and improved Levis Store in San Francisco. Along with tailoring your jeans, the store would also remember your measurements. You could go into the store, walk up to a terminal, and via a DHTML interface, place an order to have new jeans made up on the spot, just for you. The system would let you choose between relaxed fit versus snug, black versus blue, strait leg versus tapered, etc. And you could bet that this info was stored for marketing purposes. I think this info was even available online for a while, so you could order more custom fit jeans. But the idea of storing info about customers for use in retail outlets never really caught on.

Now, the world of online/offline commerce is a little older and a little wiser, and a little greedier. CNN is running a very interesting article about the use of smart shopping carts and loyalty/discount card programs in grocery stores. Both of which are designed to collect information on, and in some cases make recommendations for, what individuals buy. Some of this info is collected anonymously, most of it not. This info is then used to determine how people shop, what they shop for, which promotions work and who the most loyal customers are. Much like online cookies, the potential to use and abuse of this information is huge. Is this information kept confidential, or is it sold to various marketing data collection groups? How complex are the customer profiles, do they know I’m a vegetarian? If I buy Tide, lighter fluid and a box of nails all in one visit to the store, are they going to call the cops? Or are they going to give me, and me alone, special discounts on oatmeal raisin cookies cause I buy them so much? Or how about reminding me when I haven’t bought toilet paper in a few months, so I don’t have to deal with the ugly and embarrassing consequences of completely running out? Should we fear or embrace this technology?

I’ve been a long time fan of the concept of a super PDA. I had a iPaq pocket pc back in the day, I have both an iPhone and a netbook now. I always thought there was a market for something that was as functional as a laptop, but would fit in your pocket (or maybe small hand bag). Ideally what I had always envisioned was something that was as small as a PDA and as fast as a laptop, that could be used on its own while on the go and used with a dock with a monitor and keyboard when at a desk. One computer that does everything everywhere. Or at the very least one computer that could take the place of my laptop and PDA/smart phone.

When the Ultra Mobile PC (UMPC) platform was unveiled a couple years ago, I thought maybe my dreams had come true. But UMPC’s never took off, I’m guessing because they were too expensive and overpowered for a PDA but underpowered for most everything else. The iPhone/iTouch is easily the best phone/PDA I’ve used, but it’s not going to replace my netbook. There are still a lot of things I need a bigger screen and a little more processing power to do. Netbooks got the price right but, but not the form factor, they are still too big, I still have to have a laptop bag. With that said, my main complaint with netbooks is that the screen resolution is too low, 1024 x 600 is just a little too low to be practical.

Which poses the problem, how do you make a small, reasonably fast computer with a usable screen resolution. I think Microsoft maybe on to something with Courier. It’s not the the dock-able super PDA I was hoping for, but it’s still looks pretty cool. A tablet that can be folded up means it’s much easier to carry when not in use. And when it is in use, you have the real estate of two 7-inch-ish screens to work with. And with the nifty UI possibilities shown in the demo and I could see this being a killer device. The Courier could fill that awkward gap between PDA/smart phone and laptop, or for a lot of people, replace them all together. Assuming MS can keep these things cheap (like netbook cheap), they might have a winner on their hands.

When Google released the Chrome Beta they positioned as more of a web app development platform than a browser, I wonder if that’s RockMelt’s plan as well. I could see room in the browser market for browsers that are for specific uses and end up being transparent to the end user.