Development

Last week, Steve Jobs posted a "Thoughts on Flash" article to Apple's website discussing Apple's decision to not pursue Flash on iPhone.

Google VP Andy Rubin responded to this by saying, "sometimes being open means not being militant about the things consumer are actually enjoying." Jobs wants us all to use HTML5, CSS, and JavaScript, but despite the growing capabilities and support of those standards, Flash is still the right tool for some jobs, and despite Jobs' complaint that most Flash sites weren't designed for touch interfaces and will probably be broken, a lot of them will probably still be usable, or easily fixed by developers who care.

While I'm a happy Mac user — happy about everything, that is, except Flash video performance — Jobs' fourth point, on battery life, "The difference is striking: on an iPhone, for example, H.264 videos play for up to 10 hours, while videos decoded in software play for less than 5 hours before the battery is fully drained," and the implied conclusion "therefore you should not be allowed to watch software-decoded videos on the 45 minute bus ride between your charging station at home and your charging station at work" typifies what really irks me about Apple, why I tend to disagree with Apple's so many of Apple's technological policies, and why I'm happy there's a Droid in my pocket and not an iPhone.

PhizzPop Design Challenge - Creating a winning application in 3 days

Turning out an application using new software with only three days to do it is quite a challenge, to say the least. But that is precisely what we were challenged to do in the Microsoft sponsored, PhizzPop Design Challenge, Boston.

PhizzPop posed a particularly interesting challenge regarding process. No one builds applications in three days. So the challenge isn't really how do you produce a quality application, but more how do you squeeze weeks/months worth of work into three days to produce a quality application?

To answer this question, I thought it might be interesting to bring folks into our PhizzPop War Room and explain how we did it.

PhizzPop Design Challenge War Room

Brainstorming:

Moments after the challenge was presented, we opted not to go out for Microsoft-sponsored drinks and chose instead to take over a quiet room in the Microsoft offices to brainstorm. We immediately began to review the personas for user tasks and discuss what we believed would be possible with current technologies. Then, prompted by Jon, Outsight's Creative Director, we talked about "If the application was magic... what would we want it to do?"

Outsight recently participated in a unique interactive design and development challenge - The PhizzPop Design Challenge. Microsoft, looking to stir up interest Silverlight and Expression Blend, approached 6 firms in each of 6 metropolitan areas in the US - New York, Austin, Chicago, San Francisco, Los Angeles and Boston. Each firm could send a 2-3 person team for two days of training, a challenge would be issued, and each team would have the remainder of the week to create a solution using Expression Blend.

Outsight was invited, so we went.

Our team was comprised of Jon Reil, Brandon Goldsworthy and me, Denise Preston -- a designer, a developer and an information architect/project manager. We were up against some great folks from Digitas, Molecular, Cramer, RDVO, and PixelMedia.

The challenge? Create the interface for a home automation system. Details can be found here (DOCX).

Outsight architected, branded, designed and developed a system called Varlet (a knight's page, archaic form of Valet) that could be accessed via touch screens mounted within the home, via television screen and via a smart phone interface.

The competition culminated in an event held at the Saint Lounge where each group had to present their solutions to an independent panel of judges. The Boston panel of judges included representatives from Monster.com, Burnt Sand and 3 Comm.

Outsight Interactive is very pleased to announce that it has been selected as a winner for the 2007 MITX Awards. Outsight was awarded the top prize in the category of Applied Technology for their work on the FootJoy "DryJoys Microsite".

The DryJoys micro-site was created to highlight the latest in FootJoy shoe technology -- the new DryJoy’s Stability Pod™ outsole. The new outsole places each of its seven spikes on a hard plastic “pod” surrounded by soft plastic allowing the pods/spikes to move independently of each other, thus maintaining a better grip on the ground especially over uneven surfaces.

Outsight took a three-fold approach to present this complex technology: Animations were created from details of the shoes to highlight the product features. In addition, a full swing was presented, showing key points of the sequence where the pod technology really comes into play. Lastly, within the swing sequence a “heat map” was shown of the bottoms of the shoe to show how the pressure moves to various parts of the outsole through the swing sequence to further demonstrate how the independently moving pods can help afford greater stability.

But that was not the end of the DryJoys story -- a style carousel was created to present all 11 diverse styles and a Team DryJoys area was created to highlight the product's acceptance and use by PGA tour players.
Finally, a contest was created to create buzz around the new product and site.

Outsight is pleased to annouce the launch of a new site design for Craft, Inc. In addition to creating a new, clean and elegant look and feel for Craft, Outsight also made their product detail page more robust, assisted in simplifying their product categorization and implemented keyword search functionality. To learn more about this project -- take a look at our portfolio.

Outsight is pleased to announce the launch of Licensed MyJoys, an extension to the award-winning FootJoy MyJoys application. The application was extended to offer Major League Baseball and Collegiate licensed shoes and gloves.

Outsight is pleased to announce the launch of the FootJoy: DryJoys microsite. Read more about the DryJoys project in our Portfolio or visit the microsite.

If you're real quiet you can hear it: the sound of everybody and their dog talking about Silverlight. It's big, exciting news, sure. It will change the face of RIA development, sure -- if only to create some more competition. But will it take over the web? I'm not so sure.

The video demos are impressive, though I fear the DRM hoops that a Microsoft backed content-delivery platform will enable. The "drop in your javascript and see exponential speed increases" claim is a strong pull as well. Plus, I like Python, and I like anything that will give me an opportunity to write in it more often, so there's that.

I'm still not drinking the kool-aid regarding managed code in general, though, so .NET in the browser on top of a mini-CLR isn't so appealing to me. Also, I cringe every time I have to open Visual Studio, so I'm really not looking for another reason to tie myself to it. There's always text editors, I guess (incidentally, your only option if you're developing on a Mac). Lack of Linux client support is the deal breaker for me, though, as I've made the transition to Ubuntu at home, and have no intention of ever installing Vista on any machine I own.

The Buzz (well, mostly TechCrunch) is declaring everything else dead. AJAX is dead:"a bicycle next to a ferrari"; Flash/Flex is dead: "an absolute toy". And everybody else really seems to be chomping at the bit to praise Silverlight and to turn it into a golden hammer for web apps.

The ancient board game Go is the most popular board game in the world, and yet few people in the United States have even heard of it. Go is a game of metaphors: it has been compared to a fine art, a martial art, war, a conversation, life itself. Whereas Chess is a game of capturing prisoners, Go is a game of securing territory.

At it's core the rules of Go are incredibly simple: Two players (Black and White) alternate in placing a single stone on a 19x19 grid. Touching stones of the same color form a unit, which can be captured if all of the unit's neighboring spaces in both the horizontal and vertical directions are occupied by opposing stones. Grid points which are completely surrounded by stones of a single color become territory for that player. The game ends when both players pass their turn (because further moves would be of no value). The winner is determined by adding the number of points of territory plus the number of prisoners taken for each player. You can check out the American Go Association's rules page for a more detailed discussion of the rules of go.

Despite its simple rules, Go is at least PSPACE-hard, and could be as hard as EXPSPACE-complete, and the best Go programs consistently fail to perform much better than an experienced beginner. Though interesting, the computational complexity of the game of Go is not the purpose of this entry. What struck me, somewhere between the comment "software projects are like many other things in the world, like many other things in the world." on a recent entry by Jeff Atwood, and a blip about "writing code as art" by Jeremy Allison, is that the game of Go, like many other things, has something to teach about software development.

The Setup

You have a double formatted as a string with the decimal part separated from the whole part by a full-stop, e.g. "1234.9". Of course, not all cultures separate their digits the same way, and in fact, the site you're working on has a locale setting for a locale that uses a comma to separate the integer from the decimal, and vice-versa, e.g. German:"1.234,9" or French "1 234,9" style digit grouping. For the sake of argument, let's also say the decimal number is being parsed out of an XML file input by a US or UK user and that a full-stop is meant to separate the whole and fractional parts of the number.

The Problem

ASP/VBScript's clever and useful FormatNumber and FormatCurrency functions which solve oh-so-many related problems are no help:

SetLocale("de-DE")
'This is what we want (notice no quotes below)
FormatNumber(1234.9) '-> 1.234,90

'This is what we get (when using a string)
FormatNumber("1234.9") '-> 12.349,00
FormatCurrency("1234.9") ' -> 12.349,00 €
'ARGH!

When in a German locale, FormantNumber sees the string "1234.9", it assumes that the full-stop is merely a misplaced thousands separator and drops it. Though I was confused and angry at this behavior at first, I have come to see the sense that it makes (consider interpreting "1.234" in a German locale).