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Announcing Android 2.0 support in the SDK!

Tue, 27 Oct 2009 10:00:00 GMT

I am excited to announce that the Android SDK now supports Android 2.0 (also known as Eclair).

Android 2.0 brings new developer APIs for sync, Bluetooth, and a few other areas. Using the new sync, account manager and contacts APIs, you can write applications to enable users to sync their devices to various contact sources. You can also give users a faster way to communicate with others by embedding Quick Contact within your application. With the new Bluetooth API, you can now easily add peer-to-peer connectivity or gaming to your applications. To get a more complete list of the new capabilities you can add to your applications, please go to the Android 2.0 highlights page.

Current developers can use the SDK Manager to add Android 2.0 support to their SDK as well as update their SDK Tools to revision 3. New developers can download the Android SDK from the download site. After the download, Android platforms must be added using the SDK Manager

The SDK Manager allows you to add new Android platforms to your SDK.

Android SDK Tools, revision 3 is required to develop for Android 2.0. It includes support for code coverage through the Ant build system, as well as Mac OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard) support for the SDK and related tools. For those of you who develop using Eclipse, we are releasing ADT version 0.9.4 through the usual Eclipse update mechanism.

Over the next few months, we expect to see more and more Android devices being released. These devices will be running Android 1.5, 1.6, or 2.0. We are also planning a minor version update of Android 2.0 towards the end of the year, and that will be the last update for 2009. Below are some of the things you can do to be better prepared:

Download the Android 2.0 platform and make sure your existing apps continue to work on new devices running Android 2.0.
Make sure that your apps work when using the WVGA (800x480) & FWVGA (854x480) emulator skins. We expect devices with these types of screen, running Android 2.0 to be launched soon.

Checkout the video below for more information about Android 2.0.

Adobe is Dead

Mon, 26 Oct 2009 12:51:00 GMT

The official start of the death of Adobe was announced today.

Jeff Bezos is leading the B round of investors into Aviary.com - which is exactly what Adobe's on-line offerings SHOULD be. Aviary has been gradually bulding vector based, bitmap based, recently audio and soon video editing tools - entirely on-line and based inside of a browser.

Exactly what Adobe said could never be done. If you look at Photoshop.com you'll see a pathetic stand-in for the most valuable brand in computer graphics.

This is what happens when bureaucrats take over a tools company. AIR is coolio and what? 5 years late? The combination of Silverlight and HTML 5 will soon obsficate the need for Flash - and all that Flash video will get converted over to - what? It won't even matter - its something that will go on behind the scenes and no user will see it.

What users DO see - is the content - which is getting tired of being locked up inside of closed proprietary standards. And they'll see tools.

Aviary tools.

Its been years in the making, but I predict that within 5 years Aviary will be as big as Adobe, and Adobe - well you have heard of Word Perfect - right?

25th Anniversary of MusicWorks

Sat, 24 Oct 2009 20:22:00 GMT

Oct. 2009 marks the 25th anniversary of the first music product for the Macintosh,called MusicWorks. It was published by Hayden software and created by MacroMind.

MusicWorks had several “firsts” attributed to it, including:

- first music product which featured a piano keyboard interface

- first real-time interactive WYSIWYG music notation interface

- first ‘overview' of an entire piece, scaled ‘back'

- first MIDI product for the Macintosh (and I believe PCs in general)

- first product title which featured an inner cap (W)

- and it was our (MacroMind's) first product

MusicWorks was a breakthrough product for many reasons, and it was one of the first products that really defined what you could do with a WYSIWYG graphical user interface. People just loved to play with it. Unfortunately there were only 100k Macs in existence in those days, so we didn't “make a fortune” off of it.

The one MusicWorks demo I remember the best was an early ‘remix' I'd do - while the music was playing. I'd select the boogie woogie bassline, and copy it onto the clipboard. Then I'd open up ‘Mozart's Minuet in C‘ and paste the boogie woogie bassline into Mozart document, while it was playing. Both excerpts were exactly 16 bars long, one in C major the other in A minor. They'd end perfectly together - and the crowd would burst into applause. This was all while the music was playing.

This sort of real-time interaction with synthetic music had never been experienced before. The year was 1984. I wish you all were there.

I cannot find a wikipedia entry on MusicWorks and the term has been usurped by many many entities, orgs, books, etc. But the FIRST MusicWorks was ours all playing on teh built-in synthesizer that the early Macs came with.

MusicWorks was a variant of a larger product we had started called SoundVision, in the summer of 1984. SoundVision combined music and animation editing in the same tool - all on this tiny little Mac 512k. We used it to pitch software publishers - to give thenm an idea of what we were capable of.

We at the time were Jay Fenton (programmer), Mark Pierce (artist) and me (musician.) We were a software rock and roll band and we were represented by New Levitt, our agent, from the Wm. Morris agency.

CBS Software and Hayden Software were the two publishers who bid on the deal, after Microsoft (our first choice) ignored us. We made the decision to go with Hayden in Aug. 1984 and shipped MusicWorks by October of that year.

One of the funniest things I remember is getting a call from Jay (now Jamie) Fenton asking “what it a triplet?” I quickly realized that this would throw Jamie a looey (and delay the release of teh product) so I just told her “don't worry about it, we'll handle it later”. So all music in MusicWorks was in 2 or 4.

I found a mention of MusicWorks from someone named ‘Mel' - who used the product to write his own music.

I also found a little bit from someone named Tom Moodey and this screen shot:

And a special shoutout to “Root toot” Rudy Gartner - who did alpha testing and manually entered in - entire classical scores in Sept & Oct of 1984.

Here's the original mention of MusicWorks in the NY Times by Peter Lewis - in 1985.

Here's a mention of MusicWorks 1.1 - which this new standard - called MIDI. You see - the original MusciWorkls came out BEFORE MIDI existed, so we did an upgrade and supported David Openheimer's MIDI interface device - in 1985.

Folks have submitted their copies to the Computer History Museum (thank you BTW.)

25 years is a long time - and I want to thank Jamie and Mark - for helping us change the world.

I wonder if anybody at Adobe even has a clue?

I think Dan Sadowski is still working there.

KSL blogging - #1

Fri, 23 Oct 2009 13:47:00 GMT

I'm sitting in the Kelvin Smith library on campus at Case Western Reserve University blogging.

It's great to read that PayPal now has APIs.

Aggregating conversations - is a good thing.

Good news for us folks who provide social networks to the military.

I bet it wouldn't be too hard to find other examples of insider trading

I sure hope Android doesn't fork!

iCurrent, Coca Cola Happiness Ambassadors

Change Agent

Wed, 21 Oct 2009 22:56:00 GMT

This is a video submission I did for a Flip Cam contest here at CWRU.

It's called “Change Agent:.

Johannes Ernst: Is OpenID Still User-Centric?

Tue, 06 Oct 2009 11:30:00 GMT

I’m beginning to have second thoughts.

Plenty of people (myself included) got involved in internet identity because of its promise to put all of us as individuals at the center of our interactions on-line. To empower individuals to define and offer and enforce their own terms in their interactions with others. To not merely be somebody’s user or consumer, but to be a first-class citizen of the net. To not be at the mercy of any government or organization.

And from a merry band of similar-minded individuals, the movement was born. The assumptions were:

Anybody could set up their “digital home” anywhere on the web at any URL of their choosing. The address of that home would be their LID or OpenID URL.
When visiting somebody else’s site, they would use that URL-to-home to create a relationship from your site to my site, from your on-line home to my on-line home. It wasn’t thought of single-sign-on, but the equivalent of leaving one’s card at someone else’s place with the invitation to visit and establish a relationship. Technologically similar, but very different in intent.
This relationship between your site and my site would enable two-directional information flow for a variety of interesting purposes that could be switched off by either participant at any time.

While OpenID, the technology, still can support all of this, the thrust of the thinking of many of its larger supporters today goes into a different direction:

There is a belief that URLs are too complicated to use by the average individual, which has encouraged what’s called the OpenID “NASCAR GUI“. However, because that GUI can only show a few icons, it clearly encourages me to use a big-company-provided identity instead of my own.
Directed identity and identifier select hides the identity URL and downplays the “let’s create a relationship by exchanging pointers to home” to the extent that few people new to OpenID can even comprehend they are getting mere single-sign-on, not relationships.
The primary focus of OpenID-based profile exchange is to convey the user’s e-mail address to the visited site (usually a vendor), so that vendors can send e-mail to the user. Note that because it is e-mail, the the user cannot turn it off. It didn’t have to be that way.
Certification has entered the picture. While many details are still unclear, all certification schemes that I’ve ever heard of require substantial effort and perhaps money to get certified. In all likelihood, that will make it all but impossible or impractical for individuals to play on a level playing field with mere users of large company’s products. This is particularly ironic when applied to the relationship between citizen and government, which suddenly will have to be mediated by substantial commercial entities. Among other things, they get to see which citizen interacts with which part of the government when and how often.

I know the argument that “if the user can see which attributes go over the wire, it’s user-centric.” Well, yes, perhaps, but in my view that’s user-centric in the same way a calorie-free chocolate cake is sweet. I ordered a real chocolate cake, though, please, where did it go?

Don’t get me wrong, there are good things about all of this, the most important of which is that the state of the art has driven substantially more adoption than it likely would have been in the less organized, decentralized, you-be-in-charge-of-your-own-destiny world.

But is the price of more adoption less user-centricity? Or is that just a phase we are going through?

I hope to discuss this and other big questions at the upcoming Internet Identity Workshop. Hope to see you there.

On brand consistency and BHAGs

Fri, 02 Oct 2009 10:37:00 GMT

Ryan Stewart — a platform evangelist for Adobe — wrote a post resentful of Google Wave’s hype — and lamented the lack of similar interest and enthuasism for rich internet applications (RIAs), writing that Adobe, just [doesn’t] seem to encourage the visionary demos, the ones that make people rethink how they’ll communicate and interact.

The resulting discussion was worth a read, especially comments by Brian Lesser. While one of the arguments was over whether Wave could be built with Adobe technologies, that’s the least interesting part of the conversation. As Ryan points out, people don’t get excited about standards — they get exited about vision.

And that’s where I think there’s something to be realized.

Google is a company that values big thinking and puts resources into big ideas — what I’ve heard referred to as “BHAGs“, or “big hairy audacious goals”. I mean, their mission statement is to index and make available all the world’s information. That kind of brand promise has benefits beyond just Google, and I think that sets them apart.

The promise of Google Wave is to transform how people communicate and collaborate — and Google can credibly take on a challenge like that, because they’ve done a pretty good job of doing transforming search, and then — almost accidently — maps (even though, again, you could argue that draggable maps could have been done in Flash at the same time, but you’d be missing the point).

What Google seems to do well is focus on some obvious and widespread problem that regular people have and apply a determined, quantitive approach to solving the problem. Wave is probably their most risky bet yet because of the complexity of their solution, but I think anyone who deals with a large amount of information — in real-time or asynchronously — has to admit that our current tools just aren’t cutting it. And it’s only going to get worse unless something better is created.

But the benefits of such a technological solution will be missed unless it rapidly achieves scale through widespread and ubiquitous adoption — which requires an open, royalty-free standards-based approach. Just read Hal Varian's book on the subject, and you’ll realize that the reason that Google Wave is exciting is that it represents a multifaceted solution with a little something for everyone: the interface and user experience is controversial and novel providing designers a hook; the technology stack pleases and challenges open source hackers and the tech press equally; the collaboration and communication aspects excite businesses, managers, and any frustrated by email; and sceptics are held at bay by the cleverness of the economics of Google Wave — from the outset, Wave servers are designed to be run by other actors besides Google. That is, if you don’t want Google to own the space, you’ve now got to decide if you’re going to create a competing platform (and more importantly, “open standard”), or join the fray. Given Google Wave’s first-mover advantage, I think any competitor wishing to offer a competing open standard will be hard pressed to argue why they didn’t just “adopt the Wave Protocol”.

To put this argument another way, this is a product firing on all cylindars, and that’s what we’ve come to expect from Google.

If Adobe had launched Wave — the identical product that Google launched — I don’t think that anyone would take them seriously. As Scott Koon pointed out, Adobe is a toolmaker — they’re not known for big ideas that confront a basic human problem — least of all one related to information on the open web. Instead, Adobe tends to make graphics tools, and products that help organizations lock down information — not share it freely and openly. Wave is just a product that Adobe couldn’t make, because it’s not in Adobe’s DNA to tackle such problems.

It isn’t that Adobe doesn’t have its own BHAGs — it does — but I believe that history and behavior show that most Adobe products end up supporting existing control structures rather than breaking them down — same with Microsoft’s. Google’s products are inspirational because they enable us to imagine — and achieve — a different and perhaps freer tomorrow.

Chris Messina: Video of my talk: “Identity is the Platform”

Fri, 02 Oct 2009 01:12:00 GMT

I’ve posted the video that Brynn shot of my talk. Slides are available here.

Of course, it’s purely coincidental that I used Pownce to illustrate my story of the “death of a web app”, since it was relaunched yesterday at TypePad Motion — without any of the relationships that were lost when the service shut down.

Identity is the platform

Thu, 01 Oct 2009 07:37:00 GMT

These are the slides from my talk at the Mindtrek conference in Tampere, Finland today.

I admit that there are some controversial things in this talk, but if I don't say it, I don't know who will. So, for the purpose of understanding this talk, it's worth keeping in mind that I mean “OpenID” in a much more expansive way — not limited to the purview of the features of the protocol today, but as an effective, comprehensive competitor to Facebook Connect.

As well, I'm working out what I really mean by “Identity as the Platform”, but my five touchpoints are currently:

Me at the center
Smarter user agents
Dynamic personal expression
Universal user experience
Data is money

I'll be posting a video of my talk later, which should I expand on what these elements actually mean, but I'm happy for feedback in the meanwhile!

Also, I'm embedding this slideshow using Scribd as Slideshare wasn't able to convert my slides. Let me know what you think.

Will Norris: OpenID and WordPress Core

Tue, 29 Sep 2009 14:17:00 GMT

This was actually a comment I left on my last post about the v3.3 release of the OpenID plugin. It is a topic that comes up relatively often, and one in which most people are surprised when they hear my stance on it. It’s worthy of a separate discussion for those that are interested, so I’ve pulled it out into a separate post.

I’ve talked with core team about this numerous times… in fact, I spoke at WordCamp Portland and Seattle these last two weeks and talked with Matt about it. For the most part, I actually agree with him that OpenID doesn’t necessarily belong in core, at least not yet.

There’s a lot of thought being given to how WordPress can serve as your “digital hub” on the web. Right now, Automattic is playing in that space in the form of BuddyPress. Now right now, BP allows you to create another social network silo. BP installations don’t talk to each other, and there’s no way to use your account on one BP network to login to a different BP network. I talked with Mark Jaquith this weekend about my desire to see this outward facing functionality. For that, I think OpenID becomes painfully obvious.

I would also like to see this OpenID plugin deployed on WordPress.com to replace the existing plugin. Currently, all WP.com blogs are OpenIDs, but you can’t login or leave comments using an external OpenID. And currently, almost no one uses the existing OpenID provider. Of course, I would argue that this is because they haven’t done a good job of promoting it or adding any new features like SReg or AX. Using my OpenID plugin would greatly enhance the OpenID provider functionality on WP.com, and it would allow people to use OpenID when leaving comments. Some of the changes that are included in 3.3 are actually steps toward cleaning up the plugin so that it is more suitable for deploying on WordPress.com. There’s still more work to be done on this front, but it’s something I intend to continue pursuing.

As for inclusion in WordPress core, I just don’t we’re there yet. The OpenID plugin is pretty popular, but it is far from having the critical mass that would justify inclusion in core. I am a firm believer that WordPress should by no means try and include every cool feature under the sun in core. It would quickly grow out of control. I do believe, however, that the appropriate hooks should be provided in core to allow any cool feature under the sun to be added as a plugin. The core dev team agrees with me on this, and they’ve been very good about making whatever changes were necessary to allow plugins to provide that functionality. In fact, I overhauled how the authentication system is extended in WordPress 2.8 simply to make things like OpenID and OAuth much easier to implement.

A few other things I’d want to see fixed before considering inclusion in core… the OpenID plugin weighs in at what? almost 900K? Remove the screenshots and readme.txt and you’ve got 700K left. Over 500K of that is the JanRain OpenID library. So size is an issue. Also, the biggest problem that people have with getting the plugin to work is related to their environment. WordPress is known for having a very minimal set of requirements to get it running. I’d really want to track down and fix a lot of these weird environment issues that continue to plague the plugin. Finally, we need a really solid UI, both comment form integration and the admin side. I’m pretty happy with the new comment form integration, but the current admin screens need work. More than anything, there is just a lot of functionality in the plugin and it’s hard to boil it down. Especially when you consider both the OpenID consumer and provider options, both site-wide and per-user.