Others have said that as an e-book reader the iPad just doesn’t cut the mustard (and some with even more vitriol suggest it’s not much cop at anything else either!)

I quite liked Kevin Rose’s comparison.

But all this argument back and forth misses the bigger picture I think. Amazon and Apple are smarter than most people are giving them credit for.

Clearly Amazon saw the future of books would be electronic, especially when no one else was interested. And the best way to monetize a non-existent market is to create it.

I think the kindle was essentially a loss leader. A flawed and expensive but ultimately desirable (probably as a result of the price and scarcity) device. It didn’t matter to Amazon that they couldn’t generate the demand to reduce the price via economies of scale. They were setting up the market for someone else to create a cheaper, slicker, more fashionable device. And guess who would be selling the e-books?

OK at the moment Apple has their own e-book store, but how long will it be before they do a deal with Amazon who must surely have access to the largest library of titles. Plus I am sure there will be a way to get Amazon e-books onto the iPad without a deal being done, never mind all the me-too devices that will be coming out which will work with Amazon’s store.

I wouldn’t exactly call it a zero-sum game.

I have been mulling this over for a while, the recent release of Apple’s iPad combined with a conversation I had with a designer not long ago have crystallised my thoughts about it.

The designer emailed me about a project he was involved with, which not only sported a Flash intro, but the whole site was built in Flash. So I set about explaining that it wasn’t 1998 anymore and the benefits of converting  to plain text / HTML from SEO (from time to time I hear Flash is better at SEO nowadays, but I’m still not sure I buy it) and Accessibility points of view.

He was concerned that we would lose the tight control over the typography and visual effects that Flash offered. Again, I explained that with modern coding techniques using HTML 5, CSS 2-3 & Jquery, all aspects of the old site were achievable without the aid of a plug-in.

I also mentioned that having text fly in and out when hovering over links might seem like a good idea to the client and be fun to design, but the end user would probably end up frustrated and annoyed – I know I was after 5 minutes. The point was particularly prescient as it was a brochure style site where the major call to action is contacting the firm. Clearly the goal mustn’t be to make it harder and more irritating for a user to find out who the company is, what they do and how to reach them.

So far so old, everyone has heard these arguments all before and yet flash is still around, still has a large market penetration in the browser space. So what makes me think it’s going away?

In short HTML 5.

The new HTML specification provisions for video to be played natively in the browser without a plug-in. I think this is huge, no more will we visit a site with a freshly installed browser and see the message “You must install another piece of bloat-ware to view this content” (I am paraphrasing here obviously) before the obligatory face palm. There will be no more need to update an extra plug-in every time a security flaw is announced (or not as the case may be) on top of all the other things modern computers need to update.

It seems to me that 70-80% of Flash use is for streaming video on the internet, YouTube, Ustream etc. As soon as the major sites start converting over to HTML 5 and using the browsers native capabilities I can see Flash’s prominence dwindling quite rapidly. The only applications I can see requiring it might be those with very rich user experiences, but with more powerful modern browsers and advanced coding technologies such as Jquery even that will shrink. Leaving just online gaming, e.g. farmville etc. which is a fast growing and lucrative niche at the moment, but I wonder if it will soon reach it’s peak.

So what does all this have to do with Apple and the iPad? Well aside from the pros and cons of the device itself, some commentary has extended the negativity shown to the iPhone in not supporting Flash, to it’s larger slate based cousin.

Criticizing Apple for not supporting Flash on the iPhone was a bit short sighted in the first place as clearly such an authoritarian company is not going to do a competing technology any favours when it could promote it’s own Quicktime format (e.g. the YouTube app). But also for the reasons I listed above, Flash should be surplus to requirements in the near future, more so thanks to Apple’s Safari browser being one of those leading the way in advancing new browser technologies.

With that in mind and the fact that Apple have already sold a shed-load of iPhones (and iPod touch’s), will undoubtedly sell a lot of iPads, their Macbooks aren’t doing too bad either – all of which ship with Safari. Also Google is cranking out their Android / Chrome OS machines, end result: there is going to be a huge market of devices and consumers that do not want nor need Flash in their lives!

I’m sure there will be many people who think there will be a small but powerful group of users who will vote down every advert they see, just to stick it to the man (and charge him for the privilege). But I think that’s a slightly simplistic view of the situation.

That scenario may well come true, but that doesn’t mean it’s a negative outcome. I assume adverts can only be voted up or down after they have been explicitly viewed by a user. Meaning, if I was an advertiser and I knew that my advert was definitely going to be viewed and interacted with by a particular demographic then it becomes a very valuable opportunity and one I wouldn’t mind paying a little extra for.

Those worried that all advertisers would be hideously over charged and thus discouraged from supporting such a major ad-driven site like Digg needn’t be in my view.

I’m sure Digg have considered the possibility of a few users trying to sabotage the system (and annoy the advertisers) and will factor in the ratio of all adverts being ‘dugg down’ into how much each advertiser pays, i.e. if everyone is being voted down then the penalty is less severe. Only those adverts which are genuinely voted down should cost more.

Over time I see this system having several benefits:

• Higher quality adverts.
• Better targeted campaigns.
• Improved interaction and feedback between users & advertisers
• Greater return of investment for advertisers.
• Potentially more Ad revenue (for Digg & other websites who might adopt this strategy).

All of which is great for everyone.

Just over a month ago I relocated from Dundee to Burton-upon-Trent in the East Midlands.

Having previously worked in one of the UK’s most prolific new media hubs – Brighton – I was slightly disappointed by Dundee’s apparent lack of activity in this area.

Scotland in general doesn’t seem to have much web related activity in the real world outside of Edinburgh and Glasgow. Which is shame and even more surprising given that Dundee bills itself as a centre for new media activity (I guess it is in reference to Dundee’s computer game developers).

I now find myself in the Midlands, within easy of reach of Birmingham and Nottingham. I am excited at the prospect of more access to local new media events and will be interested to see what’s up and coming in the area (this reminds me to refresh my upcoming.org preferences!). If anyone knows of any interesting activities, please leave or comment or use my contact form to let me know.

So for a while I have been thinking of putting together an exhaustive list of features / elements a new site ought to have. That is not to say they must have – you may decide some elements aren’t required in a particular circumstance. But given a list of things you ought to have, at least you can make a choice which to include and which not to (rather than forget).

If this all sounds a bit vague, let me give some examples off the top of my head to get the list going. Obviously this is a little subjective as these are concerns I have when starting a new site and as such some are quite specific to my development environment (WAMP / LAMP), but here we go:

A website should…

• have a valid doctype
• validate against it’s doctype
• have correctly filled document headers
  • Content-type
  • Title – clear,concise and related to the page content
  • Keywords – short list and related to the page content
  • Description -short description related to the page content
• have a favicon
• use external CSS files and Javascript to separate presentation and behavior
• degrade gracefully
• use appropriate alt text for all images
• have lowercase filenames and URLs
• have nice URLs (use modrewrite or equivalent)
• work across the main browsers (FF 2 & 3, IE 6-8, Safari)
• not use too many purely decorative elements in it’s markup
• use microformats where possible
• be fast to load
• have a custom 404 page
• have a site map
• have a contact form or email address
  • use CAPTCHA security for contact forms

This is by no means an exhaustive list, so please add your thoughts in the comments. I suppose this could all be wrapped up in a ‘cheat sheet’ of some kind, perhaps this has already been done – let me know!

Is your worklife balance killing your chances of freelancing-success

In the meat-space my only resolution was not to make any resolutions (despite the self defeating aspect of it), mainly because they are usually doomed to fail. So rather than set myself up to fail, I thought I would write up some of my virtual resolutions in a blog. Therefore my first resolution is:

1. Setup and maintain a blog

The reason for this whole exercise, is setting up and maintaining a blog is my first resolution. I have been meaning to do it for a while now and a few people have been getting annoyed with me ranting about web stuff, frequently saying “Put it in a blog!” So here we are, my only worry is that I will fail to keep updating this blog and it will end up having been no better than a real world resolution.

A side benefit of maintaining a blog, is that several work projects recently could’ve used a blog engine (the rather fine wordpress) rather than me re-inventing (and having to support) the wheel for the hundredth time with my CMS. With more projects in this vein coming up it will be incredibly useful to know this blog engine like the back of my hand.

2. Get better at freelancing

Although I have not been freelancing long I can already tell that a constant battle will be to strive to improve the service I offer clients and achieve greater levels of professionalism. So far this has manifested itself as timekeeping and the resulting invoicing. It seems important to keep track of what I have been doing and how long it took me to help with accountability and eventually invoicing clients. I also hope to go through a process of evaluation to work out how well I anticipated the length of development time for each project so far and feed that into the quotation process in the future.

Another aspect of being a better freelancer seems to be ‘do the things freelancers do’ such as blogging and writing up my code with discussion about lessons learned along the way. As well as being a learning tool, it should hopefully help with promotion of my site, my services and the work I have done for my clients.

I am also inspired by the idea I read about on Tom Nixon’s blog that you should give away your knowledge for free.

3. Setup my own projects

When I first started freelancing it not only seemed a great opportunity to continue to work in the field that I love, but also a way to work in that field the way I thought I ought to be doing it. Originally that meant working smarter not harder and sticking to design / programming / philosophical principles in my work. While generally that seems to have been the case, I do feel there is room for improvement. Particularly in terms of working smarter. In the short time I have been freelancing I have been churning out CMS driven websites for clients and while I am proud of the work I have done for them, I believe I ought to be doing more. Specifically setting up my own web application for public consumption. The dream is to be answerable to nobody but the users of my web app and me.

Part of my excitement about becoming a freelancer was that I could set my own work timetable and perhaps achieve the mythical 4 day week. While that’s great in principle real life tends to have a habit of getting in the way. Client’s do expect you to be available at their beck and call (i.e. when they are working). I guess the idea is that I should become more forceful of will and explain why I will be unavailable perhaps even drafting some kind explanation in the form of a contract. But that’s not really me – I guess I’m too easily cajoled into work. So the way around it is to do away with clients, but how will I pay the bills? By becoming my own client of course. The ideal is to create a web site that earns money while I sleep and that only needs to be tended to on a weekly basis, with all it’s processes and data stored remotely so it can be maintained wherever I am. Somewhat in the spirit of Tim Ferriss’ 4 hour week.

To sum up, I intend to build a web application, to learn more (about web programming), promote my web site / services, to earn more money and if I make enough stop doing client work & work a ‘4 hour week’.

4. Be more ‘virtual’

Part of the working smarter theme has to be working more virtually. Trying to untie the systems and data I use from my local machine. There are several reasons for this:

• It will be good cross promotion for my site(s), i.e. blogging, twitter, last.fm, del.icio.us etc
• More mobile – helping me work wherever I am
• More secure – offsite backups for critical data

That’s all I can think of for now, but I guess I will probably return to this topic in the future to add things and discuss my progress.