Adobe Kills GoLive

No more speculation, it's official.  Adobe announced that it has discontinued it's WYSIWYG web creation/editing program, GoLive (if you're old school, you might remember it as CyberStudio).  After Adobe's purchase of Macromedia back 2005 there were many questions about which products would be discontinued and which might be merged.  GoLive seemed to be in prime position for the chopping block since Macromedia's Dreamweaver was by far the better tool.  

As a side note, a friend at work attended Microsoft's Artist in Residency training (which, get this, they call AIR...doesn't Adobe have something by that name...?) where there was unofficial mention that Frontpage is also about to be discontinued.  It will be replaced by a Expression Web, part of their Expression Suite of programs.

For the whole story on the demise of GoLive, check this out. 

Microsoft Pisses Off Users...Intentionally.

ZDNet posted a very interesting article a few days ago entitled "Microsoft: Vista feature designed to 'annoy users'" (read full article here) in which Microsoft product unit manager, David Cross, states, "The reason we put [User Account Control] into the Vista platform was to annoy users -- I'm serious."

Since I like to be able to pay my bills and buy life's little luxuries (like food), annoying the user is a quality I try to keep out of my design.  So what is the deal?  Is it just Microsoft thinking way, way ,way outside the user experience box?  In a twisted way, maybe.  As the article explains, "...[A]nnoying users had been part of a Microsoft strategy to force independent software vendors (ISVs) to make their code more secure, as insecure code would trigger a prompt, discouraging users from executing the code."

I guess when you have the lion's share of the market you can hold your users ransom to get your vendors to fall in line.

Adobe Releases Adobe Media Player

Today Adobe rolled out its Media Player...or was it this coming Wednesday that they did it?  Their press release is dated April 16.  The news must have been "For sooner than immediate release."  Anyway, let's just call it today because writing in the Future Past Perfect tense will have was too difficult (or would that be "will was have been"?).  

According to the future press release, "This desktop application expands Adobe's Internet video solutions, adding to an emerging ecosystem that enables new ways to distribute and monetize media, while helping viewers discover and view high-quality content both online and offline.  Leveraging Adobe's Emmy® Award winning Flash® arechitecture, the Adobe Media Player delivers more engaging video experiences to viewers while offering content publishers new abilities to distribute, track and build businesses around their media assets." (Adobe.com.  "Adobe Unveils Next Generation Internet Video Solution." 16,04, 2008. http://www.adobe.com/aboutadobe/pressroom/pressreleases/200704/041607AMP.html).

When they say "...discover and view high-quality content" I wonder if they mean substantive content or high-def content.  Having downloaded the player, watched the handy tutorials, and futzed around with the app for a bit, my initial impression is that this may be a bit of an overstatement in either respect.  The player is capable of delivering high-def content (it plays H.264 encoded MPEG4's as well .flv's) but I didn't see much high-def representation in their offerings.  And their offerings, from a substantive stand point, are rather lacking (though you can catch some very brief clips from Good Eats and Nova which is never a bad thing).

Of course it would not be fair to criticize paucity of content on the app's very first day and I don't mean it as a criticism so much as an observation.  I look forward to seeing what else shows up -- not only for the sake of my viewing choices but also as proof of viability.  Most folks don't produce their video content as .flv's or H.264's and it will be Adobe's challenge to change this (and hopefully while larger content producers may get onboard, will the typical user really utilize the "Personal Videos" portion of the app?  Adobe's media encoder is going to have become a lot more visible).  

I wonder if pushing format adoption is the real motive behind the player...hmm, just some speculation but YouTube is a huge reason for the insanely fast adoption rate of Flash Player 9.  But then again, that was content driving application adoption and this would be application adoption driving content format which is quite a different scenario.  Anyway, enough of that.  I'm not nearly savvy enough to anticipate Adobe's marketing machinations.

 The app itself is quite slick-looking with an appreciably Adobe aesthetic and having been designing for a Flex application on the AIR platform for the last nine months, I'm really excited to take a closer look at it.  You can download the app for your very own right here.

Art and Home Depot

Today my wife, son and I took a trip over to the Denver Arts District and were browsing some of the galleries when we came across something pretty interesting at Nine10Arts.  On the sidewalk outside was a sandwich board that read "Come in and see how easy it is to be Green!" (I'm paraphrasing, but you get the gist).  Essentially they were calling attention to the green architecture of the building itself but in a very compelling way.  Artwork from each of the dozen or so studios located in the building spilled out into the common areas (hallways, stairwells, coffee bar, etc.) and mixed in were installations demonstrating the environmentally-friendly construction techniques and materials. The method of framing, the material used as trim (a substance called wheatboard) and the reclamation of typically unutilized space (a rooftop garden among other things) presented in the same context as the artists' works got me thinking about the changing ideas about form and function in user-centered application design.

The distinction between design and development is being obliterated -- or at least extremely blurred -- both in workflow methodologies (the abandonment of waterfall or silo models for spiral or iterative) and production technologies (Microsoft's Silverlight and Adobe's forthcoming Thermo are perfect examples of technologies that determine the way in which designers and developers will interact.  That they approach this interaction from opposite ends of the spectrum is a topic for a future post).  The bromide, "Form follows function" is less and less accurate as our work with and perception of each cast them as inextricably bound.  The way in which the purely functional elements of this gallery (support structures, building materials, etc.) were worked in with the exhibits demonstrated this very nicely.  At one point I was looking at a cross-section of the ceiling braces that was extending out into the space of an open stairwell and thought it was one of the artists' pieces.  Granted this chopped out section of ceiling was removed from its typical context and it had a placard on the wall next to it that explained its green construction but looked very much like a title placard next to any sculpture you might find in a gallery...but now I'm just trying to defend myself .  "Yes, that wall outlet has a certain je ne sais quoi.  It speaks to the isolation of the human condition.  And have you seen the exhaust fan?!"

This is a Test.

As I've mentioned in my bio blurb thing, I am a User Experience designer for EffectiveUI in Denver, Colorado and am currently the lead designer on the eBay Desktop application.  It has been a really interesting project in many respects but chief among them, at least for me, is the design issues that have arisen in our attempts to translate a well-established browser experience into that of a stand-alone app.  It is an issue that I'm going to address in much more detail in an upcoming post but the sometime surprising user test group results that earlier, public beta iterations of eBay Desktop generated has been very much on my mind lately as I've been redesigning the default skin and layout of the application.  We are now at a point to start thinking about another round of user testing which means we are about to find out that a number of our "obvious," "utterly intuitive" ideas are neither.  It's bubble-bursting time.  

Of course, better to find out now.  We would have much better software, hardware, homeware, officeware, userware, if more companies didn't fail to conduct an adequate testing phase.  

Another Voice in the Overwhelming Din

So I've succumb and started a blog.  With relatively few exceptions, I consider blogs to be an exercise in extreme narcissism though, to be fair, this is more a product of how they are employed by their users than an inherent quality of the medium.  Or maybe I'm just rationalizing.

Nevertheless, I'm going to join in the cacophony of blog prattle and spend some time thinking about User Experience and User-centric Design, its underlying methodologies, and asking a lot of mostly-related questions (i.e. "How blurred has the line between designers and developers truly become," and "What were they smoking when they chose that design?").

If you've been known to use things or if you like having experiences, you just might find something of interesting.