Ariel Sommeria .com

Beeple did this really cool video of an imaginary hip hop robot. Awesome!

instrumental video nine from beeple on Vimeo.

Techcrunch just sold to AOL . I understand the need to sell? But why AOL? Independently of what they bring to the table, it’s just a terrible brand to be associated with. When you see what NewsCorp did to MySpace, it should make Arrington cautious. Just about any dodgy Russian Mafia backed firm would have been less damaging to the brand.

I stumbled across this “Web Installation”, in the contemporary art museum sense. It’s really cool, and unfortunately Chrome only. Need I say it’s HTML5? Apart from being impressed and drawn in,  I often thought to myself that it was marred by the crappy browser chrome (all the stuff around the actual content of the window). So it would have looked a lot cooler done in AIR, but I guess that kind of defeats the purpose Anyway, take a look, it’s worth a few minutes of your time.

http://www.thewildernessdowntown.com

We’re starting to use Haxe in Silex, and it fell to me to start porting the core from as2 to Haxe. We’ve decided to do it progressively, so that means getting as2 and Haxe code to work together in the same SWF.  so Ii’ve written my first Haxe related post over here:

http://www.silexlabs.org/the-blog/fr/2010/09/haxe-and-as2/

http://www.silexlabs.org/the-blog/fr/2010/08/amfphp-2-0-roadmap/

To test a new app in Internet Explorer 8 I decided to try the virtualization route on my Mac. I installed XP on parallels, and of course included was IE6. No problems, I’ll just download an update, I thought. Not so simple: The IE8 installer I was offered by default is in French, but it isn’t compataible with my English XP. So I tried the English one. Not only isn’t it signed, which means that it is blocked by default on XP and I had to find the setting to allow unsigned files, but it was corrupted. I finally managed to get it through Windows Update, after going through all the Genuine Advantage Windows bullshit.
No thanks Microsoft!

I’ve posted a formalization of the discussions we’re having about the future of Silex over at the Silex Labs blog:

http://www.silexlabs.org/the-blog/fr/2010/07/future-silex-developments/

just a quick tip of the hat to someone with some serious hacking skills who got Flash to run on an IPad. http://www.redmondpie.com/flash-on-apple-ipad-video/

So I finally got around to trying the Ipad. I’m not yet decided on whether or not I want to buy one, but I sure do like the experience. And the experience I find drives the following points home, that I think can be applied to building stuff for the web:

– Purists can say what they want, people love stuff that moves and zooms and slides around. I tried the Wired application and I loved it. For those who haven’t seen it or videos about it, there’s a video here.

– Zooming around is all nice, but once you’re on the content page you’re interested in, animations become annoying. So to counter balance the point I made above, animations are good to help people navigate, to inform, to train, but once you’re there, stop!

– Content is king. The ipad has only a simple black frame, with one very discrete button. So once you’re looking at that content, there’s nothing else that distracts you

– Ads can be of interest. In the Wired Ipad app they’re even beautiful and it’s nice to look at them. This starkly contrasts with Le Monde, a newspaper whose content I like but who shoves blinking ads at me as much as it cans.

– It should be as easy as possible to buy stuff on a website. Amazon has done it well with One-Click. The Ipad has made it really easy to buy.

Finally, as customers have been asking me for flipbooks for the past few years, I just know that they’re going to be asking for sliding content viewing.