Confessions of a User Experience Junkie

Apple changed the big banner image on their home page last week… when you look at it on an iPad, it might make you think of this:

Somebody recently asked me what’s going on with the recent conflict between Apple and Adobe. Is Flash really that bad?

In short, yes. But that’s probably not a useful answer to anybody. (Neither is “In long, yyyyeeeeeessssssssssssssssssss”.) So where does someone just now discovering the issue turn? John Gruber’s written a ton of very insightful material on the topic, but it’s hard to keep up if you haven’t been following the issue since the beginning. I recommend reading through his archives, regardless, but for those with a bit less time on their hands, here’s my attempt at an executive summary:

Your Business, My Business

Adobe is a company whose revenue comes from selling tools to content creators. Content creators want tools they can use to reach a wide audience. So when it comes to Flash, it’s in Adobe’s interest to:

• make sure Flash Player exists everywhere, so lots of people can see Flash content.
• make sure Adobe’s tools are the only way to create Flash content.

Apple is a company whose revenue comes from selling devices to people who want a quality user experience. Apple has a very strict definition of what constitutes quality — too strict, some might say, but it’s working out well enough for their financials — so it’s in Apple’s interest to control the user experience.

All Adobe needs for its strategy to succeed is for there to be some way for Flash content creators to target every major platform where interactive media might be used. They don’t need to care how well Flash works on any given platform, or how that might affect users’ opinions of that platform, they just need Flash Player (or similar) to exist on that platform.

For Apple’s strategy to succeed, they have to make sure there’s no aspect of using a product that reflects poorly on that product. The only way they can really make that happen is to control every aspect of the product. Apple controls all the hardware and all the software on its iPhone OS products — they may not “own” every line of code (e.g. the open source parts of OS X), but they have the ability to tweak any part of the system to meet their performance / user experience goals.

Apple’s strategy also depends on being able to innovate or react quickly: if your revenue depends on having the coolest toy on the block, you need to keep up with whatever’s “cool” this year (or define it). More on this in a bit.

3, 2, 1… Fight!

Back to the dispute over Flash — this started out as a dispute over one aspect of the technology, and now it’s two:

• Since the original iPhone shipped, there’s been the question of whether some variant of the Flash Player browser plugin is included with MobileSafari, so that existing types of web-based Flash content can exist on iPhone OS devices.
• More recently, Adobe realized Apple wasn’t changing its stance on the first issue and looked for another way to enable Flash content creators to target iPhone OS devices: they made a tool which lets one build content using Flash, then have it automatically translated into a native iPhone app one can sell on the App Store. However, Apple changed the legal Terms of Use so that developers aren’t allowed to use such tools.

As for the first — putting web-based Flash content on the iPhone — it’s not too hard to see how the business cases I laid out above make this a win for Adobe and a screw for Apple.

All Adobe would need to do for their business strategy to succeed in this case is whatever minimal engineering effort is needed to make existing web-Flash content run on the iPhone. They don’t have to care about whether it runs slow (because smartphone CPUs are much less powerful than desktop CPUs), drains battery life (because all that CPU usage requires power), and isn’t quite usable (because lots of web-Flash content assumes you have a keyboard, multiple mouse buttons, and the ability to hover the pointer over something without clicking it — all stuff you don’t get on a touchscreen-only platform). All they need is to be able to sell content creators on having millions more devices on which their content (theoretically) works.

On the other hand, for Apple this proposition sucks. If web browsing becomes slow (because every other page is eating up the CPU with Flash-based banner ads), battery life becomes poor (for the same reason), and you can try to play all those Flash-based web games only to have them fail at random times for random reasons, it makes a crappy user experience for the device as a whole. And since Flash is Adobe’s software, Apple wouldn’t be able to do much about the problem.

You might think the answer is for Apple and Adobe to make nice, and cooperate on making Flash on iPhone not just work, but work really awesomely well. But this still goes counter to the business strategy. Adobe doesn’t stand to gain from such an endeavor — they sell just as many Flash Creative suite licenses either way. And while Apple could spend a bunch of money sending its top iPhone engineers to help Adobe with Flash, that doesn’t help Apple’s bottom line much — millions of people are happily buying iPhone OS products already, and it’s doubtful that number would change much with Flash on iPhone. (Not to mention that Apple stands to gain more from having its top iPhone engineers working on the next iPhone.)

Round 2: Gatekeepers Always Win

Okay, so what about the latest turn in this fiasco? Isn’t it a win-win for everybody if Adobe’s Flash tools can be used to create native iPhone apps? Not really — it’s a short-term success for Adobe and a long-term risk for Apple.

How so? Well, the benefits to Adobe from such a move should be obvious: more ways for Flash content creators to put their work in front of people means more sales of Flash content-creation tools. The problem for Apple has to do with the second aspect of their strategy that I outlined earlier: since their revenue depends on having the coolest new devices, they have to keep on top of what’s “cool” as times change — either coming up with the next cool thing themselves, or being able to react quickly to new trends originating elsewhere. If a third-party toolkit for Apple’s platform becomes too popular, Apple becomes dependent on the third party.

To get an idea of what this means, imagine Adobe’s Flash-to-iPhone technology became available a year ago — April 2009 — and shortly thereafter, more than half the developers on the App Store migrated to it, including most games. (It’s so great to be able to develop the same app once and release it for both web and iPhone!) What would the past year have looked like?

• Apple unveils iPhone OS 3.0 in mid-March. Adobe couldn’t delay their big Flash tools release for it, so the Flash-to-iPhone tech ships in April, still targeting iPhone OS 2.x.
• iPhone OS 3.0 ships in June, with great features like cut/copy/paste, landscape-orientation keyboard, push notifications, and tools that make it easy for game developers to add both local and internet-based multiplayer.
• Very few App Store products take advantage of the iPhone OS 3.0 features — there’s no support for them in Adobe’s Flash-to-iPhone tool, and the new version of that isn’t due out for several months at least.
• Adobe ships a new Flash-to-iPhone tool in January 2010, with support for all the new features in iPhone OS 3.0.
• Apple unveils iPad in January 2010, and gives developers the iPhone OS 3.2 tools needed to build bigger better apps for it.
• It takes a little while for developers to make use of the new features from the latest version of Adobe’s Flash-to-iPhone tool, but stuff using the new iPhone OS 3.0 features starts to show up on the App Store in February-March. Not much of it, though, because most of those features are irrelevant to web-Flash users.
• iPad ships in April 2010, but there’s not much third-party software for it, because everybody’s building stuff in Flash, and the next version of Flash-to-iPhone/iPad won’t be ready till October…

Get the picture? (Considering that Adobe tends to produce big new releases of its authoring tools only once every couple of years, the hypothetical timeline above might be overly optimistic.)

Regardless of what you might think about Apple having established themselves as gatekeeper to the iPhone OS platform, it’s clearly in Apple’s best interest not to let Adobe or anyone else take over that role.

Is it good for the platform and its users for Apple to be acting as gatekeeper at all? Could Apple achieve its anti-Flash goals through less heavy-handed means? What about the whole HTML5 angle? There are many more questions to be answered here, but this is an executive summary: plenty more is available elsewhere.

Yeah… so I haven’t posted in a while, huh? How I managed to be deprived of opportunities and/or motivation to write in this journal for the last six months or so is a long story, perhaps for another time. Suffice to say that my professional and personal lives are now (finally) back in a state that I actually feel like writing about UE stuff when I have time to, so this probably won’t be the last entry for another six months.

In other news… I got a new cellphone last month, and a new PowerBook a couple weeks ago. Bluetooth is officially the Coolest Geek Toy Ever, especially when Salling Clicker is involved. Thus far, there’s been a lot of noise in the academic HCI community over “attentive user interfaces” but not a lot of good real-world implementations; but now, I’ve quickly made the transition to living with a computer that (thanks to a wireless connection to the phone in my pocket) knows when I’m present and can react accordingly. In fact, I’m sometimes rather annoyed when other parts of my computing experience can’t be usefully presence-aware. (More on that another time.)

Anywho, today I threw together a Clicker script for iPhoto 4… going through hundreds of kitten photos to mark the cutest ones and delete the blurry ones is so much more comfortable when we can do it while relaxing on the couch instead of leaning over the keyboard. It’s a keypad script designed for the Sony Ericsson T608/T610/T616, but it should be easy to translate to other devices as well. Here it is in case you might find it useful.

Somebody noticed recently that the top result for a Google search on the letter “A” is www.apple.com, and then Rael noticed recently that the same is true for “O” and www.oreilly.com. From there, we get this interesting variation of a Zeitgeist:

A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

Some of these make pretty obvious sense (CNET, E! Online), some are tangential connections (the Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation, the FSF) and some are just… odd (X for Netscape.com?). Either way, it’s an interesting snapshot of the ‘Net and some amusing weekend fun.