Now, Virgin makes an announcement about their move away from Flash (and, not to be subjective, any possibility of using Microsoft’s Silverlight) ostensibly to broaden the availability of their Website. I’m not saying they’re doing this to purposely drop-kick Adobe’s Flash which has had a great run for some time now. But, with their expanding iPhone (and soon iPad) platform, Apple’s decision is potentially going to lead developers towards other solutions.

One does exist:  JavaScript and  CSS. But, one the biggest uses for Flash (and the main reason it’s gotten so mainstream) is support for video–also the most likely reason Apple won’t allow it on it’s mobile platform OS (beyond games). HTML5′s potential for rich media, namely video support.

The HTML5 standard is still a ways away (the target date is 2012). But, as with previous versions, nothing will stop Microsoft, Mozilla, and others from rolling preliminary support into the coming versions of their browsers. Of course, you can be sure Apple will take as long as possible to roll it into Safari…at least on the iPhone.

If the industry pushes this (to the demise of Adobe), Apple’s going to be in a corner. Will that matter? Likely not, knowing Mr. Jobs and his disdain for following the pack. But, there’s going to be a point, sometime in the future, when Jobs and his disciples will need to stop holding that last tiny hill against the non-Apple waves threatening to submerge it.

Still, here’s hoping the push towards HTML5 continues or even accelerates. Dealing with plug-in versions and of course yet another plug-in to check for and support. Don’t get me wrong, though, Flash is still where it’s going to be when it comes to animation and flashy movie sites. JS and CSS can only go so far (though they CAN go far). Will that hurt Adobe? Maybe but who cares? Their support (version 10 was a pain in the ass for people who offer Flash controls for file downloads) and their profiteering off Flash ($699 just to be able to work with it? Maybe you shouldn’t have given it away to the end users…) has built up their egos a bit too much. They were better when they were still fighting Macromedia (remember them? They made Flash) and Quark. They tried. Now, they rule.

kn

I was doing an Ajax call to an aspx page with a Web Method. Something like this:

/someplace/somefile.aspx/MyWebMethod

Using JSON and JQuery. Fine. Done it a ton of times throughout the site but this time it was in a specific folder that contained files used exclusively for Ajax calls (mostly XML).

The error I was getting was:

Exception information:
Exception type: ArgumentException
Exception message: Unknown web method DoLookup.
Parameter name: methodName

Unknown web method, huh? But, the file was there, the code was in there and it worked fine on Dev…what the deuce?

After trolling the net to find something (mostly found people forgetting “static” or making their WebMethods private), the idea that the file might be corrupt popped into my head.

I thought I was stupid…after all, the aspx file just contains a basic page reference to the code behind. All the real action was in the site dll. It’d be stupid if–

Then I saw it. The file size was ZERO. Nice. I checked the delivery folder (where I drop deployments onto the server). Also zero. Great.

Checked my dev publish folder where said deployments start their life after a publish from within Visual Studio. 1kb. Oooo…looks like something died in between.

So, I copied that sucker all over again and lo and behold, the friggin thing works!

I dunno, I guess you’ve got to ask yourself what you’d do if you were trying to figure out an error message for that…how’s about Page reference missing? Or Holy Shit, your aspx file has NO CONTENT.

Ugh…Microsoft…love/hate is becoming hate/hate…

I just saw this little bit on the WSJ about a large apartment complex in NY that has a year of money left to pay a huge debt that was used to finance its purchase not too long ago. Just this time around it’s less about bad loans and more about bad forecasts and judgment in general.

This quote from the NewsHour piece says it all: “the market was full of such optimism that rents would keep increasing and office buildings would stay fully leased.” Of course, because all markets go up all the time…

Granted the deal was done in early 2007 so everyone was on the same bandwagon seeing dollar signs and thinking the economy would keep going up. But, at the same time, you had others already looking at the overinflated residential market with worry. I can’t remember the guy but Jon Stewart interviewed someone who was quoted (there was a video so we’ve got proof!) as saying the market is going to tank. Meanwhile, the guy interviewing him scoffed at the idea. Great job.

The big problem with commercial real estate is the relative size of the transactions. There may be fewer buildings versus single-family homes out there but your typical home doesn’t sell for a hundred million dollars.

Time will tell of course but I’d hate to see another dip in the emotional economy–dictated by fears and whims–bring the current progress, however shaky, crashing down.

kn

The controller contains sensors to sense just about any movement and even squeezes and passes it to the console or computer. The demo on CrunchGear looks pretty cool (you can sort of skip the first half if you want).

Outside of being a largely direct competitor to the Wii controller (Microsoft? Sony? You listening? You’d better get in there quick!), I think the best parts of it are the fact that it’s smaller (it’s the size of a friggin golf ball!) and wireless (i.e. none of this bullshit IR that requires you to point a part of the controller at the screen all the time). It can really free things up when it comes to the more “active” gaming experience.

Of course, the downside is that–just like the Wii-mote–it will be limited a bit in terms of gaming experiences. Even in the demo, you can see that the movements in the real world tend to be jittery when translated to the computer (note the basketball as the guy’s talking flails around like a loose electron). That might be a calibration or sensitivity issue but it’s still a potential issue game devs will have to deal with.

And while the Wii has plenty of games that use the Wii-mote they aren’t always that good. Shooter games have the issue of accuracy (I can never seem to get the console to realize where it should think my controller is aimed at when I look down its length) and sword fighting requires big movements.

Still, if you checked out that video you’d see how well the controller worked for running and jumping (though I think there was a bit of a delay on the jump which can be annoying). It’ll be interesting to see who picks it up and how well it will penetrate. As the days of the PlayStation seem numbered in my mind (it’s not like it’s going to disappear…it’s just not the hot platform anymore and if my game library is a judge of it, I’ve got a 10:1 ratio of XBox360 games over PS3 games…for a reason), this is really Microsoft’s ball to play (pun intended).

If MS can license that sucker and figure out how to attach, include or incorporate the controller’s technology into its console bundles, it can finally take a chunk (a potentially huge chunk) out of Nintendo’s new-found success. Of course, if Nintendo can get it first, they can further solidify their place in the market but it won’t be quite as revolutionary. It would just be a downsizing of the controllers–and would make people look even funnier as they play with the controller in their pockets when someone walks in.

The tech has been around for a while–it was profiled almost a year ago here–so you’ve got to wonder if it’s just a funding thing or if it’s because they had trouble figuring out how to leverage the tech properly.

I guess we’ll see. I’m sure the main console players have heard about it by now. Time will tell if they pick up on it and grab it before it’s too late. If they don’t then Ball-It might have to go the route of the obscure controllers like the PS Eye, the Novint Falcon, and the NeuroSky which are all trying to carve out some sort of niche in a market that doesn’t require them for anything.

kn

If I had to guess, you’re looking at a $30-50 million round, given the players and how late the round is. So, you’re looking at enough to get ramped up for expansion (also, given the players) into other areas. The thing is, will they lose focus and end up spinning their wheels as competitors grab market share in the games market?

I still can’t help but think all this is doing is funding the build out of the on-demand gaming industry without any guarantee of success for OnLive itself. Plus, they’ve lit a spark. Outside of direct competitors trying to mimic their model, you’re going to see Microsoft putting some of that $9.5 billion (per year) in R&D funding to figure out how to repurpose the Xbox into a similar device…except it’ll have a hard disk and CPU to handle other stuff off-line (for instance, how’s about 160GB of cache space to speed things up even more?).

We’ll see…it’s six months until GDC 2010 and 9 months until E3. I’m guessing they’ll announce something by one of those events if they’re really on to something. If they don’t, then you’ve got to wonder if they aren’t taking a tangent they shouldn’t be.

kn

I still think this is a shaky idea at best, at least here in the US. Sure, people will love not having to upgrade a PC or deal with shelling out $60 for a game they’ll play for a month or two but I think people still like to hold on to certain games (so maybe this becomes a great way to demo games). In other words, you won’t eliminate the need for consoles in homes but you might create a sort of “pre-market” for games.

The tricky part might be the competition…they’re competing against the console makers themselves (game devs will make more money selling to individual gamers than to a single company that buys a bulk batch of licenses) as well as anyone else in the living room that wants to own the game market in some way (cable operators, InstantAction and other online services, and Microsoft and Apple with their home TV systems).

And, of course, there’s the whole issue with lag. Broadband is fast but for many it’s not consistent which will suck for FPS and racing games which already cause a lot of frustration when lag strikes.

kn

The best part is just how rocky the road was for Marvel over the last decade. Back in 1996, a power play by Ronald Perelman and Carl Icahn tossed the company into bankruptcy and even after it emerged from Chapter 11, it was still unsure what the company would do to stay alive.

Then around 2000 Avi Arad comes along and pushes to get X-Men (2000) and Spiderman (2002) made into movies. Okay, technically Blade (1998) was first but while it did well, it wasn’t the blockbuster that Spider man was. Millions of dollars are made (mostly for the studios) and Marvel was suddenly on the map again.

Mr. Arad pushed even further in recent years to create a film division in Marvel that self-produced the films so Marvel could retain more of the revenue. Iron Man and the Incredible Hulk (not the Ang Lee one) were the first of those to come out in 2008.

Lo and behold, 10 years after emerging from Chapter 11 into the blinding light of a world that wrote them off for naught, Marvel just got sold for billions. Not millions, billions.

The potential was there but it took a handful of people to see the potential and make it happen (like they couldn’t have made those same blockbusters before they went bankrupt…someone was blind back then).

Now, the question is, will Disney ruin it? So far Disney’s run with Pixar post-acquisition produced Up which has done well (2nd only to Finding Nemo)…but that’s largely due to (I’m sure) the fact that John Lassiter is the Chief Creative Officer at Disney (you gotta think despite the politics within Disney it’s something of a vindication that he’s such a high ranking player in an organization that fired him for wanting to make the types of movies that made Pixar such a success).

Time will tell. Mr. Arad has moved on from Marvel but had retained ties. If he’s not around, will Marvel (or rather Disney) drop the ball? They’ve got some momentum (if they screw up the Avengers series or some of the coming sequels, they’re idiots and deserve to wither within the Disney organization).

kn

Vista was a complete mess. There was no reason to upgrade to it unless you were an uber hard-core gamer (like a friend of mine) and really really wanted DirectX 10 support. Well, after watching said friend run into wall after wall (mostly driver incompatibility walls), I sat back with my XP install and continued to enjoy everything Windows XP had to offer…like a stable platform to be productive on.

Will Windows 7 be the anti-Vista and actually bring more people like me back into the Microsoft OS upgrade loop again?  Maybe. The biggest single hurdle for me (beyond having to deal with the annoyance of reinstalling everything again) is whether or not all my XP apps and games will install and run just as smoothly (if not smoother) on Windows 7 as they did on XP.

I guess we’ll know in a couple weeks…though, despite not knowing, I do have an outstanding pre-order with Amazon.

kn

At least that means there’s going to be some competition in this market, which I love. Now, OnLive’s got a reason to continue to improve the service (though I suspect they’ll spend more time and effort on landing publishers before Gaikai does rather than spend on R&D).

I think Gaikai might be better positioned, though, since I think they’ll make a killing in Korea, China and Japan. A new PC used to be (and probably still is) the equivalent of a year’s salary in Korea…thus the reason LAN centers are the hub of gaming activity there. With this, they could shell out for an older PC and still keep up with the newer requirements of modern games…or better yet, play the games on their smartphones which I expect the Japanese to be doing already.

The bigger question will be if console makers will give in to these services. It’ll hurt their console sales. Though their business model’s all about game sales they’re still manufacturing those consoles and still measure penetration based on sales of those consoles. Besides, Microsoft and Sony both want to own that last leg (from the ISP to your home)  since it’s the most important leg when it comes to exposure and services. If Sony can advertise the hell out of their BluRay’s on your home entertainment center made by them, they’ll be a lot happier than having you use OnLive of Gaikai to just stream your entertainment (yup, don’t forget, if they can stream games, they can stream movies and TV eventually) to your home.

The next couple years will be very telling for this market. We’ll see…

kn

kn