Zmarties

If you read a few of my posts, you'll notice that I'm not a fan of sites that use Flash, where particular examples which I've commented on include Flickr (now thankfully gone the AJAX route), Yahoo maps and most recently Google Analytics.

Robert Scoble just linked to the Flash Troll Generator, of which he says:

"Hate Flash? You'll like this site. Done by Oliver Steele. Personally I don't agree with Oliver."

This seems to suggest that Robert thinks this site is anti-Flash, whereas by trotting out the regular trolls, and labelling them as such, it seems to me that it's precisely the opposite.

On the other hand, Robert then notes, "It's time for a higher definition web", with the implication through proximimity that Flash is the way to a higher definition web (especially when you read his next post, which is about Laszlo mail, which is an email client written in Flash).

I'm fully in agreement with Robert in wanting a higher definition web, but Flash doesn't seem to me to be stepping in that direction.

A large part of higher definition to me means that I can zoom in at will to see the details I want. Examples of this in my regular browser, running regular HTML and AJAX based web sites are:

• the literal ability to zoom in, by adjusting the text size as offered by most browsers
• the more specific ability to zoom images, as offered by the Image Zoom extension in Mozilla or Firefox
• the ability to make my browser window larger, to show more data (and yes I realize that not all HTML designers are capable of the fluid design thinking that makes this a reality)
• the ability to target in on the text on the page I want simply by starting to type (the search as you type feature of Mozilla and Firefox)
• treating any text visible on the page as a hyperlink by selecting it and selecting the "web search for selection" offered from the Mozilla or Firefox context menu
• autolinking, an example of which is the Google toolbar which autolinks ISBN numbers to external references
  

All of these features work on all web pages - that's a high definition web experience to me.

There are plenty of other examples I could use which are currently more specialized, but which all look forward to an even higher definition web. These include:

• being able to extract structured data from any web page, as shown by Piggy Bank
• "on page" mashups, as performed by many a Greasemonkey script
• tools that clip and blog the info on the page, whether to online sevices such as del.icio.us, or to local repositories such as Onfolio.
  

In contrast to all of these, tends to Flash provide me with a low definition experience. The data is trapped in what is often a fixed size box on the page. With it's gaming and presentation heritage, the artwork is often literally low definition - eyecatching no doubt, but not particularly useful. Simple web conventions and behaviours are broken - whether its the back button, chosing to open new links in new windows or tabs, bookmarking specific information, saving the page to disk etc.

I've no doubt that it's possible to program high featured applications in Flash, and Lazlomail is up there with the best of them, but for me high features on their own (rich client if you prefer that terminology), does not on its own make for a high definition experience, when I lose so much in getting there.

It's similarly possible to program AJAX badly, but when done well the result is also a rich client experience, without throwing out all the existing browser experience that makes for a high definition web.

Robert ends his note on Lazlomail with a comment that Lazlo are building a platform - and that Flash is just the first target of that platform, with AJAX yet to come. That gives me hope - we may reach a very high definition web when we can mix the existing high definition web browsing experience with the undoubted innovation that some rich client experimentation is showing us now.

Google Analytics launched this week, and has certainly had its fair share of teething troubles in the first couple of days - with registration suspended for periods as the servers stuggled to cope with the demand.

However, now that I've managed to get it set up, I'm very unimpressed with the UI, which is poor in a number of respects.

• First off, it requires Flash, which is an unnecessary overhead (and having taken the time to download and install Flash in my browser because of it, I find my general browsing experience is now much worse - distracting ads now appear on websites that previously were quite clean, and I've suffered an attack of popups that have been missing from my browsing for years now)
• The meat of the data is within a seemingly fixed size rectangle, yet there's so much detail there that I need it to be resizable so that I can make it as large as my screen will allow
• The maps are the worst that Google has ever produced - yet we know they have great mapping technology, so why dont they use it? Using the right mouse button there is a zoom function offered, so you can drill down into an area of the map in more detail, but if you do, then all the text tooltips also get bigger, and since they are limited to the map rectangle, they are thus truncated and unreadable.

• The animation of elements is pretty annoying (for example bar graphs where the bars grow from zero up to their final length), and is wasting time - my need for web stats needs the data to be there for me to view instantly, not taking its time to appear as it currently does.

Having said all that, the rest of the experience outside of the Flash displayed content is actually quite good. There's a good amount of AJAX driven dynamism to the site, and the data is laid out reasonably (with the possible exception of a wide strip of unused white space down the right of the page - could this be reserved for advertising I wonder?)

I'm also glad to see that there is the facility to export the data in alternative formats of tab separated data, xml, and as Excel data. However, this always seems to be restricted to the current view - I can't see a way to export all the data at once, which would be very useful.

Another disappointment is the poor support for printing - there is a "print" button, but all this does is hide a bit of the navigation - the layout of the remaining items is not adjusted at all to take advantage of the capabilites of the printed page. Compare this to Google Maps, which makes sure that printed driving instructions look good on paper, with a quite different appearance to that which is appropriate for on screen display.

Update: Found another problem with the map - when you click on a result on the map, it shows you a set of details in a popup - but the popup always appears below and to the right of the point. So, when you have a load of points in Australia to look at, the popups are truncated since they can't go outside the Flash borders, so you can't see the data.

Bret Taylor, Product Manager of Google Maps and Google Local, has announced the opening of an official blog to support the Google Maps API.

The first post is uninspired, but it does promise:

• An (approximately) weekly changelist listing the updates we are pushing to the API that week
  
• Official announcements and updates
  
• Workarounds for common API problems
• Techniques for using the API and AJAX in general, e.g, techniques to avoid memory leaks in IE
• API sites that have caught our attention

This should certainly be an easier communication mechanism to follow than the existing Google Group.

Whilst considering producing a mashup with a database containing locations in the Netherlands, I was dealing with coordinates in the Dutch nation grid system known as RD coordinates (Rijksdriehoeksmeting).

For one off conversions there is an online converter which will convert to latitude and longitude.

As is very often the case, the wikipedia article on the Netherlands is a very good general reference.. It explains

There is a west-east coordinate between 0 and 280 km, and a south-north coordinate between 300 and 620 km. The reference point is the Onze-Lieve-Vrouwentoren (Our Lady's tower) in Amersfoort, with RD coordinates (155.000, 463.000) and geographic coordinates ca. 52°9′ N 5°23′ E

The past 24 hours has seen a flurry of new releases:

• Google Desktop 2 has upgraded, and has supposedly graduated from being a beta. There is a new mapping plug-in in the side bar, but this in particular seems very beta quality to me. (It's very hard to use - the sidebar does not accept drag and drop, so you must type in where you want to go, and there is no "go" or "Search" button, so you can't simply paste with the mouse, since you must then touch the keyboard to use the enter key).
  
• Ask Jeeves Desktop Search has been upgraded - see the blog for full details. One of the features they particularly claim is increased stability.
• Yahoo have introduced a new mapping beta. This goes against the grain, and requires Flash, which I think is a backwards step, and also falls in to the same trap as Virtual Earth did of believing that America is the only location that counts.
  
• Yahoo also slightly redeem themselves by offering a new mapping API, which does offer an AJAX based embedded map, and also a REST based geocoding service (again unfortunately only for America).
  

Mashups using Microsoft's Virtual Earth have been slow to arrive - probably because although the API may be easier to use, the underlying mapping experience is much poorer (and noone really wants to tie their application yet to what was obviously a very rushed beta).

In an effort to kick start things, Microsoft's arms-length developer site organized a competition, offering a $1000 first prize, for mapping applications developed using their API.

The results are now available, with the top prize going to

• MapStats which shows where website visitors come from. This rather neatly works around the severe limitation of Virtual Earth in that it only covers the USA in any level of detail, by not needing to show much detail! Since most websites get visitors from around the world, a world level view does just fine.

Honourable mentions are also made to

• CREMaps, which would appear to be a property locator (but I could not get it to show me any results). It also has what I assumed was the (otherwise missing) map scroll control (containing arrows pointing in the 8 compass directions), but which turns out to be simply a branding logo.
  
• Zoom to Hotels which presumably allows you browse hotels, but which failed to show me any map (getting a Javascript error instead).

It's apparent there is a sharp drop off in quality with these second placed entries. Perhaps they work better in IE rather than the Mozilla browser which I have installed.

(I feel that the competition may have shot itself in the foot - as well as the first prize, there were other lesser prizes offered to the "first 25 entries to arrive" - which rather makes a quickly coded but poorly produced entry a worthwhile proposition).