No, no, not the way it sounds, but I do love the irony.

I’ll admit it.  I hate Flash.  I’ve hated it for years.  I hated it when it replaced Shockwave with a time-line based interface that bore every resemblance to every other time-line based interface, except that it didn’t behave like any other time-line based interface.  And not in a “wow, welcome to the future!” way either.  No more of a “uh… why doesn’t that just work intuitively?” way.  So we all had to start over and learn to fiddle with Adobe’s cryptic tool so we could create interactive pieces that were lighter than a .dcr.  Learning Flash was a pain.  You were especially challenged if you were already fluent with Director and After Effects – Flash looked like these apps but good luck finding any other similarity.   It was some screwed up parallel dimension.

So flash forward 12 years to iOS and the beginning of the end for Flash.  Career Flash developers understandably get their panties all bunched up about it, but those of us old enough to have been through this before knew Flash’s demise was inevitable. They all go poof eventually.  Naturally a suite of standardized, plug-in-free options arrived on the scene to replace the bulk of Flash’s output quite handily.  There is a delta of features still in Flash’s domain, but apart from the contentious promise of exporting iOS apps, they aren’t all that commonly required.

(Interactive Axiom #11: Never depend on a sole technology as the interface for your labor and source of your livelihood.)

The problem with the arrival of the new formats however, is that they are, well, still rather new.  There have been no development tools that allow us to create all the promised non-Flash interactive experiences without getting our hands all dirty with code.  That has limited development of rich HTML5 executions to only those which front-end developers are willing to bite off.

Enter Hype.  A frigging brilliant new tool that launched just last month from a fresh little start up called Tumult, Inc.

Hype is a no-coding-required GUI interface that allows you to create animated interactive experiences that may be saved as HTML5 web content (with CSS3 and Javascript) that will run not only on desktops, but smartphones (including Android and iPhone) and iPads too.  What’s more, the experiences take multiple browser conditions into account and gracefully adapt to the supported technologies.

Hype is a mere $29.99 in the Mac App Store (how much is Flash again?  Oh yeah, $699.00!)  And folks, it’s insanely easy.

After downloading Hype, naturally I did what I always do – I opened the app, didn’t read a word of the documentation, and started poking around.  In 3 minutes, by following intuition alone, I created graceful, looping animations that further changed based on mouse states.  I mean – literally in 3 minutes – a new user to the app.  Compare that to Flash – an opaque, lead-weight that a new user will beat his forehead flat with before he’ll get any intentional result on screen.

Honestly I’m humbled by what a great job the Tumult founders did with V1 of this app.  It is a well-thought out tool, the interfaces make sense, its features are richer than I have the patience to itemize here – but you can read about it on their site.

Ex-Flash developers may argue that Hype is light on extended features, but I think they will agree, based on the fit and finish of V1, that a year or two of further development will likely take care of that.

Yes, the near future of interactive web development just popped on the scene folks.  It’s called Hype, and in this case it’s a whole lot more than its name.

Check it out.

If you have a computer machine that’s connected to the interweb this week you have probably been sent a few messages from excited web enthusiasts containing links to compilations of subtly animated gifs. Some of them are very nicely done. Some less so. They generally involve pseudo-cinematic scenes looping at, gasp, reasonable frame-rates. The art in this approach to gif-crafting is in carefully compositing the discrete object in motion, and returning it to its start position gracefully such that the loop can repeat near seamlessly.

Red Sky Interactive: Animated Gif, circa 1997

It’s an old trick. And yet I have just received a dozen of these messages.

Anecdotally, it would appear that animated gifs are weirdly blipping the viral radar this week. At least for certain web developers eager to do something “cool”. Most of the messages I received included suggestions that it would be so cool to “add this to our site(s)!”

Whoa whoa whoa. Guys, I can’t be the only one in the room old enough to remember the last time people hyperventilated up the animated gif flagpole, am I? It was around 1997, and your messages were worded exactly the same way. “We should totally do this on our site – it’s so cool.” Only back then you were talking about jerky rotating logos and offers that blinked. Now you’re talking about hair blowing in the wind, and with all due respect – it’s the same thing.

News flash: we could do every bit of this subtle gif animation back in the 90s. And some did. Technical limitations considered. But like so many excellent pieces of work in the 90s, they fell largely lost against a tidal wave of random newness and novelty that made qualitative distinction a coarse affair. The medium was indeed new at the time, and amidst an overwhelming surge of changing data points, users (and most developers) simply didn’t have enough solid ground – consistency – a base-line – with which to develop a collective discriminating palette.

In many ways this condition undermined some of the most impressive, visionary work that was produced before the bubble burst. Creative threads were invented then which would still utterly challenge the state of the art today – if only they hadn’t been lost to the collective aesthetic dimwittery. And ultimately that work vanished into the Digital Dark Ages. Once the economic bubble burst, anything that wasn’t profitable was immediately marginalized and disregarded, despite the fact that there was indeed a strong body of interactive inventions available then, creative solutions, which would have illustrated the true future of the medium as we experience it today. You won’t ever get to see most of those now.

And that’s why – only now – 15 years later – subtle animated gifs seem novel. We finally have a collective qualitative base-line. It’s nothing earth-shattering – but we have one.

Now that we do – don’t make the same mistake you made in the 90s.

Don’t mistake technical advancement or an advancement in sheer craft, for a creative concept. The novelty of some new functionality or effect should not pre-empt leading site development with a creative concept, an idea. As we saw the first time, novelty wears off. And pretty damn fast too.  Maybe before your development cycle completes.

Start with a concept. A story you want to tell. And if executing that concept happens to require a woman whose hair is subtly blowing in the wind, well psych! You can now debate the numerous support tools with which you could achieve that same effect gracefully.

Because for 15 years, an animated gif has been one of them.

I have been developing Interactive work for over 15 years, and sadly, my son may never see any of it. That’s because we are living in what future generations will undoubtedly call: The Digital Dark Ages.

This all came to a head with renewed force for me a few weeks ago, when an interactive agency contacted me as part of a vendor pitch. They were very proud of themselves for having “innovated a brand new kind of banner ad”. One that allowed the user to interact with the brand/store/product within the banner itself, all  without leaving page the banner was on.  They went on to imply that it was the first time this had ever been done, and wasn’t it a brilliant solution.

I generally agreed with it being the right direction – well, righter than the static alternative – except that it had been done before, and frankly, many times.  I know because, my old company, Red Sky Interactive, did it, to name one.  A lot.  And as far back as 10 years ago.  And it worked then.

This isn’t the first time I’ve come across such a disconnect from past efforts.  Especially in advertising.  It seems to me that advertisers “discover” the same basic, big ideas, a couple times each decade.  And each time it’s hailed as a “truly innovative solution” all over again, as if it hadn’t happened the first time.  This doesn’t just happen with banner ads either, but all sorts of basic interactive principles, interface techniques, and solutions based on newly observed user-behavior.  I honestly don’t think this is a case of selective memory, to their credit I think they truly believe they invented the idea.  In part because they probably had to.  Redundant though it may have been.

—

Many years ago I was working on a project and needed to reference what I recalled was some aesthetically innovative interactive work in its time.  I had the CD-ROM on my bookshelf – “The Dark Eye”.  It was an awesome piece of work, created by animator Doug Beswick and featured really ground-breaking components including beautifully designed stop-motion puppets.  The packaging still looked awesome.  Looks innovative even still by today’s standards.  It was created in 1995,  and when I attempted to run it, …”the application that created it could not be found”.  I realized with some degree of concern that I had created a fair number of projects around that time, and before.  I saved those old interactive projects- all manner of files, dutifully copied and transferred and burned, from machine to machine over the years- because they represented the bulk of my own body of work, and contained ideas and experiences that I wanted to keep for posterity.  Many were first of kind innovations that won coveted awards and in some cases set industry bars.  

I held my breath and double-clicked one of the pieces I was most proud of, and discovered that neither could it’s application be found.  I tried every way at my access to open it, and only then fuzzily remembered that I’d created it with a program called “Video Works II” – long before its name was changed to Macromind Director – which was incidentally before the company changed it’s name to Macromedia, before the popular Internet, most certainly before Shockwave plugins, not to mention the arrival of Flash, and it’s subsequent acquisition by Adobe.  Needless to say, I no longer had the tools that I’d created the piece with. 

The implications slowly setting in, I rapidly double-clicked, and watched in breathless horror as project after coveted project sadly faded into digital abstraction- unreadable data- like film trapped on a reel.  That the only way they might see the light of day again is if I went to tremendous effort to, technologically, go back in time and bring them forward with me, version-by-version, adjusting code along the way.  The most recent of the “lost” pieces were roughly 5 years old.  

That’s the day I decided I lived in the Digital Dark Ages.

I believe that future generations will look back at these days, and except for those few who are trying to “archive” portions and thin, top layers of the Internet, will have little idea of what was actually happening in Interactive media today.  There will simply be a hole in our history, and no physical artifacts to remember it by.  Lessons will be lost, only to be relearned.  When you consider the mass of interactive work being created daily, it’s virtually unreasonable to think that all of that innovation will be effectively captured en-masse and stored in a form that can be meaningfully revisited across a changing medium.

Our language, messages and artwork, are only made possible through tools and platforms that will relentlessly evolve out from under our work.  Confronted with this scenario, a surprising number of people have suggested “video taping my work for posterity”.  But to me – an Interactivist, that entirely defeats the purpose.  This is interactive work.  You haven’t experienced it unless you interact with it.  Frankly, at the moment, it’s interactive work that requires a mouse and keyboard.  But even this hardware- the mouse- is on its way out.  If we don’t purposefully pursue a solution, we will need to admit that it’s okay to let our place in History diminish with our work.

When I created it, I had imagined, years from now, finding myself contemplating my waning life, but being able to look back at the great work I’d created. To show my son.  I’d hoped naively, that like the painters, sculptors, writers, film-makers of the past, that perhaps my work would persist for future generations, and maybe even serve as a touch point in instances.  I see now that that isn’t likely for any of us.

There are a few possible solutions to this issue:

1. Update.  Commit to regularly upgrading work, advancing it into new platforms.  This would require a scheduled effort, and will require re-coding as a frequent measure.  As platforms change, creators will have to rethink interface elements.  Admittedly, this solution becomes exponentially more difficult over time. 
2. Emulate.  It may yet be possible – and hopefully will be in the future- to load any OS and software configuration from the past into what will undoubtedly be very capable computing environments.  Hardware will have to be emulated as well… which poses some interesting design challenges, but hey – I can run Windows on my Mac, so maybe this isn’t too far fetched. I expect this is still a way off however.
3. Museum.  A museum of old systems/platforms could potentially display key work to future audiences.  And I’ll admit, that’s how I view some of my work today.  Unfortunately this does not extend well, and is restricted by physical limitations.
4. Let go.  It now appears to me that, as Interactivists, we may be working much closer to live performance than we had ever imagined.  Technology is merely our stage.  Perhaps we need to cozy up to that idea, and walk in with our eyes wide open.  The illusion of “persistent content” comes with the ability to “Save”, “Duplicate” and “Burn”. But in fact, Interactive work rests on a flowing stream of technology – a stream that ultimately carries it away, even while traditional media persists.
5. There is a 5th option.  Development of the Human Computer Interface Preservation Society.  This effort is underway, and we will announce details as they become available.

In the mean time, interactive media, and more specifically, the language of interactivity, is still hovering in this awkward adolescent stage, a position it’s been in for over a decade.  The most expedient way that we’ll move beyond this state is if the innovative efforts of our current crop of talent, industry creatives and engineers, more decisively builds off of what was done before – not replicate it.  

My advice to younger Interactive developers: find and interact with a seasoned mentor(s).  They’re out there, and I’m sure you’ll find them willing to recall hidden efforts.  Unlike any other “recorded medium”, the Charlie Chaplins, the Leonardo DaVincis, the relative “masters” of Interactive media are still alive today, and for better or worse, the best, most complete source of information on the subject rests with them, not on the net in circulation.  At least in the short-term it’s the only way we can effectively build off the innovation and invention that came before us.

Some time ago, I found myself thinking about all our amazing technical advances – especially those that beg moral questions- and I began a journey that changed the way I approach technology, and changed how I think of humanity… and headphones.  

The last thing the web needs – no, the last thing the world needs is another Blog.  I admit that.

Or at least that’s what I thought 10 years ago. But a decade later we’re still struggling to advance this medium past the point of base comfort.

I had a brilliant roommate in art school who was an exchange student from Hong Kong. English was his second language, and he came into the country with very little ability to communicate. His accent was thick and his vocabulary limited. Years into his time in the US, his accent still just as thick and his vocabulary still limited, he admitted to me that at some point shortly after arriving he’d lost the drive to work on his language skills because he was getting by. He was functional. At least that’s what I think he said.

And I guess that’s where I think we, as members of the interactive industry, are resting at the moment. Glowing in our vague Web 2.0 awareness, we are functional.  We’re getting by.  We lived through a time of extreme and chaotic experimentation, then the bubble burst, and a lot of us got scared, and now we’re resting on the resulting knowledge base. We’re content in our current understanding of Interactive Language. It’s even reassuring after all that unknown expansiveness of the mid 90s.

Well, I’m not at all happy about that. From where I sit, innovation, real creative innovation, the kind of innovation that expands the language and changes everything, has cooled to a quiet drip.  We’ve fallen into a process of dull incrementalism. And yet-

We have a long way to go before the children born today will cut us the slack we’ll want 10 years from now.

Before they look at what we’re doing with a nostalgic understanding, as opposed to the snort and rolling eyes I think we deserve at the moment.  

In this nascent age of MultiTouch interaction, what have you done, what has your company done to expand our language?  

I hope, as time passes, and I manage to extricate the concepts and principles I’ve been sitting on and researching during my years in this industry, I can participate, in some way, in expanding your appreciation for Interactive Language. 

It’s what this blog is meant to do.