::--Buzzwords for the 00s--::

When I went to the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) convention in Vegas in 1994, the big buzzwords were "Convergence," "Interactive" and "Information Superhighway." All the seminar presenters kept using words like "onramp," "speedbumps" and "potholes" to describe the different parts of this new, digital expressway.

So what are the buzzwords for the 00s? Here are some I notice people using with more and more frequency:

• Accessibility


• Extensibility


• Usability


• Rich Media


• Roundtrip HTML

Remember in the 90s when the cool thing to do when coming up with a name for a new piece of sofware was to take two words and smash them together, creating a single word with two capital letters?

• FutureSplash


• ColdFusion


• FreeHand

Thankfully, some products were spared or outgrew the "let's create a hip name for our new app" phase of the software industry (most people have stopped referring to Adobe's image editing app as PhotoShop, for example). It is interesting to note, however, that this creative naming phase has had negative results for some apps with "normal" names; this is to say names which didn't conform to the "one word that looks like two" naming convention. Lots of people assumed certain software applications were part of the Brave New World of application naming, and thus spelled them with one word instead of two, or used two capital letters instead of one. In some cases, the incorrect names caught on; some are still being referred to incorrectly years after the product's initial release. A Google search for SoundForge, for example, brings up an amazing number of sites which use the incorrect spelling.

And to really confuse people, when Adobe came out with a video editing product in the mid 1990s, they named it Premiere with an "e" at the end (as it is spelled in French), not Premier. Were they tipping their hat to film pioneers like the Lumière Brothers and Georges Méliès, or just trying to be clever? Je ne sais pas...


While the CoolApp names and StRaNgE CaPiTaLiZaTiOn crazes seem to be on their way out of style, one thing that is really "in" right now is using punctuation marks as part of your site name and/or as part of your site's page layout. The trend seems to be especially prevalent among Bloggers. To wit:

• ::::: f-peterjoel blog ::: Peter Hall on MX :::::


• +-- ericd.net --+


• :: Pirates in Petticoats ::


• : : Tempos Modernos : :


• ::ThaO's Journ_aL::

One Small Step for a User Group...

The San Antonio Macromedia ColdFusion User Group broadcast their meeting on the Internet last night using Macromedia's Flash Communication Server. They were the second UG to do this, the New York ColdFusion User Group having been the Neil Armstrong of FlashComm meetings when they broadcast their User Group meeting last week. Though there were a few technical and logistical difficulties, in general last night's San Antonio UG meeting went well, and was a good example of one way in which the Server can be used. Seeing this experiment with the FlashComm Server caused me to start thinking about all kinds of creative ways of using the product, and I wouldn't be suprised if many of those who viewed the meeting online had the same experience.

I predict that more User Groups will use the FlashComm Server in the next few months to broadcast one or more of their meetings, with each broadcast not only adding to our knowledge of the product, but also raising the bar in terms of the level of technical and creative quality which the next group will be expected to achieve. Perhaps Macromedia would even encourage a friendly competition among User Groups to see which one can put on the best meeting using the FlashComm server, with the winner getting one or more free copies of the FlashComm Server?

I say: Let the games begin!

Website Time Warp

Ever wonder what a particular Website _used_ to look like? The Internet Archive has copies of millions of Websites, some dating back as far as 1996. The Lycos and Yahoo sites sure have changed a lot since 1996. And check out Microsoft's 1996 site. There's not a lot of content, and only about 20 links on the homepage. Compare this to their current site, which has no content on the homepage, and what looks to be about 100 links. The thing I like most about their 1996 site is that the link to download the IE browser is easy to spot in the left nav bar. They really make you work to find it now, as if to say "why not buy MS Office 2005 while you're here?"

When looking at these documents from the Middle Ages of the WWW, it is interesting to look at the importance that was placed on flashy graphics (like animated gifs!) and the backseat that style (form) took to content. Cascading Style Sheets? Dynamic, data-driven sites? "What's that?" the typical mid 1990s Web author would have likely replied. How far we have come in just a few short years...

So what's next? Some of the things which are likely to be talked about alot and used more and more in the near future include CSS, XML, and small wireless devices which can access the Net (like Bill Gates' talking refrigerator magnets.

Studio MX Wins PC Magazine Award

Macromedia Studio MX has been named Best Development Tool by PC Magazine. MACR's stock is still only at $11, however... :(

A Web Tool for the Masses?

For info on Macromedia's newest product--Contribute--check out the Fusion Authority Weekly News Alert.

So what exactly is it and who should use it? The above mentioned article does a good job covering both of these issues. From what I have seen, Contribute is Dreamweaver without any of the powerful features of Dreamweaver. True, you can _work_ with pages created from a template and pages which use CSS, but you _can't_ create or modify templates or CSS with Contribute. Time will tell whether there is a large market for an HTML authoring tool which does not allow you to edit HTML.

One Giant Leap for Flash?

SWFKit allows you to customize projectors, create screen savers from Flash movies, and even create an installer for your movies. The list of things you can do with SWFKit is quite long; here are some of the highlights:

• access the Windows registry


• create/open/manipulate shortcuts


• check the status of the user's Internet connection


• access the properties of a particular disk drive


• send and receive email


• embed ActiveX controls in your projector

After looking at the system requirements on their Website, it appears that SWFKit exists only for Windows-based systems.

Given the growing number of third-party tools for extending Flash, one has to wonder: Is Flash the new Director?

Flash User Group Meeting

The November meeting of the MN Flash User Group will take place this Wednesday (20 November) at 6 pm. Visit the Website for directions and more info.

Paper Airplanes...Shockwave Style

Try your hand at launching a paper airplane with this Shockwave Game. My best throw was 88 feet; with a little practice, I think I might be able to break 100...

Book Review: BLOGGING

Title: BLOGGING: Genius Strategies for Instant Web Content
Author: Biz Stone
Publisher: New Riders
ISBN: 0-73571-299-9

In BLOGGING: Genius Strategies for Instant Web Content, Biz Stone explains the world of Blogging with reference material, mini tutorials, and Web links, among other things. While the organization of the book and the author's sometimes funny/sometimes less-than-funny jokes indicate that this is Stone's first published work, he nonetheless manages to communicate the important aspects of Blogging to the reader.

After a brief history of the Web and Blogs, he compares and contrasts the major Blogging software. In addition to the Blogs themselves, he spends several chapters on things such as Cascading Style Sheets, Blog promotion/advertising, email Blogging, and Blog add-ons like search features and comments.

While there is a lot of valuable information here, the reader often has to wade through each chapter to find it. For example, the screen-by-screen instructions for logging in to blogger.com--including what to do if the username you pick is already taken--are a bit condescending. Giving readers the address for Blogger (blogger.com) and telling them to follow the instructions on their screen for creating a new account would have been enough for all but the most novice computer users. Also, one wonders why Stone spent an entire section of chapter 9 showing screenshots of and explaining how to use the commenting system YACCS, which is no longer accepting new users.

BLOGGING is definitely not a definitive guide on the subject, but it does provide a good intro to Weblogs, create excitement about Blogging, and point readers to Websites of interest to both new and experienced Bloggers.

--AMG