Palm webOS on the Palm pre: PLEASE let it be WebKit

Just a few minutes ago, Palm announced their new pre device (that’s the name “pre”, I don’t mean it as in “preview” or beta). The device looks solid, like any state of the art mobile handset in the 21st century should. They’ve managed to innovate on the hardware, so it doesn’t look like a cookie cutter rebrand of HTC (cough..G1….cough).



courtesy of http://arvino.posterous.com

The big news for me was the Palm webOS… though its a bit like “Back to the Future”… Back in 1999, the Palm VII device launched with something known as Palm Query Applications (PQAs) – little compiled bits of HTML and images, as front-end local forms for submitting to remote web applications. It was a brilliant hack for the extreme low bandwidth of the Mobitex network.

Quick aside on my areas of expertise: I developed ThinAirMail, a POP/IMAP/Hotmail client for the Palm VII, that was the #1 PQA application for a long time, and eventually included in the box. This led to the acquisition of ThinAirApps, the mobile software company I helped found in 2001 by Palm. I worked there for about two years, until someone decided (probably correctly) that Palm shouldn’t be in the server software development business.

This new webOS echoes this approach, but is much more forward looking, and in fact completely inline with my own personal view of the world… it is a Mobile Web Client Stack. If you read this blog at all, you’ll have seen my previous posts on using PhoneGap to build “native” client applications for iPhone and Android using nothing more than XHTML, CSS and Javascript wrapped in a simple launcher. While I am happy that all the great Obj-C, Cocoa and Java developers have work in this mobile world, there is no need for mobile device development to be so difficult and proprietary.

The four zillion billion dollar question for Palm is, have you chosen wisely in the foundation of your Web OS? Pleeeeeaase, let the answer be “Yes, my son, WebKit is thy name.” At the least, tell me Gecko or Opera… I know standards are standards, but if this Web OS is built on yet another hacky mobile browser whose ancestry traces back to Access or Blazer, I am not going to be as thrilled as I am right now. WebKit is leading the way in amazing standards support, as well as adding the latest and great enhancements from HTML 5 (database, animations, transitions, etc). These are already shipping with iPhone OS 2.2, and lemme tell you – the things you can do with them will blow you away.

Android Market Suspends My "Blog App"!

UPDATE 7:20PM January 7: Android Market support responded with this: “Hello Nathan, Thanks for writing in. Your app was suspended because it seems to be a demo of what one can do
with a blog. You may re-upload your app to the “Demo” section of the
market as opposed to the “Reference” section. If we can assist you further, please let us know.

Regards,
The Android Market Team”

Gee – I wish they told me that to begin with! Still I have to now re-release my application, simply to put it in the correct category. Frustrating, but not awful.

Earlier today, I was gleefully attempting to show Dave Oliver the hilarious comment thread for the blog app I recently released for Android. I pulled up the Market app on my T-Mobile G1 and searched for “Nathan”, expecting to see “Nathan’s Blog App” in the results…. but, it wasn’t there. Confusion set in for a bit, followed by disbelief that the app had been removed from the store.

This was confirmed when I received this “friendly” automated note below from the Android Market support team:

noreply-android-market@google.com
6:24 PM (5 hours ago)

This is a notification that the application Nathan’s Blog App Demo (ID: -8575230491255129376) has been removed from Android Market due to a violation of the Developer Content Policy. Please review the Content Policies and Business and Program Policies before you create or upload additional applications.

For more information, or to contact us, please visit the Android Market Help Center.

Thanks,
The Android Market Team

<- This is how I feel right now…
like a sad little lost robot.



Now if you look through the policy links above, and then read about what my app does, you’ll see that, as far as I can tell, I am in no way breaking the rules.

Your application shouldn’t contain content that displays (via text, images, video or other media) or links to:

* illegal content
* invasions of personal privacy or violations of the right of publicity
* content that interferes with the functioning of any services of other parties
* promotions of hate or incitement of violence
* violations of intellectual property rights, including patent, copyright (see DMCA policy), trademark, trade secret, or other proprietary right of any party
* any material not suitable for persons under 18
* pornography, obscenity, nudity or sexual activity

Also, make sure your products don’t:

* harm user devices or personal data.
* create unpredictable network usage that has an adverse impact on a user’s service charges or a Authorized Carrier’s network.
* knowingly violate an Authorized Carrier’s terms of service for allowed usage

blog app menu Now, I’ll admit my app is a bit pointless, some may mistake it as shameless self-promotion, but in truth, it was meant as a proof of concept for gluing together the awesome Phonegap SDK (a mobile web appstack enabler) with WordPress and a mobile-friendly template. This allows my CMS-based website (be it blog or not) to have a “native” presence on a device, one click launch capability AND allow for integration with native services like GPS, media capture, accelerometer and more. Pretty cool, eh?

I guess apparently not. I ask you out there to tell me why *you* think my app was removed. Perhaps I will hear back from Google… not sure. Their “Contact Us” capability was pretty basic and I had to dig for it… considering the notification email came from a “no-reply” address, I am not very hopeful. I am going to post this blog link to the appropriate developer lists, as well, and I look forward to gaining some insight into what I may have done wrong, though I honestly believe I am not at fault here.

Regardless, isn’t Android supposed to the more “open” platform? I thought app censorship was the domain of Apple?! Is there some sort of review process that happens after an app is released? Why not do this before the app even gets into the market… that way at least you know where you stand before you tell the world the app is up. Maybe the Apple way isn’t so bad after all…

Anyhow, for one of the biggest cheerleaders of Android out there, this is not a fun moment.

Turning a Short Film into a Webisodic Sensation

On November 11th, The Grand Inquisitor, a new web mini-series, launched on Newsdate2011.com. Based on a chapter from the classic novel “The Brothers Karamazov”, THE GRAND INQUISITOR is a five part film updating Dostoevsky’s mystical fable to a future, Fox network style reality. Cruxy is proud to be an Executive Producer of this work. The series, originally envisioned as a traditional short film, went through a re-imagination process that resulted in what I feel is groundbreaking in its approach to online distribution. It also doesn’t hurt that an amazing cast and crew are involved including Director/Actor Tony Torn, writer Ruth Margraff, multi-image designer Julie Talen, Paul D. Miller aka DJ Spooky, and Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore.

I decided to write up a bit more on our approach to the online distribution strategy we helped create. I know there are many filmmakers out there sitting at that digital fork in the road, trying to figure out what’s possibly beyond “upload it to YouTube!”. This post will show what its like to go the road less travelled…

Episodes vs. Short

We all love film. We all want to sit in big dark theaters with all our friends, and see our masterpiece up on the screen. While many shorts may have success getting into festivals, and a few even might win Oscars, many don’t ever get seen by more than just a handful of people. With this piece, we decided that it could work with a more “net native” approach… edited into multiple short episodes (3-5 minutes), unfolding over a few weeks, distributed through multiple online video services. Without anything more than a few well timed email announcements and a twitter message here and there, we’ve already had thousands of people watch the trailer, viral ads, and first episode. It may not be physically communal, it may not be in a dark theater with popcorn, but its real – actual people watching, enjoying, experiencing this work. Our goal is to get to 100,000 viewers.

Hyperlinked Entertainment

Let’s be honest – this a very complex work. It’s based on freaking Dostoevsky. Even more, its a parody of contemporary politics and corporate media, and its set in the future. I love it, but I am a total geek, and I have the benefit of having read the script. For the wider audience, we wanted to balance the ambition of this work by creating a new kind of “hyperlinked entertainment” experience. You’ll see that on each episode, the complete cast of characters is represented below the main video stream as small thumbnails. As the characters appears on the screen, their thumbnail lights up. You can roll over the thumbnails to zoom in on them, and learn a bit more about their role in this tale.

Here’s an example of the “character dock” – a bit like the MacOS application dock:

Video Thumb Player

As the series progresses, we’ll also provide clickthrough links, subplots, and the ability to “friend” the different characters. The dream is to at some point to create a “down the rabbit hole” experience that allows you to experience the film and story in a non-linear way through media and plot lines scattered across many sites. Why shouldn’t a scene occur on MySpace? Perhaps you should be able to track the sightings of Jesus through Twitter and Google Maps? This is where entertainment is headed in the 21st century – mixed reality, hyperlinked entertainment….cyberspace inverted.

Here’s a full view of the entire episode one player:

Episode Video Player Fullscreen

Podcasting

By breaking up the film into a set of episodic releases, you can better distribute them through podcasting technology to iPods and other devices. Sites such as Blip.tv and Feedburner make it easy to setup your podcast feeds and get them submitted to the iTunes Podcast Directory and elsewhere.

The point here is less that a huge percentage of your viewers will subscribe to a podcast, but more that you can use this to get your work listed in iTunes directory. That way you can tell people to find and download the episodes using iTunes right to their iPod, iPhone or AppleTV.

High-Def Online

This work was originally shot on the Panasonic P2 HD cameras. Reducing it down to a DVD release wouldn’t do justice to the scale and depth of the original work. Web video has quickly moved from being terribly low-resolution and choppy, to a thing of beauty. In fact, the number one “HD” display that people are exposed to on a daily basis is their computer screen. New compression standards such as H264, Apple’s Quicktime, DivX and cheap bandwidth has put the distribution of HD video online within the reach of even the smallest budget indies.

We also have big plans for distributing the HD episodes through popular Bit Torrent tracking sites. Many of the sites are looking to go legit, and are excited to have quality, legal HD video to promote.

Flash Video

It’s the video technology we all hated, but have learned to love. Flash provides the most superior user experience, with seamless in page playback that just works. Adobe has continued to innovate, providing higher quality codec support in Flash 8 and 9 through their partnership with ON2. Customizable, open-source Flash video players from brilliant people like Jeroen Wijering have also made this possible.

Social promotion

Perhaps you saw our “Audition 2 Be Jesus” video? If not, you can view it on YouTube at http://youtube.com/newsdate2011. It was definitely controversial, with many people believing we were “making fun of Christians”. As they say, there is no such thing as bad publicity. While we were not intending to insult anyones religious beliefs, anytime you create a creative piece involving religion or politics, you have to expect there will be misinterpretations.

Domain Branding

Instead of choosing a domain such as thegrandinquisitor.com which is long and hard to spell, we picked out an intriguing aspect to the film – that its set in the near future, the year 2011. The fictional news program in the series opens with “Newsdate 11-11-2011″, and from that we selected Newsdate2011.com as the domain. Its memorable and short.

Online Everywhere

Facebook, MySpace, Blip, Stage6, Cruxy, YouTube, Veoh…. we would have done more if we had the time. The more sites you can have a presence on the better. Each of these services has their own unique value and audience, and its opportunity to create a presence on each that makes sense and represents your work well.

Just some of the possibilities…

These are just some of the avenues of online distribution and promotion that we explored. In the end, our goal was take the static, linear medium of a traditional “short film” and move it into an evoling, engaging online experience. We believe this will result in 1) more people seeing the work, 2) more people talking about and 3) the possible development of a new creative form that mixes film and hyperlinked online media.

In the end, no amount of clever code will save a bad film. With a good work, however, it can become much bigger than the sum of its parts.

Please visit Newsdate2011.com today to check out the series.

Cruxy presenting at Nov 2nd “Amateur Hour” Conference NYLS

Nathan will be speaking on November 2nd at the first “Amateur Hour” conference hosted by the New York Law School. Other speakers include NYU’s Clay Shirky, executives from ESPN, CBS, Forbes, Warner Brothers, and more, along with a whole host of lawyers and law professors. The cost to attend is only $50, and it seems well worth it. Here’s a little more detail:

From television (YouTube and Revver) to advertising (Craigslist and consumer-made TV ads), movies (Machinima), photography (Flickr and iStockPhoto), encyclopedias (Wikipedia and UrbanDictionary), and news (blogs and citizen journalism) technology is enabling amateurs to produce and distribute high-quality product that people want to
watch, read, consume, buy, and re-use. This type of media is sometimes labeled “user-generated”, “amateur”, or “peer-produced” content, and there has been a huge amount of discussion on why people produce it. Any number of commentators have suggested that this is a fundamental change in the way that media is produced, and have foretold a future full of people producing media for the love of it. For all the overblown rhetoric, it’s clear that many established assumptions in media are now being overturned.

What isn’t as clear is what happens to existing media businesses in the age of the amateur. What has been the response of these businesses in light of the rise of the amateur, and what should be their response? Media and entertainment businesses companies are faced with a range of business, legal and management issues that are both new and challenging. The time is ripe to ask what to do about this, and what happens next.

November 2 - Amateur Hour Conference

You can learn more about and register for the conference at http://www.nyls.edu/amhr