A blog about User Interface, User Experience, Design, Flash, Product management and all that goes in between.

Eric Dolecki wrote an inspiring post about “what Apollo might bring“, I must admit I share his excitement, I witnessed Flash evolve from a graphics and animation oriented application into a global standard RIA platform, empowering new approaches to User Interface, and changing the web application experience.

Apollo is a cross-OS runtime that allows developers to leverage their existing web development skills (Flash, Flex, HTML, Ajax) to build and deploy desktop RIA’s.

Apollo will probably do the same to desktop applications, enrich our desktop apps experience – applications will talk to each other, be updated without user involvement, be more personalized, and best of all – platform independent.In addition to that, imagine the impact open source projects such as Red5 will have on the way we communicate – as the costs of server applications to “talk” to (or through?) are dramatically diminished.I am definitely optimistic.

Adobe announced in the 3GSM Congress that the next release of Flash Lite™ (Flash for mobile phones & devices) will support Flash Video (FLV), to be available in the first half of 2007 – that’s really soon!This means the same video we view with our browsers will soon be viewable with our smart phones, making the FLV a dominant standard for delivering streaming video content to all devices.This also means future potential in terms of the smart phone’s User Interface, giving another strong incentive for implementing Flash Lite in the phones, also holds a possible answer to Apple’s iPhone User Interface coolness factor, as flash also allows really cool stuff. hmm, good news for flash developers.

For those who are not subscribed to the Adobe Edge newsletter, Adobe recently released Kuler – a really cool free on-line platform for creating & sharing Color schemes.Creating the color schemes is really easy & fun, colors can be defined in RGB, CMYK, LAB, HEX, making it applicable to all kind of implementation. Kuler provides predefined “Rules” which are actually preset relationships between colors, so you can change the range of your scheme on the spectrum and keep same relationship, really nice and cool!From designer point of view, these rules are replacing the “human touch” with technology. Enabling unexperienced users to reach good successful color schemes, and enjoy the experimental way.

The interface is simple & easy, however performance is not so great, every act that requires communication with the server (saving, searching, sharing) takes too long in my standards, I wanted to create few schemes to share with others, but after saving the first two I gave it up. The community features are also limited, currently only browsing and ranking, I found it painfully slow to browse other’s schemes as kuler displays 9 schemes each time and takes ages to load.

Before commenting about the interface I must say that the Venice Project client has very good table manners and generally behaves very nice, before installing it checks your hardware and informs you if your computer meets the requirements, uninstalling is also a breeze, very nice guys. Also, the video quality is pretty amazing, especially when compared to the traditional streaming alternatives, the Venice Project has a very fast initiation and almost no disturbances and freezes.The downsides are with the interface, aimed to be viewed in fullscreen mode, and probably later on through a TV, the texts are big (a la front row), the panels are clear and simple. However the interface suffers from few oddities, most annoying is the endless looped scrolling – Hey! this is really confusing, if you’re looping the menu items, let us know, put a loop marker at the end of each balk.

The main panel that has all the ‘Play Controls’ also holds the Application Controls (Quit, Resize), while in the top-right corner of the screen there is a floating icon for hiding the current screen – shouldn’t it be the opposite? It seems that the Quit button should be always present and not associated with the playing controls, furthermore, the Hide Screen is inconsistently appearing inside & outside of panels.


Another issue is the keyboard arrows, while in the ‘My Channels’ screen it is so easy and fast using them to navigate in & out of channels, in ‘Channel Catalog’ moving back to the Suggestion menu is not possible, only Up & Down.. Once I enter the ‘Channel Catalog’, I can only exit, cant go back to ‘My Channels’, even if I got there this way. come on, how will you menage a remote control navigation if you cant eat this?
Beside, it is not clear why the duplicated channels screens is needed, from the ‘Channels Catalog’ it is not possible to launch the channel, you can only add it to ‘My Channels’ – how can I know if I want to add this channel if no preview or description is available? after I added a channel to ‘my channels’ I cant remove it. ‘My Channels’ is also lacking the image/logo preview the ‘Channel Catalog’ has.
In ‘My Venice’ screen, pressing ‘My Venice Plugins’ button brings the ‘My Venice Menu’, hmm. the menu it self is mixing sections and items in the same level – News Ticker Manager along with the Feeds themselves..
Also, from the menu screen I cant know which item is enabled and needs to be clicked, and that’s the menu purpose.The feeds marquee is moving too fast for human reading.I still think that the general experience is great, and that the interface is not that bad for a beta, I hope it will improve in the future, and that we’ll see more content too