The Web, HTML5… It’s a Mess!!!

I sometimes get hassled for preferring to develop software to run on the computer desktop instead of as web sites.  Truth is, I don’t care if I get hassled about it.  I know how to develop for the web… part of my job involves creating web sites in PHP, and I think I do fairly well at it, but it doesn’t mean I like it.  And honestly I ought to be criticizing more people for putting so much emphasis on the web… not because it isn’t going to be the future, but mostly because they aren’t being more critical of the way things work on the Internet.

If you take a step back and think about the way that the web works, it’s really pretty silly.  We download a page with information.  We type information into a form on that page, then click a button to allow a computer somewhere else to process that information, and wait for an entirely new web page to be sent back to us.  It’s slow.  It requires that the same information be sent over and over again (everything on a page that hasn’t changed or doesn’t change).  It makes true interactivity slow and frustrating.  It’s silly.  We have these high powered devices we’re using to display static pages that have been created somewhere else. 

Imagine having a web page to do a simple addition operation: you enter 2+2.  You enter the data, click the calculate button, your browser sends that data off to some computer somewhere in a remote data center, it performs the calculation, and sends you an entirely new web page giving you not just the answer, but your original data, and every piece of the entire web page… You’ve just transferred a ton of data, wasted a ton of computing power, just to figure out the answer to a very simple problem.  Total silliness.  But it’s what we deal with every day, because that is the way that the web works.

Add to that the difficulty that web developers go through to make sure their web sites work on different browsers.  We create a page and it works perfectly in our browser of choice, then we try it in another browser only to find it doesn’t look (or work) right at all.  It’s very frustrating.  Again, it’s silly.  And it’s a very slow process.

Compare this with developing programs that run on the desktop (not in a browser).  They can be developed very quickly.  They run very quickly.  The development tools are mature and work very well.  They’re guaranteed to work the same on every computer they run on.  It’s SO much easier to make something work on the desktop than it is on the web.  We have access to advanced technologies that don’t work on the web.  Interactivity is amazing, performance is amazing, with things responding immediately when clicked. 

I know this makes me sound like a stick-in-the-mud to people who think that the web is the future of apps.  I’m not going to argue that things are moving in that direction, and that there are a lot of advantages to it.  My argument is that the way we’re doing things now is just… dumb, and that we’re making very little progress at fixing the problems.

HTML and the web in general were not designed to do the things that we’re doing with them.  HTML was written with the idea of serving informational pages… You view a page, you see a link to another page with more information on a particular topic, click it, and view the new page.  It was never designed with any kind of interactivity beyond that, and every attempt to make it work that way has been a hack.  Even things like logging into web sites and shopping carts are a total hack.  And despite the fact that we’re nearly two decades into using HTML, things haven’t really gotten that much better.  We’re still primarily serving new pages every time we change any data on a page instead of changing just the parts of the display that are affected by our data changes, waiting on a remote computer to do things that our own computers are perfectly capable of doing themselves. 

Not only that, but there just aren’t any great ways to define the structure of data entry, or how it interacts with the page or the web server that is saving and formatting it for us.  It has taken until HTML5, which still isn’t really implemented (and even then very poorly on virtually every browser) and it still isn’t done well.  Even if web developers choose to use HTML5 for their web sites, even the newest browsers still aren’t implementing most of it.  It’s ridiculous!  But more about that in a minute.

The development tools for creating web sites are still really bad too.  I have tried the “best of the best” of them and have given up on every one.  I have resorted to creating web sites in Notepad, because the supposedly “advanced” editors just get in the way more than they help.  I don’t understand why we keep putting up with this and aren’t pushing for something better.  A lot of it has to do with HTML not being designed for the way we use it, but even more-so is the fact that HTML has been very slow to evolve, and browser makers have done very poorly at implementing the changes that actually have been made.

Some web sites do make an attempt to improve the interactivity by only updating only small portions of a page when something changes through a technology known as AJAX.  You’ve seen it before on sites like facebook and Amazon.com where you click something and just one part of a page will change, but honestly few sites take this step because it’s difficult to implement properly.  And unless your browser settings are just right, it doesn’t work at all.

There are other problems too… like security.  You may have recently heard about Firesheep, a program that captures authentication information from other computers on a network and allows a hacker to visit popular web sites using your account without having your login information.  And most web developers don’t understand how to properly secure their sites to prevent outside access to their data.  Because it’s difficult.  These technologies are being asked to do things that they were never meant to do, and very few software developers understand the right way to do things, or even the importance of doing so.  Or they don’t care.

Most of these problems go away when you start developing software that runs directly on the desktop.  Most of the security issues go away.  The slow interactivity goes away.  The difficulty of updating the screen when data is entered goes away. 

Yes, I know that developing applications that run on the desktop does have its own set of drawbacks.  You have to write versions for each type of computer that might use the software.  The software has to be installed.  You have to install updates.  But in my mind the advantages far outweigh the drawbacks for many, many applications that are currently being developed for the web.  And these problems are being addressed anyway.

Eventually many the advantages of running software on the desktop will probably go away.  But we aren’t moving in that direction fast enough.  Developing for the web isn’t really any easier than it was 10 years ago.  Development tools have improved, but not much.  The technologies that power the web have gotten better, but not much.  And yet we as web developers continue to accept it, and some even criticize those that don’t condescend to using these bad technologies.

HTML5

Last week I finally sat down to see what’s so great about this new HTML5 thing that’s getting a lot of press.  Frankly, I was sorely disappointed.

HTML5 doesn’t really add a lot of new capabilities to web sites.  It does add a few, some are kind of cool… graphics rendering and interactivity is one area where things are supposed to get a lot better.  There is the promise of a standard way to display video and audio (finally!!!! it has only taken nearly 20 years).  There are new ways to handle and validate data in forms.  But the changes basically stop there.  And honestly, most of these things aren’t even usable.

Each of the new features is either not implemented in a major browser, or isn’t implemented properly.  A few examples…

• The new graphics features are only supported by IE9, Firefox 4, and Chrome.  Safari (which is what the iPhone, iPad, and Macs use) doesn’t.  And Chrome is the only one with a “current” version that even attempts it.
• The new methods for displaying video are a mess.  Apple and Microsoft have elected to use one format for video, while Mozilla (FireFox) and Opera have elected to use something else entirely incompatible.  Google is taking a more neutral position with Chrome, supporting both.  But there isn’t a single video format supported by all of the browsers.  So you have to create two versions of every video, and provide two versions of every page that contains video to allow users to view it.
• Audio is the same way.  The different browsers support different types of audio files.  No one format is supported by all browsers.
• There is still no way to watch live video.  Only pre-recorded video and audio sources are supported.
• The new features to format and validate form data are only supported by Opera and Chrome.  And Chrome’s implementation is horrible.  The other browsers don’t even try, even in their unreleased beta versions.  These features, which would be very useful and make web programming easier, are completely unusable to the 99+% of people not running Opera as their browser, and therefore are useless to developers.

You may have heard a lot of hype around HTML5 being a cure-all for some of the problems we deal with on the Internet (like Adobe Flash).  But based on what I have seen, it isn’t going to help anything because those creating browsers aren’t doing their job in implementing HTML5 properly.  It’s also very ironic that the most vocal of all of the HTML5 supporters, Steve Jobs, also has by far the worst HTML5 implementation of anyone.  Apple’s Safari browser is, without question, the least HTML5-compliant browser in use today.  It doesn’t even attempt to support the vast majority of the new features being added to HTML5, even in its latest version.  Not that the other browser creators are doing much better.

Ideally…

Ideally someday we’ll have a sort of hybrid of the two ways things are done now.  Store the software and data on remote computers, but download the necessary pieces to our local computer on demand, where things like interactivity and calculations can be handled locally.  If designed properly, most of the things we do now that require entirely new web pages be downloaded would be done entirely locally on our own computers, with only data changes being sent out remotely.  (Some might say this sounds like Java… but… ick, no.  What a terrible language.)  We would standardize on the tools for creating application user interfaces, and the way that the applications respond to user interaction.  We have sort of started on that path with technologies like DOM and AJAX, but they are too limited, too difficult to use, too inconsistent, and too slow to be able to develop meaningful applications that run primarily locally.  We’re still far too reliant on remote computers to do extremely basic tasks that have no place being run remotely.  I believe someday we’ll get there, but at the pace we’re moving now I’m not holding my breath… we’ll be lucky to see anything like that before 2020.

The Truth

The truth of it all is that even though I get criticized for preferring to develop desktop software most web developers deep down know that they’re using inferior technologies.  They know the pain of making stuff work across multiple browsers.  They know the pain of hand coding HTML and CSS to make sites look and work the way they should.  They also know that native applications work better than web sites too.  All one has to do is cite the iPhone as an example.  The first version of the iPhone couldn’t run native apps, and had to rely on the web to do anything other than what the included software could do.  Almost nobody took the time to create sites to run on the iPhone.  It wasn’t until the second version of the iPhone, with the ability to run Apps, came out that it started to really take off.  And everyone with an iPhone knows that running an App instead of going to a web site in Safari is a much better way to do things.  It’s much faster, cleaner, and easier.

It’s really a shame that web developers will criticize me for still preferring to work on native applications rather than the Internet.  Or is it more of a shame that most of them continue to believe that they’re working with state-of-the-art tools with state-of-the-art technologies, and not put more effort into trying to make things better on their end?  It’s also a shame that so many pieces of software that really should live on the desktop are being written (and being written poorly) for the web.  Each has a place, but because the internet is “cooler” than running programs on your computer, too many things that should be on the desktop are being pushed to the Internet, and are being done improperly.

In many ways things I was doing more than 20 years ago worked better on the computers I used then than things do today on the Internet.  Internet technologies have improved, but they are moving at a glacial pace.  And it both makes me laugh, and cry a little on the inside.

Recent Product Mini-Reviews

I’ll refrain from publishing my long in-depth reviews of some of my technology acquisitions this time, but I’ll say just a little bit about a few toys I have picked up in the last couple of months.

iPod Touch (4th Generation)

I ordered the 4th Generation iPod Touch the day it was announced and it arrived about a week later, so I have had it for about 6 weeks now.  I still very much prefer my Zune HD for music (better, faster UI, an excellent music subscription option, and a lot more features like artist bios, photos, and automatic linking to similar artists and albums for music playback), but the iPod Touch is really the only game in town when it comes to apps so I try to keep up to date.

The new Retina Display is nice and sharp, but still suffers from color shifting off-axis as previous generation models did.  (The screen goes yellow or blue if you don’t view it straight on.)  The overall speed of the device is pretty good too.  I still believe that the “multitasking” added by iOS 4 is a gimmick, as it doesn’t really allow apps (other than a very select few categories) run in the background.  So much for true background Twitter updates, or instant messaging without annoying push notification alerts.  Steve Jobs' insistence that these things can’t be done without draining the battery is just flat wrong… plenty of other devices out there are doing it now.

As with the previous devices, the hardware is excellent.  Thin, and light.  But it still irks me that Apple insists on using a shiny back to the case, as it is incredibly easy to scratch.  Even being very careful with it mine has already gotten badly marred.  And the back cover doesn’t seem as durable as previous generations.  Mine is already dented, which never happened with either of my two previous Touches.

Having the front and rear cameras is nice, especially for FaceTime calls (which work well), but the low resolution of the rear camera makes it essentially useless for shooting photos.  If your intent is to video conference with other FaceTime users, this will work just fine.  If you want to shoot photos, you still need an actual camera.

In my opinion iOS is getting a little long in the tooth without a major update.  Sure the newer features are nice, but Apple is still making too little progress on making their operating system truly useful for productivity applications.  Annual upgrades are just incremental… they now need something bigger. 

I have had one pretty annoying issue with my Touch.  When I go into the App Store to download apps or update software I get an error message that it can’t connect to the App Store multiple times before it will finally let me in.  And then I get the same error again when I actually tell it to install updates or a new app, and it requires me to re-enter my password each time.  I have to go through the same process several times before it will actually work.  My iPad, running on the same network, doesn’t do that, and the Touch does it whether I’m at home, work, or connecting through my Verizon MiFi.  Definitely feels like a bug.

I still despise iTunes.  I believe it to be one of the worst pieces of software ever inflicted on the public.  It is so slow and bloated that it badly needs to be rewritten.  It’s unfortunate that the iPod Touch is so reliant on it for syncing content with a computer.

Sony PlayStation 3 Move Controller

I also recently picked up a Sony PlayStation 3 Move controller.  This is Sony’s attempt to capitalize on the popularity of the Nintendo Wii with its own motion controller.  Unfortunately, I don’t feel like Sony did a very good job.  It feels even more like a gimmick than the Wii’s.

For $100, the controller came with the required EyeToy camera and Sports Champions game.  It’s a pretty obvious attempt to copy Wii Sports and Wii Sports Resort, not necessarily with the same games, but with the same basic idea.  Some of the games can be fun, others can be incredibly frustrating.  I won’t blame the controller for that, though.  Extra controllers are $50, or the optional Move Navigation Controller (like the Wii’s Nunchuck) are $30.  If you were to buy the starter bundle plus enough controllers for four people you’d be dropping a pretty good chunk of change ($370, not including the cost of the PS3 itself).

What I did have a problem with is the way that the controller works in practice.  At the start of each game (or in the case of Sports Champions, each mini game) you have to go through a 3-step calibration procedure.  It doesn’t take very long, but after playing a handful of games, having to repeat the procedure over and over does get pretty old.  In addition to that, part of the calibration procedure involves making you stand in a designated (and pretty small) area of the view of the camera.  And you have to stay there.  This also means that you aren’t free to move around as you play a game… Once you put yourself inside of the on-screen box during calibration, you have to plan to stay put throughout the game or it doesn’t work quite right.

Response on the controller was pretty good (as long as you resist the temptation to step away from the spot where you were standing during calibration), but not any better than the Wii Remote with the Plus add-on.  Definitely better than the Wiimote by itself, but no better than what you get with Wii Plus.  Motion sensing was accurate.

The cost of the controller is a little on the high side, but not terrible. With the limitations in Sony’s implementation of motion gaming I can’t really recommend the Move at all, though.  Especially if you already have a Wii.  The controller does give Wii-like capabilities to the PS3, but, at least to me, the advantage of high definition gaming doesn’t outweigh the frustrations that come with Sony’s implementation of motion gaming.  If you can play a game without moving around, and don’t mind going through a calibration procedure before each game, you’ll probably enjoy the Move.  But if you already have a Wii, this won’t add anything.

Apple TV (version 2)

Several days ago I picked up the new Apple TV as a way to attempt to stream some my TV shows and videos from my computer to my living room television.  I say “attempt” because I still haven’t gotten it to work.  I suffered through adding all of my video content to iTunes, but as of right now my Apple TV either won’t see my computer at all, or when it does, it will only stay connected for a couple minutes before dropping the connection.  So watching videos from iTunes is pretty much out of the question at the moment unless the video is less than 60 seconds long.  I also can’t get the iTunes Remote Speaker feature to connect to my Apple TV either, even though it will connect to my brother’s previous generation Apple TV.

The device does play Internet sourced content just fine.  With my recent Internet connection upgrade, I can actually stream high definition, a major upgrade from being stuck with SD previously.  The Apple TV only supports 720p resolution content, though, so 1080p video is played with half its original detail.  Streaming rented TV shows, YouTube videos, and NetFlix all seem to work fine, within the limitations of a user interface designed for a simple remote and television.  But since I can’t get it to connect to my iTunes reliably and I already have NetFlix and YouTube video capability elsewhere, the box is mostly useless to me.  Even if I could get it to stream from my computer properly I’m not sure I’d recommend this to someone unless they already had a huge investment in iTunes video.  I’ll say more on that in a second.

There is speculation we’ll see upgraded capabilities with new software on the Apple TV in the future.  The hardware seems to be capable of a lot more than what it is doing.  I hope we do see some upgrades, because for less than the Apple TV’s $99 price there are other boxes with greater flexibility out there, like the...

Roku HD Player

A couple months ago I found an amazing Internet deal for the Roku HD video player.  I have had the ability to stream NetFlix through my Xbox 360s, PS3, Wii, and Samsung Blu-ray players for some time, but the Roku adds a bunch more other video sources.  Installation was very easy… plug in power and HDMI, and it’s off and going.

It works just like it supposed to.  I have streamed not only NetFlix videos, but also podcasts from TWiT, Revision3, shows from NASA, PlayOn, HGTV, Amazon-on-Demand (works like the Apple TV to rent/buy TV shows and movies), and many other sources.  And they are adding new channels quite often.  While most "premium” content is only available for pay through Amazon, the amount of free content is becoming extensive, especially when you add optional private channels through the Roku web site.

The best part is the price.  The box starts at $60.  Since it does a lot more than the Apple TV, I’m going to have to recommend the Roku boxes over the ATV unless you absolutely must stream content from iTunes, in which case the Apple option is the only one you have. 

Amazon Kindle (3rd Generation)

Not being a huge reader myself, the Kindle doesn’t necessarily appeal to me in the way that it would a lot of people.  It has appealed to me as a gadget from the day it came out, but I couldn’t justify the $329, $299, $249, or even $189 for a gadget I wasn’t sure I’d use much.  But when Amazon announced the Wi-Fi only version for $139 two months ago, I decided at that price I could get one to play with it.

I’ve read a lot of varying reviews of the device over the 2.5 years of its existence.  Most people absolutely love it.  Then there are some Apple fans who love the iPad so much they have to put down the Kindle.  Owning both, I find myself leaning a lot more toward the first group.  Yes, you can read books on the iPad, but it’s too heavy to hold for reading for very long, and its reflective screen can be a problem.  In other words, the iPad is not a replacement for the Kindle.

I actually really, really like the Kindle.  It isn’t perfect, but it is very good.  It is very light, thin, and the electronic ink screen (not backlit; looks and reads just like paper) is very easy to read.  If you haven’t seen an e-ink screen, there just isn’t any way to accurately describe it.  It really does look like you’re looking at a sheet of paper.  Text is crisp, and there aren’t screen reflections to worry about.  The words appear right at the surface of the screen instead of behind the thickness of a pane of glass.  At first the flash-to-black-then-white of the screen when turning pages was a bit distracting, but after I got into my first book the screen flash totally disappeared from my mind and I didn’t notice it any longer.  e-ink screens aren’t great for everything, but they are perfect for reading.  The fact that the Kindle runs for about a month on a battery charge because of the type of screen it uses is pretty cool too.

Purchasing content is super easy, and very fast.  The Kindle store on the device isn’t quite as fast to use as purchasing directly on the Amazon web site from a computer, but it does work very well anyway.  There is a decent amount of free content as well.  But my favorite feature is the ability to preview the first chapter of a book before purchasing.  So it’s kind of like browsing the shelves at the book store before committing to a purchase.  Books download in a matter of seconds, and if they are purchased online from a computer they appear on the device without doing anything… they just show up.

The Kindle is very cool.  It just might turn me into more of a reader than I have been in the past.  But probably the biggest compliment I could give it is to share the opinion of a friend.  When I told her I was buying it she swore to me that it is something she would never be interested in because she likes the feel of the paper in a real book, and likes to collect books and show them off in her bookshelf.  She said she could never envision herself reading books on an electronic device.  Then after I got my Kindle I showed it to her, and she fell in love with it and has decided to get one of her own.  At $139 it’s a great deal, and now that Target carries them in their stores, it’s even easier to pick one up.

That’s All For Now!

Well, that’s about it for now.  I know I have picked up other toys recently, but these are the ones that stand out in my mind.

IdleVolume

I just finished (well, just started too… it didn’t take very long) a little program to take care of a problem I have had with my computer for a very long time.  I have a computer in my bedroom and occasionally in the middle of the night it will beep, twang, squeal, buzz, speak, or make some other noise that will wake me up.  Some nights I do remember to turn down the volume before I go to bed, but most nights I just forget.  So I created IdleVolume.

It’s just a little program that turns down the volume on the computer when it has been inactive for a period of time.  Similar to the way your screensaver kicks in or the computer turns off your monitor when you haven’t used the keyboard or mouse for a while.  But with sound.

It sits in your notification area waiting for you to do nothing.  Literally.  You set the amount of time that it waits, and also the volume level for when that period of time has elapsed.  Then it turns down your volume.  Then when you come back to your computer (or your cat walks by) and move the mouse or press a key on the keyboard it sets your volume back to where it was previously.  Easy peasy.

This is one of those “duh! why didn’t someone else think of that?” things that I wish someone else had taken care of years ago, but nobody has I guess.  So I did.  You can thank me later.

I wrote this program for me, but thought others might find it useful, so I’m making it available for free.  No charge.  Costs zero.  No advertising.  Without any catch, because it’s something everybody should have.  Just go to my company web site and download it.  And enjoy.  And tell your friends.

It requires a version of Windows newer than Vista (so it works with Vista, Server 2003, Server 2008, and 7), so XP and Mac users need not apply.  It won’t work.  And I don’t plan to write an XP or Mac version either, sorry!  Too much work for too little (“no benefit to me”) in return.

Religion Quiz

It seems that LDS Church members know religion in general better than most… and certainly seem to know Biblical stories and teachings better than other Christians…  Click the image to view it full-sized.  Or take the quiz yourself here.

First Video of Sonnet

I posted this forever ago on my Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube accounts, but forgot to include it here on the old blog.

This is the first released video of the week with Sonnet.  There are lots more to come… you’ll just have to be patient with me.  I still have a bit of editing to do.  And the videos will be released periodically as Sonnet feels it’s time to do so.

So here’s Sonnet’s “Without You” as performed at her acoustic house concert in June.

This was a lot of fun to work on.  We had quite a few technical problems (don’t get me started), but the good things far outweighed the bad.  Not only did I get to get out my audio and video toys, and play with new video editing software, I got to work with some great people.  Sonnet is so much more than just a gifted singer and talented writer… she’s an amazing person as well, and I’m really glad that I’ve had the opportunity to work with and get to know her.  And I’m really looking forward to the other projects she and I have in the works.  I always enjoy working on projects with Dave and Paul… both are extremely talented filmmakers, and lots of fun to be around.  The music video they’re putting together is going to be fantastic!  And Brad is amazing as well… always so willing to help out with my little projects, and just brilliant when it comes to all things musical and electronic.  He was such a lifesaver helping setup for the house concert, and directing the camera operators.  Thanks so much to everyone!

So there it is… the first public release of anything we did that week.  It was such a whirlwind (I literally got 12 hours of sleep between Monday and Friday), but in a good way.  I’d do it again in a heartbeat… but plan to spread things out over two more days if possible.

How it came to be…

So a few people have asked me how this all came about… a girl I had never met from California getting hooked up with a group of guys from Utah… well…

Let’s backup to early summer 2009.  I’m watching TV late at night and a commercial for Lagoon Park comes on.  And it’s got this cute, quirky, catchy song for its soundtrack.  The sort of song you’d never pick for a theme park, because it’s just this sweet sounding girl with rich but subtle harmony and a piano, to a slow beat—far from the stereotypical loud in-your-face sort of song one might associate with an amusement park.  But extremely intriguing nonetheless.  I really liked it, so I looked up who it was.  It took a little digging, but I finally found out that it was a girl from Los Angeles named Sonnet (yes, that really is her name), that managed to land a contract providing the song for the 2009 Lagoon/Coke ad campaign.  I found her website, saw that she was on Twitter, and followed her (that’s how you “friend” someone).  And she pretty much immediately responded by following me too.  Kewl!

Fast forward a few months.  Over time I had made a few comments to Sonnet on Twitter and she always wrote back, and was always very gracious.  We didn’t have what I’d call frequent communication, but it was steady.  At one point I mentioned to her that I did sound and that if she ever wanted to do a concert in Utah I’d be glad to provide my services, but nothing more came of that (I assumed as much… she really didn’t know me from Adam, and knew nothing about my ability as a sound engineer). At one point she did come to Utah and performed a couple concerts at Lagoon, and despite how hard I tried to get there, I arrived at the park too late and couldn’t get in.  So I missed the one opportunity I had to actually meet her and hear her perform.  That was a sad day.

Anyway, as Christmas approached one day she tweeted (that’s how you say that you posted something on Twitter) that she was looking for an idea for a Christmas present for family and friends.  I mentioned to her (since she was a singer) that she ought to record a song and give that to people.  There wasn’t really time before Christmas to do that, but it started a little bit of a dialog about working together on recording a song together someday.  Completely hypothetical, but it did begin to open up the possibility that someday something could maybe possibly happen if I rubbed my lucky rabbit’s foot during a full moon while the planets aligned just so.  Long shot, but not impossible.

Fast forward another couple months to February… another girl I was following on Twitter had been advertising to her followers that she was going to be doing a live streaming concert.  She started announcing it several weeks beforehand, making it seem like a really big deal.  This other artist was better known than Sonnet, had multiple CDs out, a recording contract with a major label, and had recently landed a nationally-broadcast TV commercial with a huge company in a very public advertising campaign, so for sure this was going to be something big, right?  So I made a point to tune in, only to be very disappointed.  Instead of being something professionally produced (you know, with at least a real microphone), it was her sitting on her bed, playing her guitar, being recorded by just the webcam and microphone in her laptop under really bad lighting.  You could barely hear her sing or play.  My first thought was, “What a waste!  She has lots of fans watching, has spent a lot of effort promoting this event, and this is what we’re getting?”  It was technology heartbreak for me.

At that point I had the idea that her disappointing production was probably due to the fact that she didn’t know the right person to pull off something better.  And I also thought, “I have the equipment, the know-how, and other resources to pull off something much better.”  The problem was, this other artist was too well known to even bother responding to anything on Twitter, so there wasn’t any way that she’d even consider taking the time working with some no-name from Utah.  And frankly, her music wasn’t something that I really got that excited about, so I didn’t even really want to pursue that anyway.

So the next day as I thinking about the disappointment of the previous evening, I thought, “who do I know that is good enough to justify spending the time, has enough of a following for there to be interest, and yet is not so well known that they’d consider working with me to produce a streamed concert?”  Of course Sonnet came to mind, so I sent her a casual message on Twitter asking if coming to Utah and doing a live, streaming Internet performance was something she’d be interested in doing.  She said it was, so we connected via IM and started talking about the possibility.  Nothing definitive, but it got the ball rolling nonetheless.

I don’t really know what she thought of the whole thing at that point--I’ve never asked, but she was game for the idea.  And before long we started making plans.  Eventually we connected via email and on the phone, then started regular video conferences planning things out.  Once we found a location, and a suitable timeframe within her schedule and mine, things finally started coming together.

Sonnet was totally on board with the ideas that I had for what the concert was going to be like.  I wanted to keep it small (for many technical as well as other reasons) but completely professionally produced, with real lighting, multiple cameras, moving cameras, nice piano, high end audio equipment, shot in high definition at a nice location, etc.  The idea of just a small concert in someone’s living room struck a chord with both of us.  I’m really glad that she and I have been on the same page through the entire process… it has made it that much more fun.

Somewhere along the line I asked Dave and Paul if they’d be interested in running cameras for me for the concert.  They’ve always been really good about helping me out with projects when I ask, so they agreed.  But I think at first they just thought it was one of my silly little just-for-fun things that I do when I’m bored of the rest of my life, so there wasn’t a lot of excitement coming from them initially.

After a couple more weeks, I was frankly a little frustrated that they weren’t more excited about the project… I wanted them to be excited about it.  And to see what I saw in Sonnet—a sweet, beautiful, extremely likeable and talented singer with a catchy sound—so I showed them a couple of her YouTube videos.  Fortunately, they got it right away.  They saw the same things I was seeing, and they finally started to show some enthusiasm. 

So as we started talking about plans for the concert, somehow the idea of shooting a music video while Sonnet was going in town came up.  I don’t remember who it was that had the idea, but after asking her if she would be interested, plans for the video started coming together.  A song was picked.  Then a different song picked.  Then back to the first song.  Ideas for the story started to come and be discussed.  Too many ideas, in fact.  Later, two days before Sonnet flew to Utah her image consultant called me and Dave and we had an emergency two hour phone conference to simplify and focus things drastically.  Yes, two days before she got here we were making major changes.  Talk about flying by the seat of your pants.  Anyway, we landed in a place we were all comfortable.  (Okay, Doug, enough with the plane metaphors!)

Anyway, thankfully we had a lot of other people jump in at the last second to help out.  A few days before we started shooting Sae Sae volunteered to help, and she did some amazing recruiting… she found people to help with lighting and moving equipment around (grips), hair, and makeup.  We owe a lot to her making things go as smoothly as they did!

Honestly, I can’t take much credit for the music video.  Dave and Paul really took the idea of the video and ran with it.  I really didn’t have that much to do with putting the video together.  Other than providing some of the equipment, while it was going on my main job was to make sure that Sonnet was where she needed to be when she needed to be there, and that she was being taken care of.  Sure, I’d step in to run a second camera, or move stuff around, but ultimately my biggest role for the video was really making sure that Sonnet was comfortable.

The Internet streamed concert was another story altogether.  Where I took a back seat during filming of the music video, I stepped in and took charge for the concert.  That was really my baby of the whole week.  Multi-camera videos are something that the others do rarely, but something I do with some degree of regularity.  Fortunately I have acquired all of the equipment to do so over the last several years, even designing, building, and writing software for quite a bit of it as well.  And I actually enjoy working with audio more than video, so this was going to be my only chance during the week to do what I enjoy most. 

I’ll save the many stories from the week when we actually shot everything for another post (and maybe some of the other people involved will post something on their own blogs… hint, hint?).  It really was quite an adventure, but in a good way.  So much fun, and definitely an experience I will never forget.  Frankly I can’t believe we pulled off what we did in so little time.  And that we survived the week of no sleep, super late nights, in the heat, on little food, without hating each other by the end (much to the contrary, actually—we’re all better friends), is kind of a miracle in and of itself.

Two little birds...

Two little birds, caught in my window. 
And I told them they don't need to worry.  
Gave 'em a board--
So they could climb out.
Climbing up seemed too difficult a feat.

They would try, they'd get it wrong, couldn't do it right
The more they'd try to climb, the more they'd fall again.
Then they would hesitate.

Birds, put your best feet on, sing me your favorite songs,
So go ahead, find your way out.
Fly up and away free, I hope you get your dreams,
Just go ahead, find your way out.

I don’t get it when…

People who design things don’t actually use them… and expect that others will want to use them.  Web sites are the worst.

Like today, I was on a comic web site… the comics are great… they have this really cool “Random Comic” link at the top of the page, and many of the comics are much longer than one page.  You read the comic and have to scroll back to the top of the page to hit the Random Comic (or any) link.  If you want me to read the comic and stay on the site, put the link at the bottom of the page so I don’t have to scroll back to the top to view another.  If the web designer had actually used the site, they would have realized that putting those links at the bottom of the page would have improved site usability 257%.