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There’s been quite a bit of buzz around HTML5 and what it means for founders, project architects, and web developers. Relevance of HTML5 has be fueled by (1) rapid browser adoption of the as-yet-to-be-finalized standard and (2) the huge implications of media delivery through the video, audio, and object tags. HTML5 is a good thing, no matter how you slice it.
The revolutionary impact that HTML5 will make will be at the mobile browser level, especially for content delivery.  This goes way beyond having your YouTube videos and movie trailers load and render way faster.  No, this is a new application delivery system that moves us a little closer toward using the web as the OS.  It definitely moves apps off the device and into the cloud.

If you need industry reinforcement of this trend, look no further than Disney’s recent acquisition of Rocket Pack for the usual  20 million.  Rocket Pack is an platform for building and delivering games that is rendered through HTML5.  In fact, in that small arena, they are the massive industry leader.  It’s a real bleeding edge acquisition for a behemoth like Disney, but it’s a big picture move.  [The tech "behind" the tech, so to speak.]

All of a sudden you can play standard def graphic games (comparable to a Wii) directly in your phone’s browser without Flash!  Realtime and networked, no less.  Despite my reliance on sunblock to setp outdoors, I’m no gamer, but, on the tech level … wow.  So for all you biz people that are concerned with applications, there’s an under-exploited (for now) technology in HTML5 called Web Storage.  This will essentially allow instant data manipulation, similar to working with a local database, but over the web.  This is achieved by dynamically caching large chunks of data using a really huge cookie.

This caching serves the double purpose of speeding up your data interactions AND allowing you to use data-intensive apps across spotty mobile networks.  Imagine having a local copy of your entire Salesforce CRM sitting on your phone.  Oh, it’ll be encrypted, of course.  Now when you are at a client’s site just before a meeting searching for an old proposal, it’ll take a few seconds to view, rather than a couple of minutes.  This tech will greatly accelerate sort, indexing, and searching data on low power devices.  I really like the possibilities and I’ll expound more in the future.

A client recently needed some help on setting up video tutorials on her website. I realized that this info is probably of value to just about everybody, so here it is. Disclaimer: these are my opinions as to what constitutes an effective tutorial and this is by no means authoritative.

• Initial capture:
  1. Script out the mouse clicks and screens that you want to hit in order (sometimes I do this in PowerPoint)
  2. Capture that workflow in a video with Camtasia or Captivate (possibly run the PowerPoint in another window for visual queues OR just print it out)
  3. Edit LIBERALLY to get tutorial down to final runtime
  4. Play video and record VERY rough voice over to get the basic structure down
  5. Replay voiceover and transcribe into a script, editing for brevity
  6. Read your script while the final video is playing and capture audio
  7. In Captivate or Camtasia, marry the audio with the video
• Stay away from the post-it style popups that are so popular in Captivate … people are way too impatient to read in a video, so these are not effective (example: subtitled films don’t do well)
• Instead, to highlight content or actions, perform a ZOOM in the video editing software
• When doing the VO, keep a consistent distance from the mic. I’d say 12 – 14 inches if you have a standalone mic. If it’s clip on or headset, then ignore this.
• I like audible clicks and typing sound effects in tutorials.  In Camtasia, this is one click box.
• Make sure the volume is fairly loud, but not blaring on the final version … people always have their speakers wayyy too low
• If this is an intro-style of video, it should be really fast, like 30 – 45 seconds (you are telling your audience that your service or product is as easy as 1-2-3 … so REALLY make it as easy as 1-2-3)
• Unless you have an insanely complex form (and if you do, you might consider redeveloping it), when demoing a form being filled out, show the beginning of filling out a form, then do a blur transition to “fast-forward” to the completed form.  If you must, fast-forward blur to the challenging parts of the form and in your voiceover, give users clear, concise direction.  Or, like I said, redevelop.
• Break non-intro tutorials into 1 minute to 1:30 chunks
• Use an SEO-friendly player like Longtail

That’s a messy, incomplete set of guidelines to making an effective tutorial.

I may have figured out how  Lala works their licensing mystery.  When synching your music collection, the service somehow matches mp3 tags like artist, album, and song title.  I think song length may also have something to do with it.  If it finds an “approximate” match AND the song is licensed for Lala’s use, the song gets dropped into your online music collection.  I bet this is somewhere in the FAQ on their web site, but I never read that nonsense … do you?

Why did I only find this out 6 months after I started using Lala?  Very good question … glad I asked it.  It takes forever to upload songs, so I only uploaded the first 20 gigs of my music collection.  I never processed the whole collection because I have 500+ gigs of music.  Because of how I originally converted all my CDs, my music collection is organized in an odd manner.  It’s very complex, but let’s just say I uploaded the most mainstream music first.  All my music matched and so I blissfully used Lala for 6 months.  Now that I am so enamored of Lala, I’ve decided to upload the rest.   Much of this current music that I am uploading is eclectic and indie.  So it’s not really matching.  See, I may be uploading a live or demo or rare version, and Lala mismatches it with the production studio version of the tune!  If it doesn’t match, Lala omits it from the album entirely.  This isn’t so bad, except you don’t know until you go to play an album and the last track isn’t there or track 5 is not what you’d expect or way too loud compared to the rest of the album.  I’m obsessive about music and my spidey sense tingles when something is out of whack.  However, I breathe deeply. count to 10, and then move on.  Oh … the other issue is that on CDs with unnamed hidden tracks, I’ve edited out the silence and re-saved the track under a new name.  Green Day’s “Dookie” has that with the “All By Myself” song.  Lala doesn’t recognize this sort of thing.  Bummer.

So consequently, my Lala collection is incomplete and mismatched.  Probably 10% of my Lala collection is askew.  I have an enormous quantity of weird music, however.  So although my OCD has been tweaked a bit, I am willing to overlook the slight problems in favor of the enormous convenience.  For the great majority of the population for whom Meatloaf’s “Bat Out Of Hell 2″ (you know “I’d do anything for love, but I won’t do that!” … you have it on your iPod and you LOVE it) is the weirdest thing in their iTunes, this won’t matter.  All the Kanye West, Christina Aguilera, and Black Eyed Peas that you need is covered with Lala’s library.  Enjoy it!

There’s a great music website called Lala which I have been using for about 6 months now.  It allows you to upload your music collection and listen to it anywhere that you have a computer (or iPhone) and an internet connection.  You can set up playlists and share them.  And, of course, you can sort your music collection any way you want.  [ Example:  Show me just the Heavy Metal albums ... yay!]   The web application is absolutely phenomenal.  It’s drag & drop and very, very visual — a model of “complex simplicity”.  It’s more or less a web-based iTunes before iTunes tried to do everything.  I’ve stopped liking iTunes because it’s doing too much — Genius, video, and now Facebook integration … why oh why?  Call me a curmudgeon, but I kinda tolerated it about 2 or 3 years ago when all it did was organize and play music.  It did that well.  Lala reminds me of the happy, friendly iTunes of 2006.

I’m not going to sit here and describe every aspect of Lala because honestly you should be using it right now.  I have not a single complaint after 6 months of daily use.  Normally I am very critical, but this just kicks ass.  Seriously, stop reading this crappy blog post and just sign up at http://www.lala.com.  Download the tiny desktop application.  Pick three or four albums to upload.  Although the upload process is automated, it takes a long time to upload all your albums (I have 180 gigs of music!!).  So at first, limit yourself to those few albums.  It took about a day to upload 9 gigs / 1800 songs, but it did all that nonsense in the background.  Anyway, if you like it, then endure the lengthy upload for the rest of your music.

One of the coolest features that I cannot get over is that I can be listening to some ridiculously long playlist here at work.  Then I turn off my computer at work, go home, boot up the home system (workaholics, unite!), and pick up the playlist right where I left off.  It’s awesome.  I giggle to myself every time I get to do that.

The big mystery that lingers over this whole utopian system is how Lala gets around licensing.  Will the RIAA axe fall as heavily as  it did with Pandora?  — By the way, Pandora, awesome bounce-back.  Y’all have a godlike CEO over there. –  Apparently, Lala gets around licensing issues by comparing your music files with albums that they already have legally in their library.  Then Lala uploads only the music that they don’t have.  Yeah, I know, if you do the math, it doesn’t really add up.  Shhhhh!

Into the mosh… Everyone’s doing it: Email. Word Processing. Calendaring. Spreadsheets. Presentation slides.

But everyone’s doing it in a different pit: The office. The conference room. On a plane. In a hotel. Out in the field…

• Can’t access that blinkin !@#$%! email because it’s back on the desktop.
• Can’t pull up that stinking proposal because Word isn’t installed on the conference room PC.
• Can’t get a quick answer from a colleague because the Mac has Yahoo! Messenger and you need Windows IM.

Whaddaya use when you’re users are moshed all over the place?

In 2008, one smart answer is Google Apps for business. Available anywhere – online or off* – Google Apps lets companies achieve levels of office app sophistication previously available only to the very big guys. (*offline functions are limited as of now)

It provides collaborative access to documents in ways that PC office suites can’t – and takes care of all the attendant housekeeping and security so you don’t have to.

Businesses and employees will want the Premier Edition for $50 per user per year. This gives you branded, ad free screens – and enormous storage quotas that defy even the most neurotic email hoarders amongst us. Users get emails branded with @yourDomainName.com not @gmail.com, and 25gb of storage each. When you add up the annual cost of maintaining Word Processing, Calendaring, Spreadsheet, Presentation, and Email Apps for each user’s PC (desktop and laptop in some cases), $50 is a complete steal.

And just when you’re thinking this sounds cool, it gets better: Teams can collaborate on documents across the web, eliminating the need for emailing large attachments to each other and playing the “can you name the latest version” game. (Okay, we’re jumping up on stage now)

But in case this isn’t enough to get you downloading Google Apps right this instant, recently announced integration with SalesForce and the Google Apps Engine will surely stoke the fire.

Here it is. Check it out.

Now we’re on the stage, arms up over our heads, looking down at the undulating mosh, smiling wide… and now we’re diving in…

We’re not talking about the Carl’s Jr. chili burger mess on that guys face. We’re talking about how your visitors are going to find what they’re looking for on your web site.

Google offers a very low cost – $100 a year – custom edition search engine called the “Business Edition“. (50,000 page sites cost more).

The coolest thing is that you can fit Google Search Business Edition seamlessly into your site – sans the “Powered by Google” logo – and with no results page ads. To completely customize the look and feel around your core branding instead of theirs, Google offers an XML API.

So the topLingo tip for today is: Google Custom Search Business Edition with the XML API is the way to go if your site needs a commercial grade search that won’t detract from your core branding.

Now you got it. Now you’re good.

A fast way to create your family tree online and stay in touch this web applicaiton is so web 2.0.   

www.geni.com/tree/start

CLICK HERE TO VIEW ONLINE
(12.7MB Flash)

Or for your iPod:
CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD
(22MB M4V)

 Podcast Video: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

When discuss web dev projects, people frequently ask me which database is “the best”.  Do you want to know the deep, dark secret?  Shhhh … do not tell anybody this … but it doesn’t really matter because they are all pretty much (very quiet now) the same.  OH MY GOD!  Yes.

When deciding which database cornerstone to base the foundation of your site upon, it actually doesn’t make that much difference.  You don’t want to use Access or any consumer-level database.  For the more techie among you, that means don’t use any file system-structured database.  Speed will destroy you there and you’ll lose data under load.  But among the server products, i.e. MySQL, SQL 2000, SQL 2005, Oracle, or PostGreSQL, the level of performance is about the same.

So then it boils down to an issue of maintenance.  The key is making sure you have one or more reliable developers that can support that flavor of database.  You don’t want to get stuck with something completely proprietary that only one guy in the world can maintain.  Otherwise what happens when he’s laid up on Vicadin after faceplanting a backside 720 at Mammoth and you find out some North Korean by the “name” of l33tHaxor is running an export of  into your credit card table?  Two words; “adult” and “diapers”.

Let me temper all of this by saying that once your site gets a ton of users, you’ll want to benchmark your app’s typical queries on each of the database systems.  Probably one or two will be a standout.  And it’s usually pretty easy to migrate databases from one system to another.  Funny enough, Access actually shines in that situation.  It’s great as a middle-tier app for data migrations from heterogenous data sources.  (By the way, if you have no idea what I meant there, fear not, it means you probably have a solid social life and/or do not spit when you talk.)

I’ve done these scale-ups before and they are normally quite painless.  Of course, the app has to be built right, but .NET does a primo job of making this step easy.

I recently read a great article “2Advanced Studios V.5 Attractor Part 2″ from issue 126 of Web Designer Magazine, the one with the bad-ass red transformer on the cover. It covers a competitor of ours and their impressive implementation of FLASH DYNAMIC DEEP LINKING.

2Advanced Studios, located near us here in Southern California may be competition in the sense that we both build killer web applications however their work is much more targeted to the intense eye candy audience where topLingo’s soul thrives in great application back-end development. Of course topLingo’s eye-candy is appealing but we have neither the time or desire to focus 100% focus that direction. Regardless, they’ve always had our respect and reaffirmed by this recent article where they address Flash’s biggest deficiency to the user, “Letting the user hit the back button, and taking them where they were last.”

Dynamic Deep Linking is emerging into the limelight and technically speaking is the ability to bookmark pages and direct call internal sections of the website through custom urls. Keep you eye out for more on this one!

Maybe it’s because I’m bad at math and saved by using spreadsheet formula functions or maybe it’s because I’m just an “attention to detail dude” and the thought of throwing important data into a word or plain text document scares me. Either way I’ve always been a spreadsheet fan.

Now enter Google Docs & Spreadsheets, an online spreadsheet application that has most of the functionality of Excel, sharing and editing with others in real time, editing from anywhere in the world and massive import and export features all of which elevated me into a much bigger spreadsheet supporter. Go Team!  In fact, I find myself using the Google system on a weekly basis for both clients during correspondence and internally with the gang for collaboration.  Word up to the online spreadsheet!

http://spreadsheets.google.com

Welcome to 2007 and Happy New Year!  Lots of great opportunities in the web development world this year and just like each year before it some cool technologies and ideas will emerge and some will fade away.  And although personally I prefer to stay on the cutting edge of technology, the reality is that my business and my business clientele is about one or two steps behind.  Not a bad thing of course, in fact staying a step behind helps reduce the risk of investing into any unproven technology or concept thus wasting time and money.  So, with that in mind here are some things that we predict will be a hot topic for both our fortune 500 and small entrepreneurial clients in 2007:

• RSS Feeds
• Web 2.0
• Social Networking
• AJAX
• Paying more attention to the end user
• Online Marketing Tools
• Cascading Style Sheets (CSS)
• Web Services
• Video in Flash