Siu Lun

I love people who innovate the web, I love people who tries new things, but there are certain things, even though you try, just doesn’t make sense on the medium that you’re building on.

Over the past year, agencies around the world have been creating websites that uses 3rd-party plugins (that are not mass adopted) in campaign websites which they want push the boundaries of the interactivity possibilities.

Two of the most prominent plugins are D’Fusion (Transformers website), and an up-and-coming Unity web player (Unity is what a lot of iPhone 3D app developers use btw. Used on: http://www.honeydefender.com/).

I personally believe these two plugins and the commercial websites that are being built are more of an experimentational nature by the tech lead in the agencies than of actual benefit to the brand to which they’re building for.

Any agencies would be able to tell you from the years of experience they have now of constructive Flash based interactive websites that barriers of entries is a killer for many of their websites. Clients (brands) will ever only want the reach offered by the web, otherwise, why bother investing in websites?

These 3rd-party plugins in Unity and D’Fusion are barriers of entry. They’re so much of a barrier that normal web users will not bother to install. Granted, once installed, the experience and possibilities is over what Flash can offer normally, however, they still suffer the same downfalls Flash has with heavy interactive websites.

Namely.

Speed of loading
High minimum specification of machine
Bandwidth requirement

Given the barrier of entry, and the level of interactivity achieved vs the investment made into those websites, it really begs the question, why did they not just build a OpenGL application? This is further enhanced by the fact that most of these ‘interactive’ websites do not even take advantage of the fact they’re on the net and they can communicate in real-time with data – though one can argue that you can do the same in an OpenGL application.

I’m beginning to question the relevance of online deployment that are not made to be indexed and discovered.

I wonder what the client truly think of the websites built using those plugins, the question is: was it worth it?

Singapore AWS has been out the past couple of weeks, and I’ve migrated my server over. I have to say, accessing from Hong Kong is much faster.

If you also want to migrate your own server from US to Singapore or just want to use one of the pre-built AMI avaliable in the US but not yet in Singapore, follow what I’ve done.

First of all, start an instance of your AMI.

If the AMI you started is not your own, then customise it first, then execute within the instance:
ec2-bundle-vol -k private_key -u user_id -c cert

Once completed, upload the image direct to an S3 bucket in Singapore!
ec2-upload-bundle -b my-sg-bucket -m manifest -a access_key_id -s secret_key --location ap-southeast-1

Then all you have to do is register it. (commandline below)

If you have already got your own AMI, then SSH in a new instance of your own image, execute:
ec2-migrate-bundle -k private_key -c cert -a access_key_id -s secret_key --bucket my-us-bucket --destination-bucket my-sg-bucket --manifest manifest_path --location ap-southeast-1 --ec2cert ec2_cert_path --region ap-southeast-1

Your AMI will be uploaded to the Singapore S3 service, then you can use:
ec2-register --region ap-southeast-1 --name myvm my-sg-bucket/image.manifest.xml

Then you can launch your own SG instance! You may want to migrate any EBS volumes and data over. I didn’t have to deal with the hassle of that as there is no easy way to do it. I just backed up all files on my server onto my own machine and re-uploaded after.

CS5 is out, and I’ve been looking at the demos of various features of the new suite.

The most amazing demo I’ve seen ever is the intelligent image generation feature to ‘fill in’ the gaps.

There is still probably some flaws from the system, but this means I’m pretty much not dependent on ‘creatives’ to retouch my images.

In terms of the most wanted feature that I’m looking for though is Flash. Flash Builder and Catalyst is shipping with the Master Collection! No longer do we have to shell out extra for Flash Builder. A nice touch, but guttered I just spent lots of money on FDT.

FDT would most probably still be my first choice as it runs on Eclipse and I do pretty much all my development work no matter what language using Eclipse.