While I’m working in the multimedia / film / entertainment industry for more than 15 years, I have seen many trends in interactive media. They came and then sooner or later they disapeared. But some things not only remained, they developed over the years more and more and became important parts of my everyday work and of the everyday user experience on the web.

One interesting thing to notice is, that one technology or one product alone often did not made it from start to finish. It was just more or less, that a certain product opened the way of creating a new kind of user experience - then the competition came out with a better product or a more economic approach of doing things.

I remember 1992 when I started my professional career as Photographer and Filmmaker. I had a new Apple Mac on my desktop and was one of the early customers of a product called Macromind Director 1.0 (later the company changed it’s name to Macromedia). This program gave me as a non-programmer the opportunity to create easily interactive animations, screendesigns and later with the advent of Apple Quicktime and the integration in to Director also the possibility to create short interactive movies, where scenes where switched by some buttons pressed.

The image size was not more like a stamp and image quality was even worse than todays mobile phone displays. Some colleagues whom I showed my first interactive movie piece just said, that this is not acceptable for them even to watch because of the lack of image quality. They did not get the point: of course this was not meant to be rivaling to BetaSP (the videoformat of choice those days) - but it was interactive, and it was Digital Video on CD. It was long before DVD’s where even described on whitepaper. It was just a stone on the road to something, that is quite common today.

Another example came up in the 1990’s with a product called “The Future Splash Player”. Some guys made an authoring software and a plugin for the new internet browsers Netscape and Explorer, with which one could create easily interactive vector animations. Macromedia, which had a Plugin for Director called Shockwave, realized that those vector animations where much smaller then the bitmap-based animations from their own product Director. So they bought the company and renamed this new acquired software to “Flash” - the rest is history.

Flash became a web-ubiquity, Macromedia became THE company on the road to more interactive user experiences on the web. They used early claims like “What the web can be” and are by many means one of the most important driving forces towards the Web 2.0.

Also they where clever enough to cash-out their company, when they realized that the time of commercial and propriatrary software was over. Flash became in the late 90’s and early 2000’s for many designer/developers the universal weapon. You saw a lot of Flash-only sites with almost no HTML at all. In the beginning there were only static pieces of code, later with new versions of Flash adressing on this issue they grew more and more to become real webapplications. As an end point they came up with technolgies like Coldfusion and Flex for creating really dynamic Flash/Web applications

But somehow Flex isn’t so compelling to me like OpenLaszlo, and Flashfiles are for me more and more “degrading” to assets on a page like .jpg, .pdf or more and more .svg. Youtube is a good example: Web 2.0 needs Flash only for videoplayback. Maybe I’m just tired after all these years, maybe the cash-out to Adobe itself made me insecure about these tools in general. Should I rely my work solely to software companies, that can be sold or just disappear? Remember Kai Krause and Metacreations?

Different product - same thing: one day they cashed-out their company, sold all their software titles to different companies. The innovation was away, the new owners just maintain the software more or less (Poser for instance is a nice tool still, but except of better models and some performance improvement it’s still quite they same like in Metacreation days …)

Open source software solutions are a more reliable solution for me - they cannot disappear from now to then, because they are created by a greater community and are in this way more redundant. In another way they are often more mature then their commercial counterpart. How’s that come? Open source software is often modeled after a commercial (or a lack of commercial) software. By this fact it is clear, that the mistakes made in their commercial counterpart can be avoided and features can be added, that where overlooked by the original software designers but in demand by the users. Writing this, I can now close the circle to Web2.0 and Macromedia. They started something in the industry - the development of media-rich, interactive applications, even something like today’s webapplication.

But the time of commercial apllications to create those applications is now turning to an end (sorry to write this, Adobe). Same is true for Flash as the only way to create those user interfaces. Today DHTML, JavaScript and PHP (aka AJAX) are experiencing a revival, as there are relatively old (what means old in the terms of the internet?) technologies. I’ll expect in the near future to see more open sourced authoring and development tools for Web 2.0 apps to become more and more popular.

And on the road to that we can than point more attention to usability and originality in the design process. Open source gives us as designers and developers a much greater freedom in shaping the tools that will shape Web 3.0.

This site (www.jobst-von-heintze.com) will be my personal diary on this journey.