Digital Things of Interest Overview:
Read these Digital Things of Interest for 02 August 2017, which includes:
- Widespread cheering at the news that Flash is being killed off. Hooray!;
- AI is apparently inventing languages humans can’t understand. It’s called gibberish;
- Viewing in landscape is making a comeback as screen sizes increase;
- Ways to chill out by turning off push notifications.
#Flash #ArtificialIntelligence #UserExperience #MobilePhones
Digital Things of Interest 02 August 2017:
- Flash is Dead
- Oh, hooray. Flash is being killed off by Adobe. I’m sure you heard the cheers ringing through the streets. At the end of 2020, they will stop updating and distributing it. That’s about 20 years too late in my book, but there you go. Most serious vendors & sites should already have moved away from Flash by now, and the rest should have moved away from it by 2020. You’d imagine that feature updates from here will be severely curtailed and really, the only updates from now should be security ones. There isn’t yet any information on whether security patches will be released in 2021 and beyond for those recalcitrant web users who refuse to stop using it.
- AI Inventing Languages Humans Can’t Understand
- This is an interesting story which got click-baited to the ends of the earth with Facebook allegedly having to cut power to the AI bots before they took over the world (ish). The actual story, though, seems a little more prosaic. Basically, the bots started jabbering at each other owing to a coding mistake with no-one able to understand what they were saying. I’m not convinced the bots were conversing by speaking and responding to each other, rather they were , like politicians, saying what they wanted to say, whatever the other party to the conversation said. Like what politicians say, I’m not convinced that counts as a conversation, or a language, although it is exciting and worth a headline.
- People on Tablets View in Landscape
- After a couple of years of being encouraged to shoot vertical video, and create ads as vertical video, it seems like landscape is making a bit of a comeback as screen sizes grow. Anything over 9 inches of screen width will have a higher % of landscape views than portrait views. This makes sense – due to the construction of our heads & facial layouts, we effectively see the world in landscape, so why shouldn’t we want to watch things in landscape. It may also be that larger screens are used more for long-form content which is more likely to be shot & enjoyed in landscape format.
- Turn Off Your Push Notifications
- This is becoming a bit of a theme recently, from people stepping back from smart phones, to only using email at certain points in their day, we seem to want fewer distractions, or interruptions. The author is correct, notifications can get annoying. I find it best to not allow apps to send notifications in the first place, and if I find I need them, then to change that to allow. In other words, the default is to have no notifications and allowing notifications is an exception. The other way is to go Do Not Disturb, or just put the thing on silent.
That’s it for today. If you find anything of interest in the digital space that you think is worth sharing, please get in touch with me.
Mobile First is NOT Mobile Friendly
TL;DR
- Flash is being killed off in 2020.
- AI isn’t really inventing languages.
- People watch videos in landscape.
- Turning off Push Notifications will make you chill a bit.
- Read The State of SEO in mid-2017. It’s good for you.
- Read about how Google’s Mobile First Index is not Mobile Friendly.
Thanks for reading. If you would like to discuss what these digital things of interest might mean for your web property, or you have found something of interest and would like to share it, please feel free to contact me.
