The Kilobots are an inexpensive system for testing synchronized and collaborative behavior in a very large swarm of robots. Photo courtesy of Michael Rubenstein
The Kilobots are coming. Computer scientists and engineers at Harvard University have developed and licensed technology that will make it easy to test collective algorithms on hundreds, or even thousands, of tiny robots.
Called Kilobots, the quarter-sized bug-like devices scuttle around on three toothpick-like legs, interacting and coordinating their own behavior as a team. AJune 2011 Harvard Technical Reportdemonstrated a collective of 25 machines implementing swarming behaviors such as foraging, formation control, and synchronization.
Once up and running, the machines are fully autonomous, meaning there is no need for a human to control their actions.
The communicative critters were created by members of the Self-Organizing Systems Research Group led by Radhika Nagpal, the Thomas D. Cabot Associate Professor of Computer Science at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) and a Core Faculty Member at the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard. Her team also includes Michael Rubenstein, a postdoctoral fellow at SEAS; and Christian Ahler, a fellow of SEAS and the Wyss Institute.
Thanks to a technology licensing deal with the K-Team Corporation, a Swiss manufacturer of high-quality mobile robots, researchers and robotics enthusiasts alike can now take command of their own swarm.
One key to achieving high-value applications for multi-robot systems in the future is the development of sophisticated algorithms that can coordinate the actions of tens to thousands of robots.
"The Kilobot will provide researchers with an important new tool for understanding how to design and build large, distributed, functional systems," says Michael Mitzenmacher, Area Dean for Computer Science at SEAS.
The name "Kilobot" does not refer to anything nefarious; rather, it describes the researchers' goal of quickly and inexpensively creating a collective of a thousand bots.
Inspired by nature, such swarms resemble social insects, such as ants and bees, that can efficiently search for and find food sources in large, complex environments, collectively transport large objects, and coordinate the building of nests and other structures.
Due to reasons of time, cost, and simplicity, the algorithms being developed today in research labs are only validated in computer simulation or using a few dozen robots at most.
In contrast, the design by Nagpal's team allows a single user to easily oversee the operation of a large Kilobot collective, including programming, powering on, and charging all robots, all of which would be difficult (if not impossible) using existing robotic systems.
So, what can you do with a thousand tiny little bots?
Robot swarms might one day tunnel through rubble to find survivors, monitor the environment and remove contaminants, and self-assemble to form support structures in collapsed buildings.
They could also be deployed to autonomously perform construction in dangerous environments, to assist with pollination of crops, or to conduct search and rescue operations.
For now, the Kilobots are designed to provide scientists with a physical testbed for advancing the understanding of collective behavior and realizing its potential to deliver solutions for a wide range of challenges.
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Personal comment:
This remembers me one project I have worked on, back in 2007, called "Variable Environment", which was involving swarm based robots called "e-puck" developed at EPFL. E-pucks were reacting in an autonomous manner to human activity around them.
The future of augmented-reality technology is here - as long as you're a rabbit. Bioengineers have placed the first contact lenses containing electronic displays into the eyes of rabbits as a first step on the way to proving they are safe for humans. The bunnies suffered no ill effects, the researchers say.
The first version may only have one pixel, but higher resolution lens displays - like those seen inTerminator- could one day be used as satnav enhancers showing you directional arrows for example, or flash up texts and emails - perhaps even video. In the shorter term, the breakthrough also means people suffering from conditions like diabetes and glaucoma may find they have a novel way to monitor their conditions.
In February,New Scientistrevealedthe litany of research projects underway in the field of contact lens enhancement. While one companyhas fielded a contact lens technologyusing a surface-mounted strain gauge to assess glaucoma risk, none have built in a display, or the lenses needed for focused projection onto the retina - and then tested it in vivo. They have now.
"We have demonstrated the operation of a contact lens display powered by a remote radiofrequency transmitter in free space and on a live rabbit," says a US and Finnish team led by Babak Praviz of the University of Washington in Seattle.
"This verifies that antennas, radio chips, control circuitry, and micrometre-scale light sources can be integrated into a contact lens and operated on live eyes."
The test lens was powered remotely using a 5-millimetre-long antenna printed on the lens to receive gigahertz-range radio-frequency energy from a transmitter placed ten centimetres from the rabbit's eye. To focus the light on the rabbit's retina, the contact lens itself was fabricated as a Fresnel lens - in which a series of concentric annular sections is used to generate the ultrashort focal length needed.
They found their lens LED glowed brightly up to a metre away from the radio source in free space, but needed to be 2 centimetres away when the lens was placed in a rabbit's eye and the wireless reception was affected by body fluids. All the 40-minute-long tests on live rabbits were performed under general anaesthetic and showed that the display worked well - and fluroescence tests showed no damage or abrasions to the rabbit's eyes after the lenses were removed.
While making a higher resolution display is next on their agenda, there are uses for this small one, say the researchers: "A display with a single controllable pixel could be used in gaming, training, or giving warnings to the hearing impaired."
"This is clearly way off in the future. But we're aware of the research that is ongoing in this field and we're watching the technology's potential for biosensing and drug delivery applications in particular," says a spokesperson for the British Contact Lens Association in London.
The rush to make computers smaller and smaller has been going on for some time now, but we may have a winner–at least for now–in terms of the small computer race. It’s called the Cotton Candy from FXI Tech, and though it just looks like yourstandard USBthumb drive, it turns out it’s packing an entire very small computer in its tiny packaging.
The specs, admittedly, aren’t anything truly spectacular, offering up a dual-core ARM Cortex A9 on the processor end, backed up by an ARM Mali-400MP GPU, wi-fi and Bluetooth connectivity, a USB plug and a microSD card slot as well as its own Android operating system. But when you consider that it’s all encasedin a devicethat’s the size of a basic key chain, well, suddenly the whole picture looks a lot more interesting.
What this is designed to do is hook into much larger displays, thanks to that HDMI plug, and allow you to perform many of your basic computer functions. You’ve got Bluetooth for the peripherals, microSD for the storage, cloud access from the Android app…it’s a very simple, very basic, but extremely portable setup. And, you can even hook it into another computer with the USB plug included, which in turn will let you borrow the peripherals hooked into that computer (great if you needed to print something, I’d say) to do the various jobs you want done.
And if you want an ultra-small computer to take with you most anywhere you go, Cotton Candy should be on hand in time for Christmas 2012, and the pricing is expected to land at the $200 mark, which isn’t half bad. Though it does make me wonder why most wouldn’t just buy a full on laptop for not too much more, especially if they buy used.
Still though, an ultra-small PC for an ultra-small price tag is in the offing, so what do you guys think? Will the Cotton Candy catch on? Or will we be seeing these go for half that or less just to clear them out? No matter what you think, we love hearing from you, so head on down to the comments section and tell us what you think!
A new installation at the Amsterdam Foam gallery by Erik Kessels takes a literal look at the digital deluge of photos online by printing out 24 hours worth of uploads to Flickr. The result is rooms filled with over 1,000,000 printed photos, piled up against the walls.
There’s a sense of waste and a maddening disorganization to it all, both of which are apparently intentional. According to Creative Review, Kessels said of his own project:
“We’re exposed to an overload of images nowadays,” says Kessels. “This glut is in large part the result of image-sharing sites like Flickr, networking sites like Facebook, and picture-based search engines. Their content mingles public and private, with the very personal being openly and un-selfconsciously displayed. By printing all the images uploaded in a 24-hour period, I visualise the feeling of drowning in representations of other peoples’ experiences.”
Humbling, and certainly thought provoking, Kessel’s work challenges the notion that everything can and should be shared, which has become fundamental to the modern web. Then again, perhaps it’s only wasteful and overwhelming when you print all the pictures and divorce them from their original context.
Focus in future will be on HTML5 as mobile world shifts towards
non-proprietary open standards – and now questions will linger over use
of Flash on desktop
Adobe is killing off development of its
mobile Flash plugin, and laying off 750 staff as part of broader
restructuring. Photograph: Paul Sakuma/AP
Mobile Flash is being killed off. The plugin that launched a thousand online forum arguments and a technology standoff between Apple and the format's creator, Adobe,
will no longer be developed for mobile browsers, the company said in a
note that will accompany a financial briefing to analysts.
Instead the company will focus on development around HTML5
technologies, which enable modern browsers to do essentially the same
functions as Flash did but without relying on Adobe's proprietary
technologies, and which can be implemented across platforms.
The existing plugins for the Android and BlackBerry platforms will be given bug fixes and security updates, the company said in a statement first revealed by ZDNet. But further development will end.
The
decision also raises a question mark over the future of Flash on
desktop PCs. Security vulnerabilities in Flash on the desktop have been
repeatedly exploited to infect PCs in the past 18 months, while Microsoft
has also said that the default browser in its forthcoming Windows 8
system, expected at the end of 2012, will not include the Flash plugin
by default. Apple, which in the third quarter captured 5% of the world
market, does not include Flash in its computers by default.
John Nack, a principal product manager at Adobe, commented on his personal blog
(which does not necessarily reflect Adobe views) that: "Adobe saying
that Flash on mobile isn't the best path forward [isn't the same as]
Adobe conceding that Flash on mobile (or elsewhere) is bad technology.
Its quality is irrelevant if it's not allowed to run, and if it's not
allowed to run, then Adobe will have to find different ways to meet
customers' needs."
Around 250m iOS (iPhone, iPod Touches and iPad)
devices have been sold since 2007. There are no clear figures for how
many are now in use. More recently Larry Page, chief executive of
Google, said that a total of 190m Android devices have been activated.
It is not clear how many of those include a Flash plugin in the browser.
"Our
future work with Flash on mobile devices will be focused on enabling
Flash developers to package native apps with Adobe Air for all the major
app stores," Adobe said in the statement. "We will no longer adapt
Flash Player for mobile devices to new browser, OS version or device
configurations.
"Some of our source code licensees may opt to
continue working on and releasing their own implementations. We will
continue to support the current Android and PlayBook configurations with
critical bug fixes and security updates."
The decision comes as
Adobe plans to cut 750 staff, principally in North America and Europe.
An Adobe spokesperson declined to give any figures for the extent of
layoffs in the UK. The company reiterated its expectation that it will
meet revenue targets for the fourth quarter.
The reversal by Adobe
– and its decision to focus on the open HTML5 platform for mobile –
brings to an end a long and tumultuous row between Apple and Adobe over
the usefulness of Flash on the mobile platform. The iPhone launched in
2007 without Flash capability, as did the iPad in 2010.
Steve
Jobs, then Apple's chief executive, and Apple's engineers insisted that
Flash was a "battery hog" and introduced security and stability flaws;
Adobe countered that it was broadly implemented in desktop PCs and used
widely on the web.
Jobs's antagonism was partly driven, his
biography reveals, by Adobe's reluctance after he rejoined Apple in 1996
to port its movie-editing programs to the Mac and to keep its Photoshop
suite comparable on the Mac platform with the Windows one.
But
Jobs also insisted that mobile Flash failed in the role of providing a
good user experience, and also would restrict Apple's ability to push
forward on the iOS platform. Studies of browser crash reports by Apple's
teams showed that Flash was responsible for a signficant proportion of
user problems; Apple was also not satisfied that a Flash plugin would be
available for the first iPhone in 2007 which would not consume more
battery power than would be acceptable.
Jobs managed to persuade
Eric Schmidt, then Google's chief executive and a member of the Apple
board, to get YouTube to make videos available in the H.264 format
without a Flash "wrapper", as was then used for the desktop
implementation.
But the disagreements between Apple and Adobe
intensified, especially when Android devices began appearing which did
use the Flash plugin. Apple refused to use it, and banned apps from its
App Store which tried to use or include Flash.
In "Thoughts on Flash",
an open letter published by Jobs in April 2010, he asserted that "Flash
was created during the PC era – for PCs and mice. Flash is a successful
business for Adobe, and we can understand why they want to push it
beyond PCs. But the mobile era is about low power devices, touch
interfaces and open web standards – all areas where Flash falls short.
"New
open standards created in the mobile era, such as HTML5, will win on
mobile devices (and PCs too). Perhaps Adobe should focus more on
creating great HTML5 tools for the future, and less on criticizing Apple
for leaving the past behind."
The first human genome cost $3 billion to complete; now we can sequence the entire population of Chicago for the same price
The mythical "$1,000 genome" is almost upon us, said Jonathan Rothberg, CEO of sequencing technology company Ion Torrent, at MIT's Emerging Technology conference. If his prediction comes true, it will represent an astonishing triumph in rapid technological development. The rate at which genome sequencing has become more affordable isfaster than Moore's law. (You can read a Q&ATRdid with Rothberg earlier this yearhere, and a profile of his companyhere).
"By this time next year sequencing human genomes as fast and cheap as bacterial genome," said Rothberg. (Earlier, he'd commented that his company can now do an entire bacterial genome in about two hours.)
I was in the room on October 19 when he said it, and I would have thought it pure hubris were it not for Rothberg's incredible track record in this area, from founding successful previous-generation sequencing company 454 Life Sciences to recent breakthroughs made with the same technology he proposes will get us to the $1,000 genome.
The Personal Genome Maker is already showing up in clinical labs, even doctors' offices
The key to this breakthrough, says Rothberg, is that the PGM does not rely on conventional wet chemistry to sequence DNA. Instead, it works almost entirely throughconventional microchip technology, which means Ion Torrent is leveraging decades of investment in conventional transistors and chips.
So what's the age of the $1,000 genome look like? Until we know what more of those genes actually correlate with, for most of us it won't be so different from the present.
"Right now don't have very many correlations between those 3 billion base pairs [of the human genome] and outcomes or medicines," says Rothberg. He predicts it will take at least 10 years of clinical experiments with full genome sequencing to get us to the point where we can begin to unlock its value.
"And it will be 20 years before we understand cancer at same level as HIV and can come up with combinations of medicine [tailored] for each individual," says Rothberg.
The next generation of mobile processors has arrived in the form of the NIVIDA Tegra 3, formerly known as Project Kal-El, a quad-core chipset with aspirations to dominate the Android landscape in 2012 as theTegra 2 dual-core processor dominatedthe majority of 2011. Though many of the details have already been revealed by NVIDIA before today on how Tegra 3 functions and is able to bring you the consumer more power, less battery consumption, and more effective workload distribution, this marks both the official naming of the chip as well as the official distribution of easy to process videos on how Tegra 3 will affect the average mobile device user.
NVIDIA’s Tegra 3 chipset has been gone over in full detail by your humble narrator in two posts here on SlashGear just a few weeks ago in two posts, one on how there are actually[five cores, not just four], and another all about[Variable Symmetric Multiprocessing]aka vSMP. Note that back then NVIDIA had not yet revealed that the final market name for the processor would be “Tegra 3? at the time these posts were published, instead still using the codename “Project Kal-El” to identify the chipset. The most important thing you should take away from these posts is this: your battery life will be better and the distribution of power needed by your processor cores will be handled more intelligently.
NVIDIA has provided a few videos that will explain again in some rather easy to process detail what we’re dealing with here in the Tegra 3. The first of these videos shows visually what cores use which amount of power as several different tasks are performed. Watch as a high-powered game uses all four cores while browsing a webpage might only use a single core. This is the power of Variable Symmetric Multiprocessing in action.
NVIDIA Tegra 3: Fifth Companion Core
Next there’s a demonstration of an upcoming game that would never have been able to exist on a mobile platform if it hadn’t been for NVIDIA’s new chip architecture and the power of a quad-core chipset – along with NVIDIA’s twelve GPU cores of course. We had a look at this game back earlier this year in thefirst Glowball post– now we go underwater:
Glowball Video 2: Tegra 3 goes underwater
Finally there’s a lovely set of videos showing you exactly what it means for game developers and gamers to be working with the Tegra 3 chipset. The first video shows off how next-generation games are being made specifically for this chipset, developers working hand in hand with NVIDIA to optimize their games for the Tegra 3 so that gamers can get the most awesome experience in mobile history. Devour this, if you will:
NVIDIA Tegra 3: Developers bring Next-Generation Games to Mobile
You can also see several examples of the games in the video and how they’ve been improved in the Tegra 3 world.Riptide GPas well asShadowgunhave been reviewed and given hands-on videos by your humble narrator in the past – can’t wait for the enhanced visions! Next have a look at these games running side-by-side with their original versions. Make sure you’re sitting down, because you’re going to get pumped up.
Side-by-side Gameplay Competition vs Tegra 3
Down to the frames per second, this new chipset will change the world you live in as far as gaming goes. Of course it doesn’t stop there, but in that gaming is one of the best ways to test a processor on this platform, one made with gaming in mind of course, you’ve got to appreciate the power. Have a peek at this tiny chart to see what we mean:
Then head over to the post from ASUS on what the very first hardware running the Tegra 3 will look like. It’s theASUS Eee Pad Transformer Prime, a 10.1-inch tablet from the makers ofthe original Transformer, a device made to pummel the competition and usher in a whole new age in mobile computing. We look forward to the future, NVIDIA, bring on another year ofcomplete and total annihilationof the competition!
At the beginning of last week, I launched GreedAndFearIndex
- a SaaS platform that automatically reads thousands of financial news
articles daily to deduce what companies are in the news and whether
financial sentiment is positive or negative.
It’s an app built largely on Scala, with MongoDB and Akka playing prominent roles to be able to deal with the massive amounts of data on a relatively small and cheap amount of hardware.
The app itself took about 4-5 weeks to build, although the underlying
technology in terms of web crawling, data cleansing/normalization, text
mining, sentiment analysis, name recognition, language grammar
comprehension such as subject-action-object resolution and the
underlying “God”-algorithm that underpins it all took considerably
longer to get right.
Doing it all was not only lots of late nights of coding, but also
reading more academic papers than I ever did at university, not only on
machine learning but also on neuroscience and research on the human
neocortex.
What I am getting at is that financial news and sentiment analysis
might be a good showcase and the beginning, but it is only part of a
bigger picture and problem to solve.
Unlocking True Machine Intelligence & Predictive Power The
human brain is an amazing pattern matching & prediction machine -
in terms of being able to pull together, associate, correlate and
understand causation between disparate, seemingly unrelated strands of
information it is unsurpassed in nature and also makes much of what has
passed for “Artificial Intelligence” look like a joke.
However, the human brain is also severely limited: it is slow, it’s
immediate memory is small, we can famously only keep track of 7 (+-)
things at any one time unless we put considerable effort into it. We are
awash in amounts of data, information and noise that our brain is
evolutionary not yet adapted to deal with.
So the bigger picture of what I’m working on is not a SaaS sentiment
analysis tool, it is the first step of a bigger picture (which
admittedly, I may not solve, or not solve in my lifetime):
What if we could make machines match our own ability to find patterns
based on seemingly unrelated data, but far quicker and with far more
than 5-9 pieces of information at a time?
What if we could accurately predict the movements of financial
markets, the best price point for a product, the likelihood of natural
disasters, the spreading patterns of infectious diseases or even unlock
the secrets of solving disease and aging themselves?
The Enablers I see a number of enablers that are making this future a real possibility within my lifetime:
Advances in neuroscience: our understanding of
the human brain is getting better year by year, the fact that we can now
look inside the brain on a very small scale and that we are starting to
build a basic understanding of the neocortex will be the key to the
future of machine learning. Computer Science and Neuroscience must
intermingle to a higher degree to further both fields.
Cloud Computing, parallelism & increased computing power:
Computing power is cheaper than ever with the cloud, the software to
take advantage of multi-core computers is finally starting to arrive and
Moore’s law is still advancing at ever (the latest generation of
MacBook Pro’s have roughly 2.5 times the performance of my barely 2 year
old MBP).
“Big Data”: we have the data needed to both train
and apply the next generation of machine learning algorithms on
abundantly available to us. It is no longer locked away in the silos of
corporations or the pages of paper archives, it’s available and
accessible to anyone online.
Crowdsourcing: There are two things that are very
time intensive when working with machine learning - training the
algorithms, and once in production, providing them with feedback (“on
the job training”) to continually improve and correct. The internet and
crowdsourcing lowers the barriers immensely. Digg, Reddit, Tweetmeme,
DZone are all early examples of simplistic crowdsourcing with little
learning, but where participants have a personal interest in
participating in the crowdsourcing. Combine that with machine learning
and you have a very powerful tool at your disposal.
Babysteps & The Perfect Storms All
things considered, I think we are getting closer to the perfect storm of
taking machine intelligence out of the dark ages where they have
lingered far too long and quite literally into a brave new world where
one day we may struggle to distinguish machine from man and artificial
intelligence from biological intelligence.
It will be a road fraught with setbacks, trial and error where the
errors will seem insurmountable, but we’ll eventually get there one
babystep at a time. I’m betting on it and the first natural step is
predictive analytics & adaptive systems able to automatically detect
and solve problems within well-defined domains.
Can ARM wrestle its way into the server market? Calxeda
and Hewlett-Packard think so. On Tuesday Calxeda launched its
EnergyCore ARM server-on-a-chip (SoC), which it says consumes as little
as 1.5 watts (and idles at half a watt). And HP, the world’s largest
server maker, committed to building EnergyCore-based servers that will
consume as little as 5 watts when running all out. Compare that to the
lowest-power x86 server chips from Intel, which consume about 20 watts but deliver higher performance.
Calxeda, backed in part by ARM Holdings, is banking that the success that ARM chips found in smartphones and mobile devices will
carry over into data centers serving large, scale-out workloads. In
that arena, it is facing off squarely against chip giant Intel and its
x86-based architecture, which dominates the market for chips running in
commodity servers.
Said Calxeda in a statement:
Thanks to its mobile phone heritage and patent-pending
innovations from Calxeda, the new processor consumes less than one tenth
the power of today’s most energy-efficient server processors and is
ideal for workloads such as web serving, ‘Big Data’ applications,
scalable analytics such as Apache Hadoop, media streaming and mid-tier
infrastructure such as caching and in-memory databases.
EnergyCore targets web serving, big data apps
The small form factor and energy stinginess of EnergyCore, based on
the ARM Cortex processor, suits an emerging and fast-growing class of
web and cloud applications, but it lacks in terms of software support
and currently won’t support the enterprise demand for 64-bit processors.
Thus, for traditional data centers locked into the Intel x86
architecture and with lots of legacy software to run, Calxeda might be a
stretch. But that might not matter.
“For big cloud companies that buy gargantuan numbers of servers and
for whom the power and space issues get linearly nasty as they build up
the number of nodes, this is a good solution,” said analyst Roger Kay,
the founder and president of Endpoint Technologies Associates.
These sorts of transactions take on an almost consultative nature,
where the server vendor works with the customer’s developers, he said.
EnergyCore is 32-bit only, a fact that Intel will no doubt trumpet.
“High-performance computing [HPC] needs 64 bits to deal with larger
address space, but that doesn’t mean that 32-bit [processors] can’t
address certain data center applications,” Kay said. “This new chip is
designed to handle very large databases that in turn handle lots of
queries from many end points. Think Google Earth where there are lots of
simple queries — ‘show me the bits in the X-Y grid specified.’”
HP estimates that those big scale-out web and cloud data center
scenarios represent a healthy 10 to 15 percent of the data center
market, Kay noted. That’s certainly worth fighting for. Intel pegs that segment at 10 percent of the overall market.
Richard
Fichera, the VP and an analyst at Forrester Research, said Calxeda did
its homework. “This looks to be at least three to five times more energy
efficient than other chips and [energy use] is a growing concern for
data centers.” Some of what Calxeda has done will be hard for
competitors to replicate, he said.
Calxeda, like SeaMicro,
which makes low-power servers running Intel Atom processors, also
builds on a fabric that lets all the various SoC components communicate
inside the box.
Skeptics point out that big data center buyers tend to be a
conservative lot, not likely to gamble on a new chip architecture. “Many
CIOs will go with the devil they know. They have software that runs on
Intel so why move?” Kay said. But again, Calxeda and HP are seeking out
the biggest of the big data center companies — those that have a lot of
in-house development talent that are not as bound by legacy software
concerns.
What’s in EnergyCore SoC?
Multicore ARM Cortex processor running at 1.1 GHz to 1.4 GHz
Supports FPU (scalar) and NEON (SIMD) Floating Point
4 MB of onboard shared L2 cache
Integrated Memory Controller with 72-bit datapath, and ECC
Typical maximum power consumption (running 100% CPU load under normal conditions) is 5 watts
Typical idle power consumption is less than .5 watts
Calxeda and HP will start rolling out sample products later this
year, with volume ramping up in 2012. Calxeda is not alone in this
arena: Marvell Inc. is already in the market with its own ARM-based servers. NVIDIA is also building an ARM-based server, dubbed Denver, for HPC.
While Calxeda is tiny compared to Intel, it also doesn’t manufacture
its own silicon, which could end up hurting it when comparing it to
Intel, one of the last silicon vendors to own its own chip
manufacturing. Fichera notes that Calxeda has no control over the
distribution and sales of what it designs: The server partner has all
the leverage. If someone else has a better SoC next year, Calxeda (or
whatever SoC provider they use) could be gone.
As mobile devices have continued to evolve and spread,
so has the process of designing and developing Web sites and services
that work across a diverse range of devices. From responsive Web design
to future friendly thinking, here's how I've seen things evolve over the
past year and a half.
If
you haven't been keeping up with all the detailed conversations about
multi-device Web design, I hope this overview and set of resources can
quickly bring you up to speed. I'm only covering the last 18 months
because it has been a very exciting time with lots of new ideas and
voices. Prior to these developments, most multi-device Web design
problems were solved with device detection and many still are. But the introduction of Responsive Web Design really stirred things up.
Responsive Web Design
Responsive
Web Design is a combination of fluid grids and images with media
queries to change layout based on the size of a device viewport. It uses
feature detection (mostly on the client) to determine available screen
capabilities and adapt accordingly. RWD is most useful for layout but
some have extended it to interactive elements as well (although this
often requires Javascript).
Responsive Web Design allows you to
use a single URL structure for a site, thereby removing the need for
separate mobile, tablet, desktop, etc. sites.
For a short overview read Ethan Marcotte's original article. For the full story read Ethan Marcotte's book. For a deeper dive into the philosophy behind RWD, read over Jeremy Keith's supporting arguments. To see a lot of responsive layout examples, browse around the mediaqueri.es site.
Challenges
Responsive
Web Design isn't a silver bullet for mobile Web experiences. Not only
does client-side adaptation require a careful approach, but it can also
be difficult to optimize source order, media, third-party widgets, URL
structure, and application design within a RWD solution.
Jason Grigsby has written up many of the reasons RWD doesn't instantly provide a mobile solution especially for images. I've documented (with concrete) examples why we opted for separate mobile and desktop templates in my last startup -a technique that's also employed by many Web companies like Facebook, Twitter, Google, etc. In short, separation tends to give greater ability to optimize specifically for mobile.
Mobile First Responsive Design
Mobile
First Responsive Design takes Responsive Web Design and flips the
process around to address some of the media query challenges outlined
above. Instead of starting with a desktop site, you start with the
mobile site and then progressively enhance to devices with larger
screens.
The Yiibu team was one of the first to apply this approach and wrote about how they did it. Jason Grigsby has put together an overview and analysis of where Mobile First Responsive Design is being applied. Brad Frost has a more high-level write-up of the approach. For a more in-depth technical discussion, check out the thread about mobile-first media queries on the HMTL5 boilerplate project.
Techniques
Many
folks are working through the challenges of designing Web sites for
multiple devices. This includes detailed overviews of how to set up
Mobile First Responsive Design markup, style sheet, and Javascript
solutions.
Ethan Marcotte has shared what it takes for teams of developers and designers to collaborate on a responsive workflow based on lessons learned on the Boston Globe redesign. Scott Jehl outlined what Javascript is doing (PDF) behind the scenes of the Globe redesign (hint: a lot!).
Stephanie Rieger assembled a detailed overview (PDF)
of a real-world mobile first responsive design solution for hundreds of
devices. Stephan Hay put together a pragmatic overview of designing with media queries.
Media
adaptation remains a big challenge for cross-device design. In
particular, images, videos, data tables, fonts, and many other "widgets"
need special care. Jason Grigsby has written up the situation with images and compiled many approaches for making images responsive. A number of solutions have also emerged for handling things like videos and data tables.
Server Side Components
Combining
Mobile First Responsive Design with server side component (not full
page) optimization is a way to extend client-side only solutions. With
this technique, a single set of page templates define an entire Web site
for all devices but key components within that site have device-class
specific implementations that are rendered server side. Done right, this
technique can deliver the best of both worlds without the challenges
that can hamper each.
I've put together an overview of how a Responsive Design + Server Side Components structure can work with concrete examples. Bryan Rieger has outlined an extensive set of thoughts on server-side adaption techniques and Lyza Gardner has a complete overview of how all these techniques can work together. After analyzing many client-side solutions to dynamic images, Jason Grigsby outlined why using a server-side solution is probably the most future friendly.
Future Thinking
If
all the considerations above seem like a lot to take in to create a Web
site, they are. We are in a period of transition and still figuring
things out. So expect to be learning and iterating a lot. That's both
exciting and daunting.
It also prepares you for what's ahead.
We've just begun to see the onset of cheap networked devices of every
shape and size. The zombie apocalypse of devices is coming. And while we can't know exactly what the future will bring, we can strive to design and develop in a future-friendly way so we are better prepared for what's next.
Resources
I
referenced lots of great multi-device Web design resources above. Here
they are in one list. Read them in order and rock the future Web!
