This reminds me of a flex-coded, corporate version the machine in Darren Aronofsky’s Pi. Only with fewer ants creating the special sauce (sorry for the spoiler but I think 12 years is past the statute of limitations). Seriously though, data-mining and trend-spotting algorithms are big business in todays T.I.A. world. And that’s fine – the data’s out there let’s make sense of it. But exploring “the past, present and predicted future of almost anything”? You’re gonna need the ants on this one because there’s nothing mystifying about a plain vanilla flex skin with cloud tags and timeline scrubbers. Here’s an example of where good brand & interaction design could help bring the truly special information (if there is any) to the user with maximum impact.

The functionality and promise of Adobe Connect is mouth-watering. The idea of what this thing could be isn’t an application, its a revolution. Collaborative screen-sharing, web-conferencing with integrated audio, video and text chat, file-sharing, the cure for blindness and cold-fusion. Great where do I sign up? Oh – its FREE?! We’re saved.

Then you load the application itself up, load the required plug-in and invite a colleague to join your virtual meeting and it all goes to shit. I’m really starting to hate Flex apps. Chuggy. Chuggy. Chuggy. When will the makers of these apps stop trying to be cute with animated fly-outs, pulsing, glowing buttons everywhere and (most likely procedurally generated) gradients and bevels and when will they start making web-applications that are snappy, zippy and responsive. Adobe Connect feels like I’ve just dipped a baseball bat in ink and I’m trying to write a love-letter. It’s cumbersome and unresponsive and generally kills my vibe.

Now there are some great things about Adobe Connect – the feature-set, oh the feature-set. I’m sure on someone’s computer somewhere in the world works like a charm. And that’s a sight I’d want to behold.

But for now, I’d prefer it to look like crap and function well. And I guess that’s what’s really at the heart of this rant. I’m tired of beautiful things that don’t DO ANYTHING (and I’m not calling Adobe Connect beautiful, but it’s certainly nicer than goToMeeting). Maybe Air will change things by running processes locally. It better, because as it exists now, I can’t use Adobe Connect (on a MacBookPro with 4(!) gigs of ram and a Core2Duo 2.4). It just doesn’t function properly.

Buzzword is a web-based document editor owned by Adobe. Now that Microsoft Office 2008 is out in Universal Binary for Mactels, users are realizing that there are many many alternative options to the shackles of Word/Office. I’ve been a iWork user (+ Sun’s Open Office for spreadsheets) because of the dismal performance of Office 2004 (Mac). I don’t honestly know why offices prefer forcing Mac-Using employees to use MS Office. It crashes, slows down the system and is generally distracting to the overall pleasure of using the Mac OS. So I’m glad it looks like viable alternatives to the oppression of Office are starting to gain traction and acceptance. Oh – and it looks like buzzword is a flex application – it’s zippy and responsive UI is a pleasure to use.