Revisiting Touchpoints – Modern Art and Modern Applications

Just got back from Santa Fe, where I got a chance to get to the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum with its current exhibit Georgia O’Keeffe and Ansel Adams: Natural Affinities. Not only a wonderful exhibit, but I ran into an old friend – a beautiful O’Keeffe work on loan from the Orlando Museum of Art I first saw in my teens. If you can’t get to Santa Fe, see this when it goes to the Smithsonian this fall. One brilliance of O’Keeffe was to cleanly link the abstract with the real. And in doing so – especially when you view her work next to the the Adams – you realize the power that comes from making the abstract and the interpretive accessible and easily appreciated.

And in a segue worthy of a mid-market weathercaster, I’m really impressed at the progress made linking Flash to standards-compliant XHTML in swfObject – now found on code.google.com. I came to depend heavily on swfobject in the past and am glad to see it grow and become such a powerful tool. Since it is doubtful Microsoft, Apple, and Adobe will play nicely in near future, its great to see Geoff Stearns original concept become so well-supported. I have had a love-hate relationship with Flash since I first worked on web-based training at Ford using the product’s ancestor when FutureWave first rolled it out in 1996. As the browser becomes the operating system, open-source projects such as swfObject will be essential to low-cost, keep-em honest rich application rollouts.

And is it just because I grew up next to Walt Disney World or does Santa Fe sometimes feel like it really wants to be a theme park? Or was it just the prairie dog scrounging french fries at Sonic.