And that's part of the reason why I'm giving up the blog. As RIAs have hit the main stream smaller niches have developed within the RIA space and the major technologies are being covered by the prominent bloggers and press. That's been great for more coverage of RIAs and it also means that I'm busier than ever with my day job for Adobe. I haven't had time in the past couple of months to do the blog justice and I hope RIAs get even bigger taking up more and more time.

I want to say thanks to all of you who made my particular road possible while I've had this blog. Thanks for the comments, the information, the support, the criticisms, and the demos you've given me. You'll be able to find me on my personal blog, DigitalBackcountry (it'll be generally Adobe-centric) and if you want to hear my take on RIAs you can catch me on RIA Weekly every week. I may also be popping up on BTL every once in a while.

To get your RIA fix I suggest Mary Jo Foley for Microsoft and Ed Burnette for JavaFX on the ZDNet side. Tim Anderson probably does the best job of covering all of the technologies together. My RIA Weekly co-host, Cot, has a great slant on things. Jeffrey Hammond is a fantastic analyst who knows the ins and outs of the RIA business. With those links you should be covered on all things RIA.

Thanks again for everything.

One firm, Halston, recently released its autumn collection through a music video. Others are also likely to pursue digital means to reach a broader audience. Catherine Malandrino, a popular French designer, has spent the past three months rworking her website to make it more "human and interactive". Fashion, she points out, was historically old through intimate salons. She wants to re-establish that accessibility - and the internet allows her, and the others, to do it cheaply.

Fashion, and industries like it, are a perfect fit for the world of interactivity and RIAs. Clearly any kind of internet revival won't be driven by fashonistas looking for some interactive work. But industries like Fashion, where there are strong emotional and design ties, will be ideal candidates for the more collaborative, video, and interactive applications for which RIA technologies are so well-suited.

It's been oft-repeated that economic downturns, and the scarcity of resources during them, are what help the good ideas float to the top and succeed. But RIAs are seeing a tremendous amount of innovation at the runtime level which has been helped by a lot of competition in the space. Things like higher quality video, real-time communication and collaboration, a focus on design and design efficiency, as well as performance enhancements mean that we have an infrastructure in place that we haven't had before. This is going to appeal to a wider range of industries who are using the web but looking for more value added services than just a website or even some of the social advancements from Web 2.0. It's a good time to be thinking about and working with RIAs because they can provide a lot of value - even in this climate.

One of my favorite RIA events is 360|Flex. The organizers, Tom Ortega, and John Wilker, do a great job of getting the community excited and putting on an event with great technical content and great networking opportunities. The 360|Flex events end up feeling like a week hanging out with friends with some great sessions thrown in. And since we've seen an incredible interest on the part of RIA developers to start building things for the iPhone (and 200,000 applications can't be wrong), they're putting on an iPhone development conference in March called 360|iDev.

One of the things that I think is going to be interesting about this particular iPhone conference is the RIA background. The iPhone has become a big deal in the Flash community and gurus like Keith Peters have taken a head first plunge into the iPhone development world. Keith will be doing a session at 360|iDev, so this is going to be a great event to get some Flash perspective on iPhone development.

So if you're doing RIA development and are looking to get started on the iPhone, check it out. It runs from March 2nd to the 4th at eBay's San Jose office. Ticket prices are staggered and start at $200 so first folks to buy get the best prices (I think there are a few $200 tickets left). There are also four tracks: Game Development, Non-game Application Development, The Business of iPhone Development, and Hands-on Training, so there's a lot of range in topics.

We already know that Windows 7 will have multi touch support which means that anyone building WPF applications can incorporate multi touch functionality. Snow Leopard, Apple's newest operating system, supposedly will include it as well but what I want to see are the RIA plugins include it: Flash, Silverlight, JavaFX, etc - because I think that's where the exciting cases are.

Those plugins were built from the ground up to be rich in animation, multimedia, and experience - the perfect use case for multi touch. But I'm also very excited about what's starting to happen with real time communication and collaboration with things like WCF and Cocomo. The web seems to be ready for real-time to take off, so we're getting to the point where we have very rich data layers underneath extremely powerful user interface frameworks and technologies. The only piece that's missing is an input mechanism that can actually make some of these things less cumbersome to use.

As the UIs and the data become more complex, there's going to be a draw to move to better ways of actually interacting with the content. Multi touch technology gives us that, and as we've seen with the iPhone, people pick these applications up very, very quickly. That usability boost is critical if we want to start seeing widespread adoption of the more interesting user interface ideas out there. We've got all the parts of the puzzle, but it's taking more time than I would have liked to bring it all together.

And as Marshall notes, the prices are far from daunting. When SproutBuilder first came out there were some whispers that this might be an interesting online version of the current Flash tool. It's not going to replace Flash in any way shape or form, but by having a very targeted model they're showing that it's possible to make money from web based tools that leverage the Flash Platform. I think this is good news for everyone in the RIA space as it shows there is a fairly robust ecosystem to create targeted tools on top of any given platform.

Brightcove has a ton of old Allaire/Macromedia/Adobe people, so it isn't surprising that they would draw from that pool again, and both David and Jeff were based in the Newton office. There may be some more old Adobe faces popping up at Brightcove down the road. In part because they seem to be doing so well. As Jeremy's letter said, they released Brightcove 3 which included a chance in direction away from individuals uploading content to more polished and branded work. It seems to have been received very well.

They've also don a ton of work on the developer side to make it easy to use and integrate the Brightcove platform. They've got an XML-based BEML langauge which lets you create and customize Flash-based video players. They've got a Media API which lets you use REST-based web services to get actual content and metadata out of your Brightcove account. They've also got a number of custom components and hooks for you to build your own, so that you can add basically anything you want to your video player like stock quotes, news tickers, or anything that might enhance the experience around your content.

Brightcove continues to do a good job. As I think we've seen with Hulu, content is king. Brightcove has a ton of content and they're making that accessible in a number of different ways and letting people get in and customize it to make the experience their own. The addition of Jeff and David is yet another step in the right direction.

2009 is going to be no different. With some major players in place, both Microsoft and Adobe entrenched in the RIA game for a long time, and companies like Google working on their own version of RIA technologies, whether it's Native Client or Gears, are going to have a big impact on how people interact with the web and think of rich Internet applications. It's also going to be exciting to watch as more and more companies - small and large - start rolling out RIA-based solutions. Think about the impact RIAs have had on video - that's what I want to see happen to web applications.

I think 2009 is also going to be the year of performance. Our runtimes are going to get faster, our data is going to get bigger and companies are going to demand performance. There was already some talk of the real-time web and RIAs have a huge role to play in that. As robust client side technologies, RIAs can do things that normal web applications just can't, and as people demand more data faster, RIAs are in a great position. Just look at Curl's announcement to support AMF and you'll see evidence that the back end is becoming just as important as the front end when it comes to rich Internet applications.

I'm really looking forward to 2009 and getting back to focusing on this blog. It's been a little bit difficult not being able to write specifically about Flash and Silverlight because that's where a lot of the action is. But as RIAs have matured it has become very important to detect and discuss both the fundamentals as well as the high level concepts behind what drives RIA adoption and features in the runtimes. We're in for a big year.

Adobe announced Alchemy at MAX, which is a similar project for the Flash Player. Like Alchemy, Native Client uses GCC-based tools to compile C or C++ into bytecode native x86 code for the specific runtime. Alchemy uses Flash and Native Client has it's own, I assume C-based implementation. Both of these are early projects but it's the start of a trend and an example of the ever-expanding sphere of web applications. It's also very interesting to see this come out of Google, a company that has been doing a lot to expand the functionality of the web browser. They've got Gears for offline/desktop functionality, Native Client for performance, Earth for mapping, and of course Chrome for an actual browser.

Keep an eye on this project. I see the Flash Player or Silverlight has having 3 core parts: the runtime, the rendering engine, and the video codecs. Put those three things together and you've got an RIA plugin. Google has a bunch of disparate projects and none that do all of these, but they have a bunch of the pieces and a ton of engineering talent. It's also telling that Google is starting to be more and more obvious that the web browser/technologies as it exists today just aren't cutting it. That means we'll see more energy for projects like Native Code and Gears.

I consider widgets a subset of rich Internet applications mostly because of the technology behind them. Almost all widgets tend to be pretty interactive which makes platforms like Flash and Silverlight ideal for deployment. The fact that the embed model works so well with those technologies makes it easy to port them. Adobe AIR provides desktop functionality that lets you persist and create notifications. Then think about Flash and Silverlight's move into the mobile world and how easily it will be to repurpose widgets across devices.

That last part is key. There is a fairly sophisticated ecosystem building up around monetization of widgets. yourminis was one of the first companies to the space and have focused on customization and working with partners. Since being acquired by AOL they've been busy adding customers and partners. The other aspect is being able to analyze this content and provide analytics. That's where repurposing the widgets becomes more interesting. You could automatically track your widget across devices, social networks, and desktops with the same tracking back end.

There are also more complicated engaging widget platforms emerging. Sprout Builder is a great example of this. Something a bit more complex than a traditional widget, they provide a framework that can be customized with interactive content and then placed anywhere widgets can be. They provide the same kind of analytical tools so you can track where your widgets are going and even limit them by domain.

Widgets are a great way to engage users and the most powerful thing about the is that users can consume them in ways they control - desktop, web, Facebook, mobile, etc. So their value as an advertising engine is significant and with the ways the infrastructure is moving, it's going to be easier and easier to create and deploy widgets.

As I mentioned on RIA Weekly, I think there are a couple of core components to RIAs. One is a much improved graphical user interface and layout mechanism. This is part of the appeal behind technologies like Flex and XAML - they've got a robust set of components and it's very easy to get pixel perfect layout. They also support vector graphics, another benefit of that increased rendering capability. The other is video and multimedia. Canvas kind of enables the first case on the HTML side, something Google could get behind. But video is tougher. Now Google has that piece. And as Dion notes, it's not like they don't have a way to deploy this in a wider, developer-friendly way.

The technology behind it seems a little ambiguous. They're supposedly using some technology from Vidyo and they rely on the Flash Player for something whether that's some behind-the-scenes communication or webcam support, I have no idea. But I've also heard rumblings that parts of this could be contributed back to the open source community. That would make it an interesting play for the HTML5 video tag.

So this is a big deal and it's something to keep an eye on. Google has never been associated with the "rich" in rich Internet application, but that could start to change.

The beauty of Aviary isn't the set of tools or the fantastic design and branding - though those all help - but how they're building up their community. On their blog they've got a ton of samples to get you started. And baked into the tooling are all the steps that you take to create the end result. That means that if you want to, you can share all of the steps and settings that you used for your masterpiece. New users can look at that and figure out exactly how to get the most out of the tool. They've become famous on digg for their various creations. They've also started to roll out a way to make money by pricing the service at a couple different tiers. Hardcore users can choose between Green, for the people who mostly use Phoenix, and Blue, which gives you access to the whole suite of tools.

But one of the subtle beauties of Aviary is that it's all cross platform. One of the reasons I've been using it lately is because I'm trying to switch more of my work to Linux. There just aren't a lot of great design tools for Linux, but Aviary's entire suite is built on the Flash Player and so it's cross platform. They've even got a Firefox extension that lets you do things like take screenshots from the desktop and helps blend the browser sandbox with the desktop. It's a pretty good bridge between online photo editor and the functionality people expect on the desktop.

So keep an eye on Aviary. They should be releasing more of their tools soon, but I think they've really nailed a lot of big parts of rich Internet applications. They've got a very functional tool, a rich user interface, and a passionate design community.

Thanks to Flash Speaks Actionscript for the reminder.

That's one of the things I like about Josh's slides, it covers both the design architecture as well as the application architecture. I've started to see this a lot with AIR applications. People spend a ton of time architecting the visual aspects but they aren't thinking about the fact that this application is going to be open for long stretches of time so they haven't thought out things like memory consumption or destroying objects - things that should all be part of a well architected application.

Both the post and the slides (below) are excellent and well worth the read for anyone building RIAs.

]]> http://ads.pheedo.com/click.phdo?s=9aecc564384114712a4a8ffdaad5a978&p=4 9aecc564384114712a4a8ffdaad5a978 ]]> 6048000951 Enterprise Software One of the most impressive Flex-based applications out there, SlideRocket, is now open for anyone to go and sign up. (Screenshot Gallery) They've been doing a private beta for the past few months but they launch today with some new features and a business model.

In talking with Mitch Grasso, the founder of SlideRocket, the plan was always to do a fremium model. They've got a free version which lets you have up to 250 megs of storage and gives you the basic online editor functionality. Then for more business users there are a couple of tiers - one for individuals and one for a group of people at a company - that includes more advanced features like collaboration and access to the offline presentation viewer which they built in Adobe AIR. It's one of the first examples that I've seen of Adobe AIR being used as a pay-for extra.

Another notable feature is the marketplace. They've got a few partners including a stock photography site that will be populating the marketplace with content. SlideRocket users can purchase credits which can then be used to bring assets from the marketplace into their presentations. SlideRocket takes care of all the usage rights. In theory this could also end up being a way for other SlideRocket users to monetize their content but Mitch said right now they're not opening it up for the general public to upload content.

The interface and the functionality remain mostly the same, but they're still very impressive. SlideRocket supports importing from PowerPoint and lets you create more interactive applications by enabling SWF embedding. It remains one of the best examples of creating real applications inside of the web browser. Congrats to the team on the launch. You can sign up for a free account at SlideRocket.com.

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]]> Andy Plesser has the scoop that the New York Times has launched a new HD video portal using Brightcove's service, something I've covered recently. With news that the New York Times is in trouble, this couldn't come at a better time. Online video continues to explode in popularity and it's becoming arguably the best way to reach new audiences and keep those audiences engaged. The New York Times doesn't have a brand problem or even a content problem, but newspapers just haven't been adapting well to the web. Video is one way to counter that.

The New York Times is using the new platform which allows for dynamic streaming so that users get the best quality video stream that their bandwidth allows. The portal looks like it has a lot of great content across all of the New York Times' categories. They look like they're using preroll ads. With the impressive brand of the New York Times, advertisers could be more than happy to jump in and advertise on the site, especially with the economic downturn looming. This is a good move for the Times and another indication of rich media becoming more important in every facet of content creation.

]]> 6048000949 Browser CXO Mobility Software IT Employment It turns out the iPhone is pretty damn popular. Those of us following the digeratiy scene could probably have told the analysts that but even these numbers are impressive. 6.892 million iPhones sold in the quarter for a total of 12.992 million and more importantly, it gave Apple a revenue boost to the tune of $806 million. Not chump change by any stretch. And what made iPhone arguably the greatest gadget of a generation? The user experience.

Sure the multi-touch stuff is great, and it adds, but the iPhone is a nearly flawless device from the silicon to the software. It's exactly what most people want in a phone and it helped show that the vision of "one device that does almost everything" was actually possible. Some of that is good hardware engineering, but largely it's due to software and how that software links all the pieces. Look at how easy it is to sync the iPhone with your music, photos, or applications. And how easy it is to purchase those things. That's good software design.

When you nail the user experience, you go mainstream and you make a lot of money. Web 2.0 has given us a ton of great building blocks. Social networking, the web as a delivery mechanism, real time collaboration, the cloud - all of those things really started becoming realities during the Web 2.0 boom. So from a technology standpoint, we've established a good baseline. But in order to really make a difference you've got to put a better experience on it. That's essentially the promise of rich Internet applications. And as more and more companies pour money and resources into design, you're going to start seeing real, tangible dividends in terms of user adoption and revenue.

Web 2.0 came along and turned software on its head. The software business is having to rethink how it does things. And as part of that transformation, design and experience are taking center stage. With the plethora of design-centric software development platforms out there, it's never been more fun and interesting to build software. It's one reason why I'm excited about RIAs and also why it's great to see the iPhone do so well. If you put the design time in, you are going to be more successful. Keep that in mind as you're looking to build the new generation of software.

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]]> Hardware SitePoint and TechCrunch both have some information up about something that EffectiveUI is building for Intelligence Gaming. It's a video-based virtual reality training simulation for the army. It's one of the coolest RIAs that I've seen. The application uses a combination of high quality video and hardware to immerse people in the training environments. The hardware uses an accelerometer of sort so that when you move your head, the video moves with you. They've also done a lot to the audio processing so that as you move, the audio changes just like it would in a real situation.

When I was at the EffectiveUI offices in Denver I got to try the glasses on a check it out. It was one of the most fun things I've seen built on top of RIA technology. I'd love to see this become a wider trend. The combination of rich media power and easy interface design makes RIAs a perfect medium for this. As both Flash and Silverlight start to add more functionality around video processing and start to take advantage of the hardware more, we could see more scenarios like this enabled. Now we just need to make it easier to hook up to external devices.

There is a video that TechCrunch posted below.

]]> 6048000946 Today Brightcove is rolling out a new application as part of their web platform for content creators (Update: here's a post by one of the Flex developers who worked on it). The new user interface and features are some of the coolest things that I've seen in the ever popular rich media space. There are a few highlights of the new platform but the biggest takeaway for me was that Brightcove really wants to put people in control of how their content is displayed. To that end one of the things they've done is overhauled how people can create new video players. Using a XUL-like language anyone can create a template for video players that includes things like a horizontal list of related videos, meta data, and various other aspects of the video player experience. That can be saved as a template and then used across an entire network of sites. What's nice is that you can then build on top of that template to customize the experience even more. In the demo I saw they used a nature show to demonstrate how you could add a playlist of rainforest videos and skin the original template with rainforest assets. You could then take that same template and customize it for an ocean themed show. They really nailed the branding aspect of video while allowing reuse of assets and a ton of control with the XUL-based interface language.

A couple of the other highlights include new APIs and dynamic streaming. The new APIs are expose in both Flash and JavaScript so that regardless of the technology you're using, you can still get in and manipulate or access various parts of the video. Using the APIs you can pull out metadata, make changes to the playlist, or even alter how the video plays. It's going to mean that developers and site creators can easily customize what and how they want things to appear on their sites. Dynamic streaming lets content creators encode multiple versions of a video at different bitrates so that the user gets the highest quality version available. Brightcove detects the bandwidth and then based on settings that the content creator establishes, the user gets the best possible quality video stream.

All in all Brightcove 3 is a big leap forward in giving the people who create video a ton of control over how that video behaves. It's a good step for the rich media world and a great example of where the industry needs to go.

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]]> Linux Microsoft Open Source Operating Systems Software (Update: It also looks like you can grab the final bits as of 12:01 this morning: http://www.microsoft.com/silverlight/resources/install.aspx?v=2.0)

After listening to the Q&A from the press conference today (recording here), digging into some of the details, and reading some of the commentary on various blogs, there are a few things that I don't quite understand about the announcement today. I think part of this is because there wasn't a whole lot of new news from the announcement and it was more of a direction announcement than anything. Of course, I work for Adobe, so I look at the world differently. The end result is that it's great Silverlight 2 is finally out in the wild. As an RIA enthusiast and an Adobe employee I've witnessed that Adobe does its most innovative work when both our community and our competitors push us. But there are a few things that struck me as odd from the release.

The 1 in 4 Number
Scott Guthrie said that "already one in four consumers worldwide has access to a computer with Silverlight already installed" but I'm not quite sure what that number means. Ben Romano from the Seattle Times noticed it too and it seems like an odd metric to use. The numbers game is a little bit bogus everywhere because there are so many ways to measure things: downloads, penetration, etc. The other numbers show that Silverlight is gaining traction, but it's hard for developers to do a direct penetration comparison with Flash right now.

Linux
In the Q&A, Tim Anderson asked about Linux support. Right now Silverlight has partial support for 1.0 (though it doesn't include video or MP3 playback, two of the main features of Silverlight 1.0) and there is no support for 2 on Linux right now. As Tim notes, it's misleading to tout the cross platform aspect of Silverlight without an actual release. It's also surprising that there was absolutely nothing in terms of a roadmap for Linux. My hunch is that they wanted something to announce for PDC and this may be it. As Brian Goldfarb mentioned in the Q&A session, Miguel de Icaza, who runs the Moonlight effort, has a session at PDC although his session doesn't say anything about Silverlight/Moonlight so I'm not sure what to make of that.

Eclipse Support
This is the one I was most bummed about. The announcement about Eclipse support for Silverlight is a big deal. As a Mac developer I've been waiting for a way to build Silverlight apps on my Mac (what better way to scope out the competition than to start building apps on their platform). But the release of Eclipse4sl is currently Windows only with support coming from others "soon". I agree that it makes sense for Microsoft to woo developers outside the Microsoft ecosystem, but why use Eclipse on Windows when you have Visual Studio? Ask any developer and they will tell you Visual Studio is basically a gold standard for IDEs. Even more, as part of the press release they announced that Silverlight support extends to Visual Studio 2008 Express, the free version of Visual Studio. So if I can use the free version of arguably the best IDE out there to create Silverlight 2 apps, why do I want to use Eclipse? Hopefully "soon" really does mean soon for Eclipse Silverlight support on the Mac.

The other parts of the announcement are significant. Opening up the components is great, especially considering the gigantic ecosystem of Microsoft developers out there. Nick Hoover asked about Silverlight inside Microsoft and the response was that over 100 campaigns had been run with Silverlight. Most of these seem to be very video centric, but I can only assume more actual applications will be coming from the world's largest software maker.

Now that Silverlight 2 is out, the RIA battle heats up more. As I mentioned above, that's a good thing for me or anyone who wants to watch Adobe and Microsoft add features and functionality. I'm looking forward to being able to start talking about Silverlight 3 and Flash Player 11 soon.

]]> 6048000943 CXO Linux Microsoft Open Source Operating Systems Software Development Microsoft announced this morning that Silverlight 2 will be available for download tomorrow. So after a long beta period that included big events using Silverlight including the Olympics and the DNC, the bits are going to be out there. The press release includes some impressive numbers:

Silverlight adoption continues to grow rapidly, with penetration in some countries approaching 50 percent and a growing ecosystem that includes more than 150 partners and tens of thousands of applications. During the 17 days of the 2008 Olympics Games in Beijing, NBCOlympics.com, powered by Silverlight, had more than 50 million unique visitors, resulting in 1.3 billion page views, 70 million video streams and 600 million minutes of video watched, increasing the average time on the site (from 3 minutes to 27 minutes) and Silverlight market penetration in the U.S. by more than 30 percent. Broadcasters in France (France Televisions SA), the Netherlands (NOS), Russia (Sportbox.ru) and Italy (RAI) also chose Silverlight to deliver Olympics coverage online.

The 50 percent penetration in some countries is what jumps out at me right away. I'm not sure if that's for Silverlight 1 or the Silverlight 2 beta. I'd assume the latter. But there are a few other very interesting announcements in the press release.

One is that Microsoft is going to be working with Soyatec to bring Silverlight development capabilities to Eclipse, which in theory means that we could finally have Mac and possibly even Linux development tools for Silverlight. According to the press release this will also be free. A technology preview of the tool is available now (I'm downloading as we speak - but the current tool is only available for Windows).

There was supposed to be an event with Scott Guthrie this morning but the dial in doesn't work for me. I'll be watching the recording later and should have more info later today.

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]]> Microsoft ReadWriteWeb has a post up about the fact that Zoho has added offline access to Zoho Mail using Gears. Zoho continues to do a really good job of innovating when it comes to Ajax-based RIAs. They were very early to the game in creating offline support for Zoho Docs before Google beating them by almost 5 months.

As I've mentioned before, the hardest part of the online/offline problem is synchronization. I'm not exactly sure how Zoho is implementing that part of offline Zoho Mail but I have to wonder if one of the reasons that Google hasn't added support for Gears yet is that they're spending a lot of time on the synchronization problem. Both Adobe and Microsoft have products that help handle online/offline synchronization. Adobe has LiveCycle Data Services and Microsoft has the Microsoft Sync Framework. It wouldn't surprise me at all if Google was working on something similar and looking at how to bake it into Gears.

An open source synchronization platform would be a big deal and would go a long way towards blending the browser and the desktop. In a lot of ways I think that's one of the major problems that has to be solved before we move on to the next generation of RIAs. I've been doing some thinking about the cloud and RIAs recently but you can't fully jump into that unless you make it easy for developers to use the same piece of data wherever they are.

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