Archive for: July, 2008
July 31st, 2008
JavaFX preview SDK available
Sun released a preview SDK for JavaFX which gives developers a first look at the RIA play for Sun. Coté has a couple of videos up wth Nandini Ramani, the Director of Engineering for JavaFX and we did a Podcast with Joshua Marinacci as part of RIA Weekly that should be out this week. There are a number of cool things with the tooling (and how they plug into CS3) that give the impression Sun is really focused on creating some great experiences with JavaFX.
One of the most compelling features of JavaFX is the ability to seamlessly move between the browser and the desktop. Being able to drag JavaFX content from the browser and turn it into a desktop application is pretty compelling for users who want that desktop persistence. It’s also going to be partially open-sourced under the GPL which provides the open source community with a more open RIA technology than they have today.
I really liked Tim Anderson’s analysis on the topic. The install experience worries me from a user perspective, but being able to plug into the entire Java ecosystem is a plus. I’m looking forward to kicking the tires of the preview SDK but in general the impression I get is that this is a good step for Sun. The more RIAs we have the better and getting Sun into the RIA game brings a lot more developer eyeballs.
July 29th, 2008
Better RIAs from the Ribbit-BT Acquisition
![[image]](http://mowser.com/img?url=http%3A%2F%2Fblogs.zdnet.com%2Fopen-source%2Fimages%2Fribbit-close-up.jpg)
This morning Ribbit and BT confirmed previous rumors by announcing an acquisition price of $105 million. I’ve been a big fan of Ribbit since they launched because they made voice a first class citizen and data type for rich Internet applications. They helped bridge the gap between voice in your browser and voice on a phone by basically turning it into content that you could access a number of different ways (MP3 files, text transcriptions) and they very early targeted developers by offering a free SDK that made it -very- simple to add that voice to any Flex-based RIA. Then they launched Amphibian and started making a play for the consumer space.
Now, with the acquisition, they’re going to become a major player. They have BT’s infrastructure and money behind them so they can scale, reach new customers, and offer more services. And they can start getting deals in areas that would have previously been off limits.
The beauty of Ribbit is two-fold. One, that it’s very easy to create voice-centric applications or integrate voice into your RIAs. The APIs that they’ve created span the range from making a phone call, to getting contact information or sending an SMS. The platform allows you to pick and choose what features you want to use, so you can bite off a little bit or create a full-fledged phone dashboard as part of your application. That means any application can start to add voice in a way that makes sense. The second part of Ribbit that’s so nice is that they’re building an ecosystem to let developers make money. Through the Ribbit Store, developers can build widgets and then price them and distribute them. By providing a way to make money and a way to distribute, they’re working inside the iTunes model but for Flash. I think it’s the first instance of a “SWF” store where Flash developers can deploy widgets.
It’s a little bit funny to think about “Silicon Valley’s First Phone Company” being owned by a British company, but this is a good day for data-enabled voice and voice as a core data type for your applications.
July 28th, 2008
Interactive agencies, RIAs, and the advertising market
There’s a pretty good article in AdAge today about the online display market and how it isn’t gaining as much traction as all of the hype would assume. In fact, with the economy starting to decline, AdAge says that the display market is getting hit harder than traditional media. The reason is largely because traditional media (TV, print, and radio) simply gets more reach. And that’s partly because the traditional media is better for branding content than online ads have been so far.
I’ve long felt that rich Internet applications and the online advertising market are deeply intertwined. Not necessarily on the pure display ads side of things, but as a way to build brand and deliver more pure forms of advertising online. AdAge brings up the quintissential example: Nike Plus.
More marketers are creating their own media and their own consumer experiences. Nike Plus, of course, is the perennial example of marketing taking an advertising budget and creating a real-world utility that essentially becomes proprietary media.
I’m excited to see more companies jump in and create experiences like Nike Plus that cater very heavily to a brand and bring with it all of the various aspects of the “lifestyle” you’d want. In Nike Plus’ case, those are things like exercise, fitness, and achieving goals. The added community aspect makes it easy to share (and in theory, keeps you on track).
The Roles of Agencies
One impact of this new advertising medium is going to be increased importance of agencies and development shops. R/GA did the Nike Plus site and were able to use their skills in the interactive world to create a high quality branded experience. By all accounts, the Nike Plus site has been a big success. As other companies look into creating something similar, it will be the agencies with strong interactive ties that benefit and perhaps lessen the importance of the pure advertising agencies. RIA skills will be in even more demand and being able to completely customize and design an RIA will be an important skill set.
I’ve still got a lot of faith that advertising on the internet is the holy grail. It’s easier to track, easier to change campaigns, and it’s more global. We just don’t have the right hooks or techniques yet to make the jump. But the more experimentation we get the better. I think the hype is well-deserved.
July 23rd, 2008
Entellium puts a video game spin on CRM with a desktop RIA
Yesterday I sat down and talked with Entellium, an on-demand CRM company that has recently gone away from a purley browser-based model and moved into a desktop smart client application. In doing so they saw a big increase in conversion numbers and the customers have responded well to having the application on their desktop instead of inside of a browser. So it’s a great desktop RIA story, but I chatted with them about the new version of their desktop application, called Rave, which uses Microsoft’s Windows Presentation Foundation for the user interface. It’s a sexy application and it shows that regardless of what you’re doing, a great user experience can make a big difference.
What I thought was very interesting about the company is the way they went about deciding on a UI. They wanted to capture as much of the video game experience as they could. They wanted their users to be able to just “pick up and play”, something that’s important for video games for obvious reasons. They also wanted to make it fun and engaging just like video games and make it really easy for users to accomplish tasks and control how the UI was laid out. So wanting to capture that video game feel was something that had to be done with really great, expressive RIA technologies. They went with WPF because the old application was a Win Forms app and they were familiar with the Microsoft stack.
They had a lot of good things to say about WPF and the .NET Framework. It was very interesting to hear their take on the designer-developer workflow problem. I like Microsoft’s solution, and it sounds like it’s mostly there with a few quirks. It’s a tough problem to solve, but as we start to see more consumer-like experiences in all walks of the IT world, we’re going to need to solve it. Adobe’s working on it, Microsoft’s working on it, so it’s going to be fun to watch.
Another thing I like about the application is how they leverage the desktop and the cloud. The desktop application allows them to tie into existing data, like the ability to hook directly into Outlook contacts with an Outlook add-in. You can then keep your Outlook contacts AND your Rave data in synch. On the browser side they have an application that lets you view data and create reports that you could access from anywhere if you needed to. The desktop application also provides the ability to go offline as you’d expect.
Any company focusing on the user interface is one I’m happy about, but the fact that it’s coming from a CRM company with great numbers is even better. They’re looking at how to leverage that same kind of experience across devices and the “deeper” web so I’m excited to watch what they do. Hopefully it’s the start of a bigger trend on good-looking business applications. It makes a huge difference and it makes Rave and Entellium stand out big time.
July 20th, 2008
Rich Internet application startup ideas Y Combinator wants to see
Y Combinator posted a list of a bunch of different startup ideas they’d like to see and fund. It’s a sizable list with 30 different thoughts waiting for enthusiastic entrepreneurs to take a shot. But what struck me most about the list was how RIA-heavy it is. I as much as anyone feel that RIAs are the wave of the future though it’s difficult sometimes to articulate how, why, and when. But this list provides good indication that even though people may not realize it, they want more RIAs:
2. Simplified browsing.
Sure you could create a simplified browser in a native language, but I see this as a great use case for Adobe AIR. You get the web technologies and you can easily customize it so it feels very web-centric. Plus you can provide it on Mac/Windows/Linux so wherever they go, they’ll have the same, simple UI. For that target demographic that’s a good thing.
5. Enterprise software 2.0.
This one screams for RIAs. In fact the entire enterprise screams for an RIA makeover, but the enterprise moves slowly. If you want to target the enterprise why not make your application look fantastic and stand out. Since you’re starting from scratch and aren’t really beholden to legacy systems like the big enterprise players you can create rock-solid code and then put an intuitive, meaningful user interface on it. That will turn heads.
6. More variants of CRM.
Why not add a little rich media to the CRM world? Incorporate some video chat, maybe some real time messaging, add the ability to synchronize data online and offline and provide a mobile interface for use on the go. CRMs could be greatly overhauled with RIAs.
9. Photo/video sharing services.
This one is a no brainer, but I think we can definitely do better than the sites we have now. Add some more interaction. Add collaboration, real time communication, a better user interface. People want to share and you can make that experience extremely engaging with RIAs. Make them feel like they’re sharing in front of a room full of people instead of a website with avatars.
10. Auctions.
Another place with rich media or collaboration could make a huge difference.
11. Web Office apps.
A gigantic market with high expectations. People have been using office apps on the desktop forever so in order to get them to switch you have to provide great functionality as well as a user interface that feels like a desktop app. RIAs provide that capability.
12. Fix advertising.
Don’t even get me started. I hate annoying Flash ads as much as anyone. I think the interactivity of RIAs could be used in such a more responsible and valuable way - we just have to think of it.
13. Online learning.
Another case where RIAs can help jump over the walls so to speak. Real time messaging, collaboration, and rich media are absolutely necessary to create something worthwhile in the online learning space. You have to be able to create emotional connections which is tough to do over the web. In all honesty I’m not sure the technologies exist to make this a reality yet, but they’re getting there.
16. A form of search that depends on design.
Design is still very, very important. I’d love to see one outcome of the innovation around designer developer workflow to be a search engine that provides good, fast results, and has a stellar design.
18. The WebOS.
The cloud combined with a good user interface. If you’re replicating an OS you have to have power under the hood and make it easy and engaging for people to use. How are you going to create Vista or Mac OSX in the browser? Lots of useful transitions, usability tweaks, and rich media.
22. A web-based Excel/database hybrid.
Another design problem. Code a great database and then put a friendly, usable interface on it. Make it fun to use, make it intuitive, and show off your design chops. Another thing that would be helped by an overhaul of the designer-developer workflow.
26. Better video chat.
How do you make video chat feel more real? Good UI, lots of rich media are a good start.
29. Easy site builders for specific markets.
Another great place for RIAs. Site builders are important and it’s always good to lower the barrier to entry of the web for everyone. But they have to stand out. You’ve got to let people get creative and put those creative designs to screen. An RIA that lets people build those kind of RIA-like experiences would be a huge help.
July 17th, 2008
Second version of NASDAQ MarketReplay application released
Last week NASDAQ released version two of their Market Replay AIR application and added a couple of interesting features as well as provided some details of how the service works. Market Replay is available as a paid service and the downloadable client comes with the service. The goal of the application is to provide a large amount of data to traders and hobbyists who want to explore market conditions over a specific time frame. The new version of the application includes trades so you can actually drill down at a millisecond level to see bid and ask prices for all of the major exchanges as well as when trades happen.
NASDAQ is actually using Amazon S3 to store and serve data down to the client. They store the stock data in 10 minute chunks on S3 and then when the AIR client requests it, they grab those 10 minute files and download them to the users machine. That makes the data available offline so you can look through the data regardless of whether you have an internet connection or not. And since you have the raw data, you can do almost anything with it.
The new version uses Flex’s charting components to provide a graphical interface for moving through the timeline and replaying what happened. It’s skinned to look very much like a trading screen and as the user moves through the replay, the bid and ask prices for the various exchanges will change so you can get a picture of exactly what happened to the market. You can also dump any of the data directly into an Excel file for parsing or manipulating it on your own.
All in all it’s a very good application and a good use case for combining services like Amazon S3 with clients like Adobe AIR. It also provides a very dynamic, engaging way to do stock research.
July 15th, 2008
Using Flash and Silverlight to move web standards forward
Via John Carroll I saw a blog post by Paul Ellis in which he talks about the shortcomings of open standards, or more specifically, standards bodies, and how that affects the open web. In short, it’s led to the innovation and widespread adoption of proprietary technologies like Flash and Silverlight. If you really step back and look at it, despite all of the amazing things people are doing inside of the browser, real, ground-level innovation just isn’t happing unless it comes from companies like Adobe or Microsoft.
People are definitely doing innovative things with Ajax, but they’re taking the same basic set of technologies and rearranging it in different ways with varied results. All of the Ajax frameworks? Great stuff, but there’s not much in the way of core technology innovation going on. Flash and Silverlight on the other hand are pushing the boundaries when it comes to video, cross-domain security, offline/desktop access, deep zoom technologies, manipulating sounds, file access, filters and effects, and more.
I’m not trying to disparage the open web. I think if the open web could move at the speed of a private company, we’d all be better off. But it can’t, and really, the W3C wasn’t made for innovation and people are starting to realize that. Alex Russell realizes it, and more importantly Google realizes it. And they realize that lack of innovation is actually starting to hold them back as a company that relies very heavily on the browser. That’s one reason you’re seeing so much going into Gears. Google needs to move the open web forward but the W3C is too slow, so they’re coming up with their own solution.
In the end, I think the web is pretty robust and it’s self-healing. The W3C and other open web advocates should look to technologies like Flash and Silverlight as a way to see what works on the web and what doesn’t. If there’s a genuine threat, then hopefully that causes people to get up and help fix a broken standards process. The open web is in a good position. It’s still the best solution but now it has a bunch of companies fighting to innovate around it. The community can pull good ideas from that battle and move everyone forward.
July 14th, 2008
Microsoft as the gate keeper of video analytics
![[image]](http://mowser.com/img?url=http%3A%2F%2Fblogs.zdnet.com%2FStewart%2Fimages%2Fsilverlight_logo.jpg){kind=logo}
There’s a post over on TechCrunchIT about how NBC is going to use Silverlight and the Olympics to do some audience research around how people consume digital media. Basically NBC has a ton of content that will come from the Olympics and they’re planning on providing it in a number of different ways including in the browser, on the regular television set, and on mobile phones. I’ve also heard they’re providing a feed or stream directly into Windows Media Player so you could watch it on your desktop.
NBC and Microsoft now have a huge test segment and a number of different ways to slice it. What makes Microsoft so interesting is that with Windows Media as the baseline, they can deploy a ton of different experiences and then deploy more targeted advertising based on the platform. They’ve got Windows Mobile, they’ve got Zune for devices, they’ve got Xbox for television, they’ve got Silverlight in the browser, and they’ve got Windows Media Player on the desktop. They are pretty much alone as the company that can distribute the same basic video file and provide that many different touch points. Update: a reader just sent me this press release that says Wave will be providing a desktop experience around the Olympics through Media Center.
I don’t think they’ll be rolling all of those things out for the Olympics, but since we’re in the infancy of digital media, Microsoft has a lot more room to test than other companies. I think it will also be interesting to see how Microsoft treats the HTML5 video spec. Because the spec essentially leaves it up to the browser to choose the codec, all of those Windows machines would more than likely be using Windows Media. That could give Microsoft more marketshare in the browser than they have now with Flash being the major player for digital media.
July 10th, 2008
iPhone 2.0 and all kinds of little mobile RIAs
I generally break RIAs into three categories: browser-based, desktop, and mobile. After playing with the iPhone 2.0 firmware, checking out some of the applications, and going through the experience in the iTunes store (one of the best RIA examples out there), I’m pretty convinced that the iPhone is the best mobile RIA platform out there.
The mobile world is incredibly fragmented. That makes distribution, development, and everything in between much more complex than it should be. The iPhone is far, far from open, but with that lock comes an ease of use for both the user and the developer. Developers know exactly what the platform they’re building for can do and users know that the applications they download are going to work. The App Store is by far one of the best delivery mechanisms for mobile RIAs and even though I haven’t actually paid for any applications yet, the built in monetary possibilities are good news for developers. And because Apple already has the processes in place to do monetary transactions, this was basically no cost to them.
The applications also show a lot of diversity. The typical Web 2.0 players are there (I grabbed a Facebook app, the Yelp app, NetNewsWire (which I love). And there a number of game and other productivity tools. From a developer standpoint it seems like it’s fairly easy to create a consistent look and feel between both web properties and native Cocoa applications. That’s a powerful draw as brand continuity becomes more important.
I was a little skeptical that all this would work and as a user and Adobe evangelist I’m still annoyed that there is no Flash on the iPhone, but Apple has a great RIA platform on their hands. Everyone out there with mobile platform ambitions should take a note. Now I just can’t wait for iPhone 2.0
July 7th, 2008
OpenLaszlo 4.1 relased with DHTML support
![[image]](http://mowser.com/img?url=http%3A%2F%2Fblogs.zdnet.com%2FStewart%2Fimages%2Flaszlo_systems_logo.jpg){kind=logo}
I completely missed this but it looks like OpenLaszlo 4.1 has been released and it includes full support for DHTML/Ajax as well as SWF/Flash. In addition there are a number of bug fixes and overhauled documentation.
Back when OpenLaszlo started showing being able to create either DHML/Ajax or Flash content with the same codebase it got a lot of people talking about bridging the gap between Ajax and Flash. I’m not quite sure it does that, but it does provide developers with a more nimble way to deploy applications. You can now write OpenLaszlo and then choose which platform to compile to. And you can change it up as you go if you need to take advantages of one platform or the other. I was also always a fan of OpenLaszlo UIs and so having those effects available in DHTML/Ajax makes this a pretty compelling way to create those applications.
In addition to DHTML support they’ve also added early support for SWF 9 features in this release. If you’re interested in participating you can head over to the Wiki, the JIRA bug tracking system, or the mailing lists and forums.
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