October 28th, 2008

SlideRocket opens up to the public

Posted by Ryan Stewart @ 5:46 am

Categories: AIR, Flex, Rich Internet Applications

Tags: Adobe Systems Inc., Adobe AIR, Marketplace, SlideRocket, Investment, Finance, Ryan Stewart

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.

July 17th, 2008

Second version of NASDAQ MarketReplay application released

Posted by Ryan Stewart @ 2:59 pm

Categories: AIR, Rich Enterprise Applications, Rich Internet Applications

Tags: S3 Inc., Stock, Nasdaq Stock Market Inc., Investment, Finance, Ryan Stewart

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.

June 2nd, 2008

Adobe merging desktop and web with Acrobat 9 and Acrobat.com

Posted by Ryan Stewart @ 6:21 am

Categories: AIR, Adobe, BuzzWord, Flex, Rich Internet Applications

Tags: Desktop, Adobe Systems Inc., Web, Adobe PDF, Adobe Acrobat, Acrobat.com, Linux, Web Conferencing, Operating Systems, Software

We made a few announcements today around our Acrobat 9 product and a new portal called Acrobat.com which is aimed at helping people work better. I think it’s significant because as a company we’ve released web-based applications like Photoshop Express and Buzzword but Acrobat.com represents something of a combination between the old world of Acrobat and PDF and the new world of Flash, Audio/Video, and real time communication. I also think it’s the best example of Adobe leveraging it’s own platform to deliver value to users.

The new version of Acrobat, Acrobat 9, includes the ability to deeply integrate Flash. It’s the fruit of the combination of Macromedia and Adobe finally coming together in each companies core products. With the new embed-ability you can incorporate movies as well as use Flex/Flash as a front end to your PDF content.

The more significant announcement in my mind is the roll out of Acrobat.com. As Scoble notes, we’re trying to change the way people work. Flash has been associated with video, animation, and annoying ads, but underneath all that is a platform that’s perfect for real time communication and a more engaging collaboration toolset. We’re finally bringing all of the pieces of the platform together to provide that.

It starts with Buzzword, which hopefully will become a hub for anyone working with documents on the web. You get a great UI and the ability to quickly add multiple users to a document and then see where changes have been made. But it also spans regular document management. We’ve had a beta of Share up for a while but now Share is integrated with Buzzword and with Acrobat 9 so you can share any document or any piece of information and then embed it on a page ala Scribd or Docstoc. As part of the service we’re also allowing you to convert your documents to PDF. The final piece is ConnectNow. Connect is a online meeting application similar to WebEx. But Connect uses the Flash Player so it works cross-platform on Mac, Windows, and Linux (the add-in which enables screen sharing isn’t available on Linux however).

I think that’s the main appeal of something like Acrobat.com. It’s built on Flash so you get the same experience on Mac, Windows, and Linux. The team has also released an AIR application so you can access some of the services by dragging and dropping your files. The integration with Acrobat 9 further closes the web/desktop gap. We’ve also exposed a set of APIs that developers can use to take advantage of some of these services. We’ll be rolling out more of these soon.

As an employee, I think this is a big step for the company. It’s a good use of the platform, it shows that we have a life beyond shrink-wrapped software, and it plays to our strengths - PDF, rich media, collaboration, and Flash. I think it’ a good example of RIA technologies being more than just fluff and fancy user interfaces.

May 29th, 2008

Knowledge@Wharton interview with Kevin Lynch

Posted by Ryan Stewart @ 3:17 pm

Categories: AIR, Adobe, Flash, Flex, Kevin Lynch

Tags: Adobe Systems Inc., Adobe AIR, Knowledge@Wharton, Kendall Whitehouse, Desktop Application, Desktops, Hardware, Ryan Stewart

Kendall Whitehouse has an interview up with Kevin Lynch at Knowledge@Wharton in which he discusses everything from Adobe AIR to the Open Screen Project. It’s one of the better interviews I’ve seen and gets into a lot of aspects of Adobe’s strategy around RIAs. They also talk about Kevin’s new role as CTO and what that means for the company.

Some of the best information comes when Kendall asks about the different ideas between Microsoft and Adobe. Kendall got to interview Scott Guthrie at MIX and this interview with Kevin is a nice compliment to that. On Adobe AIR and desktop application security, Kevin does a good job of setting everything straight:

AIR is enabling applications to be built with web technologies — using things like HTML, Flash and Flex — and it brings those applications to the desktop with the rights of a desktop application. Otherwise, there’s not much point in bringing them to the desktop.

The installation process for AIR lets the user know that this application was signed [with a digital certificate] by a particular vendor. You can approve or disapprove it. If you approve it, then it does have capabilities like other applications you install on your computer. It’s very much following the desktop application model in enabling these applications to be more functional and act like desktop applications, but run across operating systems.

In the rest of the interview Kevin talks about how Adobe AIR fits into the next generation of cloud computing and then a bit about the Flash/Silverlight competition. Kendall always does a good job of getting good answers by asking good RIA questions. This one is well worth the read.

May 12th, 2008

Introducing the User Interface Resource Center

Posted by Ryan Stewart @ 6:38 am

Categories: AIR, Flex, Rich Enterprise Applications, Rich Internet Applications, Silverlight, effectiveUI

Tags: Adobe Systems Inc., Rich Internet Application, Ryan Stewart

Late last week effectiveUI rolled out the User Interface Resource Center as a place for developers and designers to get information about various RIA technologies. They interviewed people from Adobe, Microsoft, and independent developers on a variety of topics. There’s obviously a heavy user interface focus and they dive into specific examples like the eBay Desktop and general user interface guidelines.

The site should prove to be a good resource for people comparing RIA technologies. There are no direct comparisons (yet) but the articles they’ve compiled from Adobe and Microsoft provide a lot of information. I’m hoping to see them branch out into more technologies and more companies. They’ve also compiled an FAQ for the Three UI technologies on the site (Adobe AIR, Adobe Flex, and Silverlight).

In general this is a pretty good start for an RIA portal. With so much interest and confusion still around the RIA landscape, this should provide people with some good, unbiased information.

April 18th, 2008

The ever-changing definition of RIAs and how people are killing it

Posted by Ryan Stewart @ 3:58 pm

Categories: AIR, Adobe, Ajax, Curl, Flash, Flex, JavaFX, Microsoft, Mozilla, Prism, Rich Internet Applications, Silverlight, WPF, Windows Presentation Foundation

Tags: Desktop, Microsoft Silverlight, Adobe AIR, Rich Internet Application, Web Browser, Mozilla Prism, Ryan Stewart

There’s a long and mostly good article about various RIA technologies over at eWeek. I say mostly good because the author, Jim Rapoza, gives a pretty unbiased view of a lot of technologies. It’s a rundown that we (the entire space) needs more of and that I don’t feel qualified to give (for obvious reasons). But the problem is that Jim limits the term RIA to primarily desktop technologies with the exception of Silverlight which is included in the desktop RIA roundup and Curl, where I can’t tell if he’s using the browser plugin for Curl or the desktop version.

Defining RIA
Let’s first bite off the question of what desktop applications constitute RIAs. In general, I’m pretty broad with this definition. I think things like Mozilla Prism, Adobe AIR, Curl Nitro, and Microsoft WPF are all examples of desktop RIAs. WPF is the hardest to place because it’s the most “native” of those examples seeing as it’s the next generation of Microsoft’s .NET framework for building Windows applications. In general, I think RIAs as a whole should be:

• Cross-platform
• Using web technologies
• Have a focus on both performance/data as well as very usable, next generation user interfaces (the “Rich” part of RIA).

I also think that the best RIA platforms should have:

• A good designer/developer workflow story
• At a technical level business logic and user interface should be very cleanly separated so that the UI can easily be enhanced.

It’s the last two that I think pushes WPF over the top.

Coding for the desktop in the browser
So with that definition of RIAs, we get a bunch of technologies. Some are RIAs on the desktop, like the ones included in the eWeek article. But the longer term, older, and some would say more future-compliant are the RIAs inside the browser. That’s what Web 2.0 was built around and that’s what continues to get a lot of attention. As a result it’s VERY, VERY important to differentiate between browser RIAs and desktop RIAs and to compare apples to apples instead of apples to oranges (browser RIAs to desktop RIAs). This is where people seem to confuse Silverlight the most.

The eWeek article starts off like this with regards to Silverlight:

However, while Silverlight’s browser and operating system support is impressive, as an RIA platform, its scope is much more modest. In tests, Silverlight proved to be a fairly basic and even old-school approach to building and using RIAs. In fact, Silverlight can’t be considered a direct competitor to more advanced RIA platforms such as AIR. If anything, Silverlight is more of a direct competitor to Flash.

That’s both semi-accurate and completely misses the point. Actually, it’s kind of scary that the newest entrant into browser RIAs is being called a “basic, old-school approach to building and using RIAs”. Are browser RIAs that boring? While I’m a huge advocate of desktop RIAs, I think the browser should still be getting a bunch of the attention. And in fact, the browser is still where most of the energy is and as a result a really good RIA platform will build on what they know in the browser and leverage that in their desktop clients.

Look at Adobe. We’ve got the Flash Player in the browser and you can use ActionScript as well as the Flex Framework to build browser RIAs. Then you can take that exact same knowledge/code and start building a desktop application on AIR. Look at Microsoft. You can build a C# and XAML application in Silverlight then take that code and start building a desktop application in WPF. Look at Java. You can write Java code along (soon) with JavaFX and run it in the browser or as a regular Java app. Seeing a pattern? Same thing with Curl. You can use the Curl language to build a Curl application in the browser and now with Nitro you can take that code and build a desktop application. Mozilla Prism is the most basic example because all you’re basically doing is taking a browser application written in Ajax and turning it into a desktop application. The browser space is also where a lot of the Ajax frameworks exist and where companies like OpenLaszlo exist, so there’s room for all of those to grow.

Ajax
The way all of these technologies incorporate Ajax has also been interesting to see. Silverlight allows you to use JavaScript to program RIAs with it. AIR supports the full HTML stack so you can create desktop applications with Ajax. Prism is obviously all about Ajax. So as a core RIA technology, JavaScript and HTML are still doing very well and should continue to get attention whenever anyone mentions RIAs.

It’s a big, big world and it’s only getting bigger. And yeah, maybe it’s a pain that RIAs have started to fragment a lot. But in the end, competition is good and each of these technologies within both the browser niche and the desktop niche have their own strengths and weaknesses. It’s how those evolve that will be the most interesting and because of the close relationship between the browser RIAs and the desktop RIAs, we need to keep an eye on both.

So that’s my take on the RIA space. What did I mess up? Talkback away.

April 4th, 2008

AIR Twitter client Twhirl gets bought by Seesmic

Posted by Ryan Stewart @ 12:13 am

Categories: AIR, Rich Internet Applications

Tags: Desktop, Web, API, Rich Internet Application, Twitter, Twhirl, Ryan Stewart

I think this is the first case of an AIR application being acquired so it’s a pretty cool day for RIAs on the desktop. Twhirl has been gaining a ton of momentum because it’s so well designed and I think it shows off why RIAs on the desktop are going to be a big deal. You’re empowering a whole lot of people to build brand new kinds of applications. One excellent developer, Marco, was able to put together Twhirl, integrate a lot of community feedback and have it running cross platform all using web technologies.

In Loic’s post (the founder of Seesmic and purchaser) he gave a bunch of reasons for the acquisition including the first one, “Staying in touch with your friends using microblogging is much easier using a client than through your browser”. I think he nails it. We’ve got a ton of APIs floating around the web. Shouldn’t we be able to provide the best possible experience using those APIs? It doesn’t matter how you interact with the data, only that it’s there. The web ecosystem that has been built up is such a great fit for RIAs on the desktop because we’ve exposed data at its most basic level and let people create great experiences around it. Regardless of the platform, those APIs make it easy to create the right blend of desktop and browser.

Congrats to Marco. This is a cool day for RIAs.

March 24th, 2008

Dear desktop, welcome back

Posted by Ryan Stewart @ 3:05 pm

Categories: AIR, Flash, Mozilla, Prism, WPF, Windows Presentation Foundation

Tags: Desktop Application, Desktops, Hardware, Ryan Stewart

Dear desktop,

How are you doing? Are you still hanging in there? It’s been tough, I know. People have talked about you being dead for a while but you don’t listen, you just keep moving along. I’ll admit, there were some dark times for you. It seemed like only yesterday that every cool new thing was a browser-based application. People were talking about storing everything in the cloud and how the operating system was dead. Vista didn’t help matters much and then even Leopard didn’t do much to further your cause. If operating systems are dead, the desktop is basically dead, right? Or at least that’s what everyone told you.

But you knew. You understood that the desktop is more than just an operating system. It’s hardware, storage space, a persistent connection and more control over the entire software experience. Everyone seemed to forget but you read your Maximum PC and kept smiling. It worked out. The desktop is exciting again in a number of interesting ways.

First, people are starting to build desktop applications again. Microsoft, the king of the desktop, has overhauled it’s .NET programming model so that people can create great looking desktop applications. It’s called WPF and I bet you’re pretty excited about that, right? It only runs on Windows but you get hardware acceleration, a great UI and all the shiny bells and whistles of desktop applications. It’s like you got a whole new set of clothes. But there’s more. Adobe AIR is bringing Flash and HTML/JavaScript to the desktop. People can use web technologies to start building applications for you. It’s cross platform so that means it won’t matter who operating system you’re running. Then there are things like Google Gears and Mozilla Prism. They use you to go offline and to provide a better web experience. With Prism you can turn any web site into a desktop application with the click of a button. Google Gears uses a SQLite database stored on top of you to let developers read and write data to it for offline use cases. Microsoft, Adobe, Google, Mozilla - that’s a big list. It must feel good to have big names encouraging developers to use you again.

But that isn’t the most interesting part, is it? I remember you talking about how you were annoyed so many people were talking about the browser without reminding people that the browser was a desktop application. Now that area is heating up. This dustup between Safari and Mozilla? It’s over a desktop application! Why? Because the desktop is important. It’s the most valuable place. From there you can control the search path, you can control the experience and you can keep rolling out updates. It’s easy to leave a webpage and never come back. But uninstalling a desktop application? A browser? That’s harder. And I bet you’re excited that browsers are looking more and more like avenues into the desktop. They’ve got offline storage, extensions, and think about how they’ll evolve. More desktop-centric? Seems to be going that way.

So welcome back desktop. We’ve missed you. So now that everyone is paying attention to you, try not to let it go to your head. The tech crowd is fickle. Just keep showing off and making sure people understand why you’re important. I’d also make sure to talk to cloud. She’s got a lot of interesting stuff going on. Maybe you two could get together…date…have some little desktop/cloud babies. That would be the ultimate union. The desktop and the cloud together.

March 1st, 2008

Is an offline version of Silverlight coming at MIX next week?

Posted by Ryan Stewart @ 7:02 pm

Categories: AIR, Microsoft, Silverlight

Tags: Microsoft Silverlight, Microsoft Corp., Desktops, Hardware, Ryan Stewart

There have been rumors for a while and today TechCrunch says they’ve been hearing that an offline version of Silverlight is coming to compete with Adobe AIR. Currently, despite a lot of comparisons in the tech media world, Silverlight and AIR have absolutely nothing to do with each other. Silverlight competes with Flash Player, a product that has been around for a very long time. But maybe that’s changing.

What they’ll most likely do is release an “offline” version of Silverlight that uses SQLite. It would be something like Google Gears where they install the database with the runtime then developers can write data to it and take their Silverlight applications offline. They still live in the browser so in this sense, it’s not quite a 1-1 competitor with Adobe AIR, it’s a competitor to Google Gears. There are definitely bits of competition there because one of the big value propositions of AIR is offline access, but there’s a lot more too it as well because it’s a cross-platform desktop runtime, something I can’t see Microsoft doing.

The other angle here is something Michael alludes to and Nick Carr talks about, the “web-apps strategy”. Nick says he’s hearing that Microsoft will soon start to talk about how Microsoft will follow through on their Software plus Services strategy and bring some of their great desktop properties online. I’m surprised that people think this is news because anyone who’s tracking the RIA space has seen this coming for 2 years. And don’t think the timing is a coincidence. What does Microsoft’s online strategy and MIX have in common? Silverlight.

There is one single reason Silverlight exists - because Microsoft needed a platform to deploy very rich, desktop-like applications in the browser that they controlled. You can talk about the “war” between Adobe and Microsoft all you want, but Microsoft simply couldn’t afford to roll out rich, online versions of Office or their other properties on someone else’s technology. They saw how powerful Flash was getting and they had to do something. That something was Silverlight. They got a first version that focused on video out to generate some buzz and get people talking while they worked on a version that was actually able to deploy applications like Flash can. By most accounts, Silverlight 2 is going to be it. They’ll finally have a version for the public to play with at MIX and with that piece of the puzzle in place they can start really going after the online world with their wealth of properties.

February 29th, 2008

Interviews galore from Adobe's Engage event

Posted by Ryan Stewart @ 8:58 am

Categories: AIR, Adobe, Adobe Engage, Rich Internet Applications, Rich Media

Tags: Adobe Systems Inc., Online Video, Video, Corporate Communications, Marketing, Ryan Stewart

Andy Plesser was a busy guy at our Adobe Engage event this week. He talked to a lot of customers and attendees about what’s coming up and has been posting them over on his blog. I chatted with him about AIR and how it could fit into the entire video space from desktop to devices. For live coverage, Scoble provided the best angle, but Andy did a great job on getting a wide-range of subjects to talk about AIR, technology, and the web. I also know he’s going to have some more information that’s VERY relevant to anyone thinking about online video delivery.

• Nick Bilton from ShifD/New York Times
• Claude Courbois - NASDAQ Market Replay
• Robert Blatt - AOL’s XDrive
• Robert Scoble - FastCompany.tv