May 28th, 2008

More information on Yahoo's BrowserPlus

Posted by Ryan Stewart @ 7:42 pm

Categories: Ajax, Rich Internet Applications, Yahoo

Tags: Web, Google Gears, Yahoo! Inc., Web Browser, Web Browsers, Channel Management, Internet, Marketing, Ryan Stewart

There have been small bits of information trickling out about Yahoo’s BrowserPlus, but today in a blog posting on the Yahoo Developer Network we got some more information about what Yahoo’s planning and it’s a good development for RIAs. In their own words, Yahoo is building a platform to extend the web:

BrowserPlus is a platform for extending the Web: an end-user installs it and a developer uses its features through a small JavaScript library. Some of the features that exist in the platform today include:

• Drag-and-drop from the desktop
• Client-side image manipulation (cropping, rotation & filters)
• Desktop notifications

Clint Boulton makes the comparison between Gears and Adobe AIR, which is sort of correct. It really looks like it’s more competition for Google Gears as it will run inside the browser and expand the capabilities of the browser. It also doesn’t seem to be a one-plugin fro everything model. In the case of Yahoo BrowserPlus, users would download a plugin, and then websites could call different web services supported by BrowserPlus and BorwserPlus would load those into the browser when they’re called. That means it’s very easy for Yahoo to add functionality to the platform as they go instead of having to worry about distributing a new version of the plugin every time.

Some of the new functionality parallels the new features and roadmap of Google Gears that was announced today and it’s interesting to see two big web companies continue to try and expand on what the browser can do by offering their own functionality. If you look at Mozilla Prism, Adobe AIR, Google Gears, and BrowserPlus, there does seem to be a lot of interest in moving beyond the browser and there is plenty of choice for how each developer makes that happen.

February 2nd, 2008

What the Microsoft-Yahoo deal might mean for rich Internet applications

Posted by Ryan Stewart @ 12:00 pm

Categories: Adobe, Ajax, Google, Microsoft, Rich Internet Applications, Silverlight, Yahoo, Yahoo! Maps

Tags: Google Inc., Web, Yahoo! Inc., Rich Internet Application, Microsoft Corp., Channel Management, Marketing, Ryan Stewart

I’m still digesting the news of Microsoft’s’ $44.6 billion bid for Yahoo or the possible News Corp bid which is a lot more intriguing). I feel like everyone knew it was coming but it didn’t really do anything to diminish the surprise. This deal is primarily an advertising deal. It’s a way for Microsoft to buy into the race with Google and do it with style. But I think the long term implications here have a huge impact on rich Internet applications for a few reasons.

As Robert Scoble notes, Yahoo has a ton of great Web 2.0 properties. Not all of these are rich Internet applications per se, but the DNA of the entire company is built around creating interesting web experiences. Sometimes those experiences are acquisitions (Flickr, del.icio.us, Upcoming) and sometimes they’re created in-house (Yahoo maps, Yahoo finance). I always thought Microsoft had the most potential to transform itself into a web company. They have great software properties and with stuff like Silverlight it was clear they were looking for a way to merge that software with the web in a powerful way. If some of that Yahoo DNA can survive, the combination of Microsoft’s platform with Yahoo’s web savvy is going to be very interesting.

I also think there’s more potential here than people realize. I always thought Yahoo got a raw deal. Yahoo properties drive a ton of traffic because the content is so good. Advertising only works if people visit the web and people visit the web to do interesting things. Yahoo nailed that with its properties but it couldn’t convert that into big money advertising for a variety of reasons. Maybe Microsoft can actually turn that around. RIAs are part of the new web. Customers are flocking to them, developers are creating absolutely fantastic stuff on top of RIA technology, and Microsoft is in a position to combine RIAs with their existing properties (Zune, Xbox, Office) and all of Yahoo’s properties. If they can do that they may be able to increase the value of advertising on the site and even become the next gen ad company. Google’s text ads are great but they aren’t the future. Microsoft would have enough pieces of the puzzle to explore that future.

Finally, I think there’s a big void that Yahoo leaves that will hopefully jump-start competition in the world of RIAs. Yahoo was a great company in part because it was willing to grow through small acquisitions. It ended up with some very interesting properties. Where is the acquirer of great RIAs? Yahoo might have stepped up because it had a long tradition but would Microsoft step up? Google has a lot of potential. Would Adobe step in there? Does this open up an area for IAC or eBay to add value by diversifying from core assets and taking Yahoo’s place as arguably the most interesting destination on the web? I hope so. We need companies like Yahoo and the RIA space is only getting hotter. There’s big money to be made down the road in acquiring these companies because they hold the key to the next generation of the web experience. Hopefully someone steps up.

December 5th, 2007

Finally. WPF Yahoo! Messenger available for preview

Posted by Ryan Stewart @ 9:54 pm

Categories: Rich Internet Applications, WPF, Windows Presentation Foundation, Yahoo

Tags: IM, Yahoo! Inc., Microsoft Windows Presentation Foundation, Microsoft Windows Vista, Yahoo! Team, Microsoft Windows Vista (Longhorn), Instant Messaging, Microsoft Windows, Operating Systems, Software

I got an email tonight that I wasn’t sure I was ever going to get. The Yahoo! team has finally released a preview of their Yahoo! Messenger for Vista which is built on Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF). First of all, kudos to the team. Screenshots of this application always looked fantastic and as far as messaging applications go, I think it blows every other app out of the water. There are those of you who will say “listen, all I want to do is send text back and forth, I don’t care about UX”. That’s fine, but if you’re running Vista, download messenger and tell me if you feel the same way.

One thing I thought was interesting is that despite using WPF, which can run on XP, this is exclusively for Vista. It wouldn’t let me download and install it on my XP machine in VMWare. That said, the new version just feels like a native Vista application and all that entails including richness, transparencies, and very powerful reflow features. The new version of Y!M also provides a great deal of customization. You can quickly and easily create your own rich experience in any window. The feature list has items that are good, but not quite revolutionary including spell checker, very quick search (great for multiple contacts) and being able to transfer large files. Those are all good, but they aren’t why I like the new messenger so much.

Conversations are meant to be personal and human. Being able to quickly chat is great, and the built in Gtalk for Gmail is a good example of a quick and dirty IM client. But the new Yahoo! Messenger re-humanizes IM conversations. It provides a rich experience around instant messaging that makes it feel more personal and more engaging. You’re supposed to have that emotional attachment when you talk to someone and it’s the little transitions, flow, and animations that help restore that humanity. I know it sounds cheesy, but this application brings a lot of the human element back to chatting for me because of it’s user experience. That’s part of what RIAs are all about: more natural experiences through user interface.

May 3rd, 2007

Yahoo goes Rich Internet Application for its browser messenger

Posted by Ryan Stewart @ 12:43 am

Categories: Apollo, Flash, Flex, Rich Internet Applications, Yahoo

Tags: Apple Macintosh, Internet, Yahoo! Inc., Internet Application, Web Browser, Ryan Stewart

Today Yahoo released a web based version of its messenger which was built using Adobe's Flex 2 on top of Flash Player 9. The application is very well done and I thought it was more than competitive with Meebo. It's also fast, intuitive and stable, things a lot of people don't usually associate with Flash applications.

Yahoo has been doing great things with Flex including the new Finance site and their Maps product. This is just another example of some of the cool web experiences that Flex and Flash make easy. Even Mike Arrington of TechCrunch seemed impressed with the new product. Meebo has done quite well in the IM space, but I think it's telling that both Yahoo and Google went with Flash for their browser based IM clients. Microsoft has to follow suit and a Silverlight client wouldn't be a stretch.

One other intriguing thing about this is what it may mean for a Yahoo Messenger desktop client on the Mac. The Yahoo team put together a great Windows Presentation Foundation client for Vista, but that would be difficult to port to the Mac. This version on the other hand, because it was built with Flex, would be easy to turn into an Apollo application so it could run outside the browser on either PCs or Macs.

March 29th, 2007

Apollo, Windows Presentation Foundation, XULRunner and Slingshot at Web 2.0 Expo

Posted by Ryan Stewart @ 5:25 pm

Categories: Ajax, Apollo, Joost, Rich Internet Applications, Slingshot, WPF, Windows Presentation Foundation, XUL, Yahoo

Tags:

With the buzz mounting over the past couple of weeks, I thought it would be a good time to talk about a panel I'm hosting at the Web 2.0 Expo, going on April 15th to 18th in San Francisco. My panel is Rich Internet Application Platforms and we've got some heavyweights in the industry to talk about what they're up to and how they're building rich desktop applications.

• Representing Apollo is Ben Galbraith from Ajaxian. Ben is going to talk about Apollo from the perspective of an Ajax developer, so it's an angle that hasn't been talked about a lot. It should make for some new conversation about Apollo.
• On the Windows Presentation Foundation side, we're going to be talking with Chris P. Saari, from Yahoo. Chris was the engineering manager behind the new Yahoo Messenger for Vista and he will provide insight into the process of developing a WPF application.
• We've got Joost, and one of their board members, Dirk-Willem van Gulik, to talk about XULRunner. Joost burst on to the scene and has been generating a lot of buzz in the video space. Dirk-Willem is also giving a keynote about Joost, so this will be a good way to get ready for that.
• Just today we confirmed that we're going to have Magnetk come and talk about Joyent Slingshot. Slingshot allows you to take your Ruby on Rails Application offline, so it's going to be an excellent addition to the panel.

It's shaping up to be a panel with a lot of information and a lot of different viewpoints. By the end, you should have a great sense of what the space looks like and what technologies are out there to bring your web applications to the next level. So if you want to see all of these interesting technologies in one room, go over to the Web 2.0 Expo site and register.

I'll also be speaking at The Rich Internet Application Summit, but I'll have more information on that next week. 

January 9th, 2007

Universal Desktop Daily - Tuesday, January 09, 2007

Posted by Ryan Stewart @ 3:05 am

Categories: Adobe, Flash, Goowy, Microsoft, Rich Internet Applications, Windows Presentation Foundation, Yahoo

Tags:

• I noticed that Jeremy Suriel of Goowy and Yourminis has a blog. He's got a lot of experience in building RIAs and I'm looking forward to reading what he has to say.
• Aral Balkan has a detailed writeup of the FlashFoward MacWorld Keynote. There were some good demos and some interesting information it sounds like.
• FlexLive has an interesting breakdown of Microsoft vs. Adobe. It does seem like there is more overlap now than there has ever been.
• Mike Chambers blogged that the open source ActionScript 3 Libraries have been moved over to Google Code.
• Tim Sneath has an updated list of WPF and WPF/E bloggers. I think I subscribe to most of those and I don't think you'll be lacking information if you download the OPML.
• I'm still gathering information on this but TechCrunch has a writeup of Yahoo's Vista Messenger which is written in WPF. The video presentation looks really slick.

January 8th, 2007

Rich Internet Applications at CES

Posted by Ryan Stewart @ 3:43 pm

Categories: CES, Microsoft, Mobile-Web, Rich Internet Applications, Yahoo

Tags:

I'm not at CES and I wasn't anticipating much in the way of Rich Internet Application news to come out of it so I haven't been rabidly following it today but a couple of things caught my eye that I thought you might be interested in.

The first is the item that has been on top of Techmeme all day today, the announcement of Windows Home Server. Microsoft continues its march into the living room and in doing so helps bolster the case for Rich Internet Applications to be built on their platform. While Microsoft has never been a huge supporter of cross platform (WPF/E is the most recent technology to support the Mac but others haven't survived to tell the tale) they have the largest reach when it comes to delivery points. Mary Jo Foley has some good info about Windows Home Server here and here but this seems like Microsoft is going to work very hard to tie into their other properties. Nathan Weinberg has some excellent coverage and puts the picture in perspective. The idea is that Home Server can act as the cloud for you in your own home giving you access to data wherever you are and storing it locally on your home server. This has some pretty neat implications for media and for companies looking to take advantage of Microsoft technologies to build rich media applications. It isn't cross platform but Microsoft has a pretty wide net here.

The other thing that caught my eye was the Yahoo Mobile announcement over at Read/Write Web. Not ready to concede mobile search to Google, Yahoo created a branded mobile experience (using Java) that enables its users to access the Yahoo network from their devices. It's a perfect example of how RIA technologies can be used to extract the important content and present it in a form that is usable. The mobile world continues to do exciting things and espouses the RIA ideal by demanding rich, tailored experiences. Whether in a web browser, a mobile phone or the desktop, these rich branded experiences that bring content front and center are the future of applications.

November 20th, 2006

The Resurgence of Flash

Posted by Ryan Stewart @ 10:03 am

Categories: Adobe, Ajax, Apollo, Experience, Flash, Google, Rich Internet Applications, Yahoo

Tags:

When Flash first started taking off in the late 1990's, it was the first time most people saw animation on the web. For a lot of people, Flash gave them a way to create web experiences that hadn't been possible before. It was exciting, it was pretty easy to jump in and many people did so. Unfortunately, this gave people a bad taste of Flash. We saw a lot of "skip intro" buttons because people thought it would be fun to have an animation as their start page. Jakob Nielsen wrote his famous "Flash : 99% Bad" article which talked about Flash as a distraction and a usability nightmare.

But slowly, Flash has started to turn the corner. In 2002, Jakob wrote an addendum declaring that "Flash Now Improved" and listed Design Guidelines for Flash usability. With Flash Player version 7, we saw the beginnings of seamless video on the web which would allow for companies like YouTube and Brightcove to flourish along with putting Flash front and center in people's minds. Most of them didn't realize it was Flash that was making their video experience so easy, but among developers and the digerati, Flash started to get more attention.

When Flex 2 was released to the public, it gave developers a way to jump into the world of Flash in a way that made sense to them. Keyframes and timelines aren't things developers want to think about, and the Flex 2 Framework took all of that away. Adobe decided to use the Eclipse IDE which was something Java developers were very familiar with and has helped Flex 2's adoption. Adobe has also done a very good job of increasing the presence of the Flash Player. They released a beta version of the Linux player and they open sourced the Actionscript Virtual Machine which will power the next generation of the Mozilla project. Both have gone a long way towards putting Adobe in a good light with a variety of developer communities.

But in the end I think Web 2.0 has helped Flash come into its own. Ajax gave people a taste of what a more interactive web could look like and as their needs expanded into more multimedia experiences, people turned to Flash because it just works. We are seeing entire applications built with Flash including Goowy, Gotuit, Pandora and Yahoo Maps. Flash has also done a lot to make sure it works with Ajax, the darling of Web 2.0. A great example is Google Finance: a combination of Flash and Ajax that helps incorporate news items into the stock graph.

What has struck me the most is that as Rich Internet Applications have become more prominent, more and more people are talking about Flash. Just this weekend Fred Wilson, Greg Yardley and Anne Zalenka had posts about Flash. Fred has a good quote which I think sums up the new attitude towards Flash:

I have become a huge fan of Flash. I never liked websites that were built in Flash. They took too long to load. I never understood what was wrong with html. It's still true that a website that is entirely built in Flash is not attractive to me. But delivering certain services in Flash, the way Etsy does with the shop by color or shop by geography, is a smart approach.

There is a big place for Flash on the web. Flash will never be a solution for everything, and that's good, but as the platform grows we are going to see more ways to add to the web with Flash. Flash Lite gives you access to mobile devices, Apollo will give you integration with the desktop and we will continue to see hybrid Flash/Ajax applications that take the best of both worlds and create very engaging experiences. Rich Internet Applications have come a long way and Flash has gone through ups and downs during that time. But right now, Flash seems to be on a big upswing. I expect that to get bigger and bigger. It has come a long way since the skip intro button.

September 26th, 2006

Universal Desktop Daily - Tuesday, September 26, 2006

Posted by Ryan Stewart @ 2:05 am

Categories: Experience, Flash, Rich Internet Applications, Yahoo

Tags:

• There is a lot of buzz over Wallop tonight and I’m very interested in the product. I think it is best categorized as a "rich social networking application" because it’s built in Flash and places a very heavy emphasis on the experience. It looks like a cool example of next generation social networks, and I hope I can check it out and review it soon.
• Interesting comparison of the New York Times reader and Adobe Acrobat. I realize the two are very different products, but it is an interesting read. It also makes me wonder about delivering a similar solution inside of PDF. That’s a possible use case for Apollo. Could we see an implementation that would allow you to brand the Acrobat reader and restrict it to your content?
• A little bit off track, but Ed Burnette has a comparison of NetBeans and Eclipse. Why is this relevant to RIAs? I always keep an eye on the Eclipse platform because there are some very interesting things being built on it. Ed seems impressed with how fast Eclipse is moving.
• Finally, in a sign that RIA technologies continue to get press, Mike Chambers linked to the new Yahoo! Flash Developer Center. Hopefully we’ll see some cool Flash work at Hack Day this week.

June 7th, 2006

Designers are the New Black

Posted by Ryan Stewart @ 9:34 am

Categories: Adobe, Experience, Google, Microsoft, Rich Internet Applications, Yahoo

Tags:

If you haven’t seen Pierre Francois talk about the essential ingredients for Web 2.0, then you’re missing out. But as with the best humor, there’s more than a grain of truth to what he says. In this new world, designers are in vogue and the programmers who build the applications are taking a back burner.

While some may scoff at the notion that designers are taking front and center on the web, the signs are there. Adobe has always coveted the designer crowd, but is even now moving towards making it easier for designers to build code. Kevin Lynch gave the example of the Spry Ajax framework that Adobe just released. Meanwhile Microsoft is busily trying to build out the design tools it offers (see Sparkle) and stated many times that one of the primary goals of WPF is to bring together designers and developers in an unprecedented way. Google aquired exclusive rights to Doug Bowman to shore up the design and usability of their applications. A designer who knows the web and can work with programmers is an invaluable asset right now.

So why the revolution? What happened to the kid who could crank out an application on nothing but dreams and Red Bull? Soccer moms and teenyboppers happened. In case you didn’t notice, if you’re a techie, no one cares about you any more. The web is social, and the people advertisers like are the soccer moms and the teenyboppers. That demographic won’t notice well written code, but they will notice a well designed application.

RIAs are an extension of this. The future of software is rich, interactive applications delivered over the web - the RIA. If soccer moms are going to use your application, it has to be pretty, it has to be smooth, and a huge emphasis has to be placed on the experience. The IPod wasn’t successful because it was the best product technically. It succeeded because it was the most beautiful product. All of the big players, Microsoft, Google, Adobe and Yahoo, realize this and are incorporating that beauty into at least some of their products. The gateway to success in RIAs is going to be the ability of your designer and your programmer to work together. People are used to a certain experience on their computers, and in order to get the mainstream to flock to the web as a platform, you have to make the experience better than what they have now. The web provides that potential, and if you’re a technically astute designer, then now is a great time to ask for a raise.