July 23rd, 2008

Entellium puts a video game spin on CRM with a desktop RIA

Posted by Ryan Stewart @ 9:18 am

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

Tags: Entellium, Sun Java Studio Creator, Microsoft Windows Presentation Foundation, Rich Internet Application, Video Game, Video, CRM, Desktop Application, Games, Desktops

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.

June 3rd, 2008

Silverlight 2 beta 2 coming this week

Posted by Ryan Stewart @ 3:20 pm

Categories: Microsoft, Rich Internet Applications, Silverlight, WPF, Windows Presentation Foundation

Tags: Microsoft Silverlight, Microsoft Windows Presentation Foundation, Beta, Ryan Stewart

At TechEd today Bill Gates said that the second beta of Silverlight 2 will be available for download at the end of the week with a Go Live license. The Go Live license is similar to the one that was used late in the beta process for Silverlight 1 and it allows developers to roll out applications to production but with limited support from Microsoft.

At TechEd S. Somasegar demoed the beta 2 of Silverlight with a social networking application called Crossfader which can be used to share things like photos and music. According to Joe Wilcox, Somasegar focused on the the workflow between Silverlight and WPF as well as the benefits of XAML and using Visual Studio and Expression Studio.

I’m a big fan of the XAML model and I think it’s going to be interesting to watch as the lines between Silverlight and WPF blur. I wasn’t at TechEd but it sounds like the message around where to use Silverlight and where to use WPF is getting more pronounced. I think the ultimate workflow goal is to let developers and designers move quickly from Silverlight to WPF as the needs increase so the next beta may offer a picture of how easy it is to reuse and adapt the code and XAML from a Silverlight app to a WPF app.

Update: Brad Becker provides some of the new features in beta 2:

UI Framework: Beta 2 includes improvements in animation support, error handling and reporting, automation and accessibility support, keyboard input support, and general performance. This release also provides more compatibility between Silverlight and WPF.

Rich Controls: Beta 2 includes a new templating model called Visual State Manager that allows for easier templating for controls. Other features include the introduction of TabControl, text wrapping and scrollbars for TextBox, and for DataGrid additions include Autosize, Reorder, Sort, performance increases and more. Most controls are now in the runtime instead of packaged with the application.

Networking Support: Beta 2 includes improved Cross Domain support and security enhancements, upload support for WebClient, and duplex communications (“push” from server to Silverlight client).

Rich Base Class Library: Beta 2 includes improved threading abilities, LINQ-to-JSON, ADO.NET Data Services support, better support for SOAP, and various other improvements to make networking and data handling easier.

Deep Zoom: Beta 2 introduces a new XML-based file format for Deep Zoom image tiles, as well as a new MultiScaleTileSource that enables existing tile databases to utilize Deep Zoom. Better, event driven notification for zoom/pan state is another improvement in Silverlight 2 Beta 2.

May 12th, 2008

New version of Windows Presentation Foundation released

Posted by Ryan Stewart @ 12:54 pm

Categories: Microsoft, Rich Internet Applications, Windows Presentation Foundation

Tags: Microsoft Windows Presentation Foundation, Microsoft Windows, .Net, Benefits, Operating Systems, Software, Software Development, Software/Web Development, Human Resources, Ryan Stewart

Microsoft released a new version of Windows Presentation Foundation, their next generation windows application UI framework. The new version will ship as part of the .NET Framework 3.5 Service Pack 1. Tim Sneath has a very long and detailed post of the features but I’ll try and break down the major points and benefits for RIA developers.

I think the biggest news is that it will now be easier to deploy WPF applications because they’re making a slimmed down version of the .NET Framework which is dubbed the “Client Profile”. Instead of the ~50+ megs that you had to install to run WPF applications, you’ll have a 25 megabyte runtime that will be easier to deploy and should help expand adoption. Using Visual Studio 2008 SP1 you can create WPF applications which specifically target the smaller Client Profile. For developers that means you can get some of the benefits of WPF without having to require the full .NET framework. In general that will make WPF applications easier to push out, easier to download and run for consumers, and expand the penetration of the framework.

They’ve also added some cool graphics enhancements. For instance you can actually use any Direct3D surface as a brush for WPF content. They made WPF and DirectX a lot tighter and that should make for some really spectacular effects. Another graphic enhancement is that the shader classes (which enable affects like blurs, drop shadows, and flares) are all going to be hardware accelerated. That will boost performance and make everything a lot smoother.

Other benefits include performance, some tweaking to XBAPs (browser-based WPF applications) that make the user experience better, new controls (including the Office Ribbon control) and adding ClickOnce support to Firefox.

It’s almost too bad the release is buried under the title of a Service Pack. This is a significant release and in some ways make all of the additions and changes to WPF that will really help it shine. It still seems like long term the goal is to bring Silverlight and WPF closer together in some respects. This release shows that WPF isn’t slowing down at all which means good things for Silverlight developers.

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.

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 5th, 2008

MIX08 keynote rundown

Posted by Ryan Stewart @ 1:18 pm

Categories: Expression Studio, Microsoft, Online Video, Ooyala, Rich Internet Applications, Rich Media, Silverlight, WPF, Windows Presentation Foundation

Tags: Microsoft Silverlight, Microsoft Corp., Silverlight Penetration, Productivity, Business Structures, Advertising & Promotion, AJAX, Finance, Marketing, Internet

I was at the Microsoft MIX08 keynote today and Microsoft unveiled a few really cool things and a few not so much things. Obviously I work for Adobe so all the standard disclaimers apply.

First things first, lots of new bits. They dropped versions of Silverlight 2 Beta, Internet Explorer 8, Expression Studio 2 Beta and hooks for Silverlight and Visual Studio. Silverlight penetration is coming along at a rate of 1.5 million downloads a day and growing. That should get them to their number of 200 million downloads by June of this year. Flash has about 12 million downloads a day for comparison but I think that’s a very good number for Microsoft. No big news but some fun stuff to play with. Now on to the announcements.

A lot of the demos were things that we’d seen or heard of before like the Olympics site in Silverlight but there were a few gems that I think flew under the radar of some people. One is the adaptive streaming bit with Silverlight. In my opinion that was one of the coolest features of the day. I know that the Ooyala team has something like it in their video player. Adaptive streaming lets you provide the best experience to the user based on their system. If the bandwidth is slow and/or the machine isn’t up to speed, the stream automatically adjusts the experience so the user gets the highest watchable quality possible. This was one of the things that has made Move Networks so successful. That was the biggest surprise for me - the announcement of a partnership with Move and Microsoft around Silverlight. I don’t have any details of what the partnership looks like but that could be a big deal.

The coolest demo of the day was a deep zooming feature that was used on the Hard Rock Site. Microsoft has features in their tools that will let you stitch together a bunch of images and then a component that displays them so you can use the mouse wheel to get insane levels of detail on the stitched-together image. Pretty neat stuff. The rest of the demos were kind of blah. The AOL Mail application was good looking after they switched the skin to the Halo version but they showed things like “sorting a grid control” which is doable in Ajax. Even as a big Flash guy I wasn’t sure that using Silverlight on that application was a great showcase of the technology. They did do a fun/cool demo of WPF and Cirque Du Soleil

The other big news was the fact that Silverlight mobile will be released on Nokia devices. The showed a couple of demos (one good, one bad) of Silverlight applications running on a S60 device. It sounds really cool and the way I understood it you could take the same Silverlight code and run it on the phone or browser. Two big questions were when will it be available and what is the licensing model. It seems like Microsoft is trying to get Silverlight mobile deployed in a number of places so I would imagine they’ll make licensing as easy as possible.

Overall the keynote was good but not spectacular. Ray Ozzie talked a lot about “meshes” and how the ecosystem fits together. There were some very cool technical things with Silverlight but not a lot of examples to differentiate it with Flash. I was also hoping to see more about the workflow. At this point you can pretty much do anything you want to with Flash or Silverlight so what matters most in my mind is the tools. Blend got a few mentions but they were small bits and I would have liked to know more about their designer/developer story. They did show a “dev-igner” slide so that was cool. Maybe I need to go to the sessions to learn more.

Overall, even as an Adobe employee, I was hoping to see them push the boundaries and provide a ‘check’ to Adobe in the chess game. There was some of it, like the Silverlight mobile bit and adaptive streaming, but I was hoping for more tool innovation and more info about Silverlight 2 that we hadn’t heard about. But the crowd was energetic and it’s clear there’s a ton of RIA interest in the .NET world so we should see some great apps down the road.

March 3rd, 2008

Offline Silverlight: No current plans but eventually (And some Expression Blend news)

Posted by Ryan Stewart @ 5:42 pm

Categories: Expression Studio, Microsoft, Rich Internet Applications, Silverlight, Windows Presentation Foundation

Tags: Microsoft Silverlight, Ryan Stewart

Martin LaMonica over at CNet talked with John Case, a general manager in Microsoft’s developer division about the possibility of an offline version of Silverlight. Case’s response was that there aren’t any current plans but he left the door open for something down the road:

“It’s something that we will want to do,” Case said in an interview on Monday. “Eventually, customers will expect us to do it.”

So you can wipe that off of your MIX08 predictions list, but it will still be a great show. Scott Guthrie posted another crazy-awesome long post about using Expression Blend with Silverlight. Microsoft will be shipping the beta a new version (2.5) of the Expression suite that I’m excited to dig in with. I’m a huge fan of Blend so even as an Adobe employee I’m pretty stoked to see how they’ve updated it for Silverlight 2.

March 3rd, 2008

Infragistics releases NetAdvantage for Visual Studio 2008

Posted by Ryan Stewart @ 10:24 am

Categories: .NET 3.0, Experience, Rich Internet Applications, Silverlight, WPF, Windows Presentation Foundation

Tags: Microsoft Visual Studio, Component, Microsoft Visual Studio 2008, Microsoft Windows Presentation Foundation, Rich Internet Application, Infragistics WPF Component, Looking Component, Ryan Stewart

In the world of rich Internet application components, Infragistics has a ton of experience. They’ve been building .NET components for a long time and they took very quickly to WPF. They announced this week that they’re component set, including NetAdvantage for WPF is compatible with VisualStudio 2008 so you’ll be able to use all of their components when you upgrade to Microsoft’s latest and greatest tools.

The Infragistics WPF components are quite good. They’ve got some data grid enhancements, a “ribbon-style” control that you can drop into your WPF applications and a good charting suite. They also have some good Silverlight components as Doug McCune noted when he went looking for Silverlight demos.

I think the RIA components market is one that has only just started to get off the ground. Good looking components are such a big part of the experience that as bigger and bigger companies start using RIAs, there will be a huge market for people building components. As with many things, companies are more than happy to buy a solution that fits their needs, so a diverse and quality component library is a welcome addition to any RIA platform.

February 12th, 2008

ViewOn.Tv a nifty media player built in WPF

Posted by Ryan Stewart @ 11:49 am

Categories: Rich Internet Applications, WPF, Windows Presentation Foundation

Tags: Microsoft Windows Presentation Foundation, Media Player, Media Players, Digital Music, Digital Media, Consumer Electronics, Personal Technology, Ryan Stewart

I haven’t been able to review a lot of WPF applications which is why I’m always thrilled when one comes my way. The latest I’ve been testing out the past couple of days is ViewOn.tv a general purpose media player that has a lot of the features you’d expect wrapped up in WPF. It actually made me remember how much I love WPF applications. It has some performance issues for me on my machine but there’s something about the WPF component set and user interfaces people build that really stand out to me.

ViewOn.tv lets you do everything you’d expect, you can import your music library and also play radio stations from the application. I couldn’t find where to have it go out and grab the album art for me, but other than that the process was straightforward. It’s got a mini mode and a cool pop-out interface when browsing the album art. The player also supports burning your playlists to a CD. In addition, you can play music directly from your devices. They say they support the iPod but I couldn’t get my Zune to show up on the device menu. The interface is cleanly striking. It’s basically a grayscale color theme with a single regular color that the user can chose to complete the theme. It ends up being a nice effect.

The ViewOn.tv player launched earlier this year so the version they have is still very, very early. Right now there isn’t a ton to differentiate it from other media players but as I said above, there’s something about the interface that I really like so I have high hopes for the application.

January 23rd, 2008

Rich Internet application predictions from the experts

Posted by Ryan Stewart @ 3:03 pm

Categories: AIR, Adobe, Ajax, Flash, Flex, Google, Microsoft, Rich Internet Applications, Rich Media, Silverlight, WPF, Windows Presentation Foundation, effectiveUI

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

Earlier this month I did my 2008 predictions for rich Internet applications. My record last year wasn’t as good as it could have been so I decided that this year I’d do two sets of predictions. One set are mine but the others are sets from people in the industry who know RIAs as well or better than I do. That way at the end of the year I can pick and choose to get up to a 100% success rate. Here are the predictions from a lot of smart people:

Jeffery Hammond - Forrester Research
I’m excited about the major revs we’re going to see from both Adobe with AIR and MS with Silverlight 2.0 this year. They will both up the ante for RIA development, albeit in different ways. Silverlight will give million of .NET developers a straightforward way to built cross platform RIA apps using their existing skill set, and if the early example of apps build with AIR are any indication, the traditional wall between browser and desktop will fall once and for all.

This will lead to a blending of RIA and RIW (Rich Internet Widgets) technology but create some market confusion as developers try to figure out where Yahoo Widgets and Google Desktop leaves off and AIR and Silverlight/Vista Gadgets pick up.

The battleground for RIA will also shift in intensity to the mobile Web space. A second gen iPhone with 3G, new communicators from Nokia and other devices with fully capable Web browsers will make standards-based Web development for mobile platforms compelling and put the pressure on carriers to keep up to stay compelling.

Anthony Franco - effectiveUI
Last year, the overall demand for RIAs outpaced the qualified supply chain. This trend will continue. This year, companies facing both job growth and decline will need to continue to leverage innovative, usable RIAs to hone their competitive edge to outpace their competition and improve core business practices with fast, reliable, productivity-enhancing internal and external tools. However, building and deploying effective RIAs is not something companies can jump into with blind assumptions.

Kurt Brockett - IdentityMine
Silverlight 2.0 will be the buzz in 2008 that will lead into a strong 2009. In 2008 you will continue to see Silverlight deployments mostly via Microsoft partnerships as the industry dives in once the .NET backend story is clear and tools and documentation are readily available. Much like WPF was a buzz in 2007 with greater adoption coming in 2008.

Josh Catone - Read/WriteWeb
For me, one thing that will be big this year will be offline apps (Gears, AIR, etc.). The way you get the mainstream used to the idea of RIAs is to get them hooked on Internet apps by making them more familiar and approachable — i.e., by making them desktop apps.

Joe Johnston - AIR iPhone Creator
As many people have already stated I think this will be the year that user experience really takes off. I think companies are really starting to see that creating a unique and useful user experience really does pay off. I think that you will see a wide variety of Mobile and Embedded RIA’s that will utilize some form of Flash, Flex and AIR. I also believe that someone like Adobe or Microsoft will come out with a toolkit for building multi-touch interfaces for things like Flex, Flash, AIR, Silverlight and WPF. Its gonna be a big year for touchscreen applications.

Mike Soucie - ElectricRain
I believe 2008 will be a momentum-building year for RIA technologies and adoption, setting the stage for a heated battle mainly between Microsoft and Adobe in 2009/10, each working hard to address weaknesses found in their respective tool sets. For Microsoft that means driving Silverlight plug-in adoption via content wins like the online video portal for the 2008 Olympics, and making Expression Studio more useful as a serious design suite. For Adobe, that means winning over developers with Adobe Flex Builder as a serious and deep development framework. I think two hot areas that RIA will impact and heat up in 2008 is in ‘Office Suites and Collaboration’ (Microsoft Office Live, Google Docs, Adobe Buzzword, Yahoo Zimbra, Zoho Office), as well as ‘Social Networking Applications’ and add-ons for sites such as Facebook, Bebo, Orkut).