November 10th, 2008

Aviary launches with brand new domain, pricing model

Posted by Ryan Stewart @ 1:54 pm

Categories: Design, Flash, Flex, Rich Internet Applications

Tags: Desktop, Domain, Pricing Strategy, Tool, Aviary, Productivity, Ryan Stewart

This is a bit old, but I haven’t had time to dig in and play with the public version of Aviary until recently. After a long beta period they’ve officially taken the wraps off of Phoenix, their bitmap editing tool and consolidated everything under the aviary.com domain. The launch not withstanding, the Aviary crew has been very, very busy and Aviary continues to be one of the most innovative set of RIAs that I’ve seen.

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

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

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

Thanks to Flash Speaks Actionscript for the reminder.

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.

September 10th, 2008

Jibdee launches: a consumer-centric take on the webtop concept

Posted by Ryan Stewart @ 10:49 am

Categories: Flex, Rich Internet Applications, User Interface

Tags: TechCrunch, User Interface, List, Ryan Stewart

At TechCrunch 50 yesterday a company called Jibidee rolled out a public beta of their service. I like what Jibidee is doing. At its most basic level it’s a webtop product. You can store information, create lists, and generally organize your life through a very engaging web-based interface and a series of templates for things like “Financial”, “School”, and “Shopping Lists”. You can create those lists and then share them with any number of friends to create a collaborative environment that’s perfect for families or co-workers. In a future version of the product they’ll support Address Books and Calendars.

So what makes Jibidee different from all of the other webtops out there? One, I don’t think they’re trying to bite off too much. They’re not trying to replicate everything Windows does. They’re focused on the very specfic niche of the more consumer market. It isn’t trying to compete with things like Google docs or replace an operating system. It’s goal is to essentially make people’s lives a bit simpler by allowing them to store and collaborate with organizers and lists. The other thing that stands out is the user interface, which is an important element for going after the consumer space. They built the application in Flex and really focused on the user interface. It’s fun, colorful, intuitive and best of all, can be customized to look however you want.

I also like the fact that they have a business model coming right out of the gate. They’re using the “freemium” model which gives you a certain number of “sheets” for free and then there are tiers above that. I’m a big fan of the freemium model but it does take some scale to achieve. Jibidee was a semifinalist in the TechCrunch 50.

July 29th, 2008

Better RIAs from the Ribbit-BT Acquisition

Posted by Ryan Stewart @ 12:00 pm

Categories: Flex, Rich Enterprise Applications, Rich Internet Applications, Rich Media

Tags: Acquisition, Voice, Ribbit, British Telecommunications, Rich Internet Application, Telecommunications, Ryan Stewart

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.

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.

May 8th, 2008

KinetiCast - online presentation and promotional tracking

Posted by Ryan Stewart @ 3:41 pm

Categories: Flex

Tags: Presentation, Presentation Creator, Productivity, AJAX, Web 2.0, Microsoft Office, Internet, Software/Web Development, Web Development, Office Suites

Update: KinetiCast can do PowerPoint imports but you can’t edit them. I was looking at the “preview” mode in the file sharing screen but when you create a presentation you can import slides from PowerPoint.

With the meme about presentation tools and SlideShare yesterday I thought now was as good a time as ever to cover KinetiCast, a company in the online presentation space that I chatted with a couple of weeks ago. One of the things that makes KinetiCast unique is that they very consciously didn’t target the Web 2.0 world and instead started going after paying customers in areas like real estate, and the financial industry. I don’t know what their revenue numbers look like but there seem to be a number of paying customers.

The application is based on Flex and has some good features that revolve around managing a lot of presentations and tracking how well they do. You can set up email campaigns with a link back to the presentation and then analytical tools let you track how many people viewed the presentations and when they stopped looking at them. It includes the ability to save contacts and a hook into Salesforce would be good here.

The actual presentation creator is interesting but it isn’t quite as full featured as Ajax or Flash counterparts like Zoho Show or Sliderocket. It has most of the basics that you’d expect including the ability to add video, upload images, etc. Transition editing or any kind of advanced editing is limited. (Updated:) You can import power point presentations but there is no way to edit the content directly in the tool. They end up as basic images right now which works, but most of the presentation applications on the market offer the ability to import and then edit PPT presentations.

Overall it’s a good tool. The shortcomings in the editor are mitigated a bit by the fact that they have a lot of good tracking and managing of presentations. When taken as a whole, this is a quality way to promote your product and see how well it’s doing. As a standalone presentation creator it falls short. You can check out a demo here and they allow you to try it free for 15 days.

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 19th, 2008

SlideRocket - the king of presentation applications - raises $2 million in funding

Posted by Ryan Stewart @ 9:43 am

Categories: Flex, Rich Internet Applications

Tags: Rich Internet Application, SlideRocket, Ryan Stewart

Update: Sorry about the link. Fixed.

SlideRocket (Screenshots) is on the short list of my favorite Flex applications and it sounds like TechCrunch is pretty impressed. I’ve been following SlideRocket’s development since almost the beginning and I’m a huge fan of what founder Mitch Grasso has been able to accomplish. It’s absolutely one of the best presentation creation applications out there. And because it’s built on rich Internet application technologies you can add interactivity and create a cinematic experience that I haven’t seen done any where else.

The company is announcing today that they’ve raised $2 million in funding from Hummer Winblad Venture Partners and First Round Capital. I’ve written about SlideRocket before but they’ve set aside 100 invites for Universal Desktop readers so if you haven’t been able to check out SlideRocket, just click here.