And that’s part of the reason why I’m giving up the blog. As RIAs have hit the main stream smaller niches have developed within the RIA space and the major technologies are being covered by the prominent bloggers and press. That’s been great for more coverage of RIAs and it also means that I’m busier than ever with my day job for Adobe. I haven’t had time in the past couple of months to do the blog justice and I hope RIAs get even bigger taking up more and more time.

I want to say thanks to all of you who made my particular road possible while I’ve had this blog. Thanks for the comments, the information, the support, the criticisms, and the demos you’ve given me. You’ll be able to find me on my personal blog, DigitalBackcountry (it’ll be generally Adobe-centric) and if you want to hear my take on RIAs you can catch me on RIA Weekly every week. I may also be popping up on BTL every once in a while.

To get your RIA fix I suggest Mary Jo Foley for Microsoft and Ed Burnette for JavaFX on the ZDNet side. Tim Anderson probably does the best job of covering all of the technologies together. My RIA Weekly co-host, Coté, has a great slant on things. Jeffrey Hammond is a fantastic analyst who knows the ins and outs of the RIA business. With those links you should be covered on all things RIA.

Thanks again for everything.

One firm, Halston, recently released its autumn collection through a music video. Others are also likely to pursue digital means to reach a broader audience. Catherine Malandrino, a popular French designer, has spent the past three months rworking her website to make it more “human and interactive”. Fashion, she points out, was historically old through intimate salons. She wants to re-establish that accessibility - and the internet allows her, and the others, to do it cheaply.

Fashion, and industries like it, are a perfect fit for the world of interactivity and RIAs. Clearly any kind of internet revival won’t be driven by fashonistas looking for some interactive work. But industries like Fashion, where there are strong emotional and design ties, will be ideal candidates for the more collaborative, video, and interactive applications for which RIA technologies are so well-suited.

It’s been oft-repeated that economic downturns, and the scarcity of resources during them, are what help the good ideas float to the top and succeed. But RIAs are seeing a tremendous amount of innovation at the runtime level which has been helped by a lot of competition in the space. Things like higher quality video, real-time communication and collaboration, a focus on design and design efficiency, as well as performance enhancements mean that we have an infrastructure in place that we haven’t had before. This is going to appeal to a wider range of industries who are using the web but looking for more value added services than just a website or even some of the social advancements from Web 2.0. It’s a good time to be thinking about and working with RIAs because they can provide a lot of value - even in this climate.

One of my favorite RIA events is 360|Flex. The organizers, Tom Ortega, and John Wilker, do a great job of getting the community excited and putting on an event with great technical content and great networking opportunities. The 360|Flex events end up feeling like a week hanging out with friends with some great sessions thrown in. And since we’ve seen an incredible interest on the part of RIA developers to start building things for the iPhone (and 200,000 applications can’t be wrong), they’re putting on an iPhone development conference in March called 360|iDev.

One of the things that I think is going to be interesting about this particular iPhone conference is the RIA background. The iPhone has become a big deal in the Flash community and gurus like Keith Peters have taken a head first plunge into the iPhone development world. Keith will be doing a session at 360|iDev, so this is going to be a great event to get some Flash perspective on iPhone development.

So if you’re doing RIA development and are looking to get started on the iPhone, check it out. It runs from March 2nd to the 4th at eBay’s San Jose office. Ticket prices are staggered and start at $200 so first folks to buy get the best prices (I think there are a few $200 tickets left). There are also four tracks: Game Development, Non-game Application Development, The Business of iPhone Development, and Hands-on Training, so there’s a lot of range in topics.

We already know that Windows 7 will have multi touch support which means that anyone building WPF applications can incorporate multi touch functionality. Snow Leopard, Apple’s newest operating system, supposedly will include it as well but what I want to see are the RIA plugins include it: Flash, Silverlight, JavaFX, etc - because I think that’s where the exciting cases are.

Those plugins were built from the ground up to be rich in animation, multimedia, and experience - the perfect use case for multi touch. But I’m also very excited about what’s starting to happen with real time communication and collaboration with things like WCF and Cocomo. The web seems to be ready for real-time to take off, so we’re getting to the point where we have very rich data layers underneath extremely powerful user interface frameworks and technologies. The only piece that’s missing is an input mechanism that can actually make some of these things less cumbersome to use.

As the UIs and the data become more complex, there’s going to be a draw to move to better ways of actually interacting with the content. Multi touch technology gives us that, and as we’ve seen with the iPhone, people pick these applications up very, very quickly. That usability boost is critical if we want to start seeing widespread adoption of the more interesting user interface ideas out there. We’ve got all the parts of the puzzle, but it’s taking more time than I would have liked to bring it all together.

Apologies for the long hiatus. Between Christmas, a vacation to Japan, and everything else, things have been hectic. But hopefully I’m back with a vengeance.

And as Marshall notes, the prices are far from daunting. When SproutBuilder first came out there were some whispers that this might be an interesting online version of the current Flash tool. It’s not going to replace Flash in any way shape or form, but by having a very targeted model they’re showing that it’s possible to make money from web based tools that leverage the Flash Platform. I think this is good news for everyone in the RIA space as it shows there is a fairly robust ecosystem to create targeted tools on top of any given platform.

Brightcove has a ton of old Allaire/Macromedia/Adobe people, so it isn’t surprising that they would draw from that pool again, and both David and Jeff were based in the Newton office. There may be some more old Adobe faces popping up at Brightcove down the road. In part because they seem to be doing so well. As Jeremy’s letter said, they released Brightcove 3 which included a chance in direction away from individuals uploading content to more polished and branded work. It seems to have been received very well.

They’ve also don a ton of work on the developer side to make it easy to use and integrate the Brightcove platform. They’ve got an XML-based BEML langauge which lets you create and customize Flash-based video players. They’ve got a Media API which lets you use REST-based web services to get actual content and metadata out of your Brightcove account. They’ve also got a number of custom components and hooks for you to build your own, so that you can add basically anything you want to your video player like stock quotes, news tickers, or anything that might enhance the experience around your content.

Brightcove continues to do a good job. As I think we’ve seen with Hulu, content is king. Brightcove has a ton of content and they’re making that accessible in a number of different ways and letting people get in and customize it to make the experience their own. The addition of Jeff and David is yet another step in the right direction.

2009 is going to be no different. With some major players in place, both Microsoft and Adobe entrenched in the RIA game for a long time, and companies like Google working on their own version of RIA technologies, whether it’s Native Client or Gears, are going to have a big impact on how people interact with the web and think of rich Internet applications. It’s also going to be exciting to watch as more and more companies - small and large - start rolling out RIA-based solutions. Think about the impact RIAs have had on video - that’s what I want to see happen to web applications.

I think 2009 is also going to be the year of performance. Our runtimes are going to get faster, our data is going to get bigger and companies are going to demand performance. There was already some talk of the real-time web and RIAs have a huge role to play in that. As robust client side technologies, RIAs can do things that normal web applications just can’t, and as people demand more data faster, RIAs are in a great position. Just look at Curl’s announcement to support AMF and you’ll see evidence that the back end is becoming just as important as the front end when it comes to rich Internet applications.

I’m really looking forward to 2009 and getting back to focusing on this blog. It’s been a little bit difficult not being able to write specifically about Flash and Silverlight because that’s where a lot of the action is. But as RIAs have matured it has become very important to detect and discuss both the fundamentals as well as the high level concepts behind what drives RIA adoption and features in the runtimes. We’re in for a big year.

Adobe announced Alchemy at MAX, which is a similar project for the Flash Player. Like Alchemy, Native Client uses GCC-based tools to compile C or C++ into bytecode native x86 code for the specific runtime. Alchemy uses Flash and Native Client has it’s own, I assume C-based implementation. Both of these are early projects but it’s the start of a trend and an example of the ever-expanding sphere of web applications. It’s also very interesting to see this come out of Google, a company that has been doing a lot to expand the functionality of the web browser. They’ve got Gears for offline/desktop functionality, Native Client for performance, Earth for mapping, and of course Chrome for an actual browser.

Keep an eye on this project. I see the Flash Player or Silverlight has having 3 core parts: the runtime, the rendering engine, and the video codecs. Put those three things together and you’ve got an RIA plugin. Google has a bunch of disparate projects and none that do all of these, but they have a bunch of the pieces and a ton of engineering talent. It’s also telling that Google is starting to be more and more obvious that the web browser/technologies as it exists today just aren’t cutting it. That means we’ll see more energy for projects like Native Code and Gears.

I consider widgets a subset of rich Internet applications mostly because of the technology behind them. Almost all widgets tend to be pretty interactive which makes platforms like Flash and Silverlight ideal for deployment. The fact that the embed model works so well with those technologies makes it easy to port them. Adobe AIR provides desktop functionality that lets you persist and create notifications. Then think about Flash and Silverlight’s move into the mobile world and how easily it will be to repurpose widgets across devices.

That last part is key. There is a fairly sophisticated ecosystem building up around monetization of widgets. yourminis was one of the first companies to the space and have focused on customization and working with partners. Since being acquired by AOL they’ve been busy adding customers and partners. The other aspect is being able to analyze this content and provide analytics. That’s where repurposing the widgets becomes more interesting. You could automatically track your widget across devices, social networks, and desktops with the same tracking back end.

There are also more complicated engaging widget platforms emerging. Sprout Builder is a great example of this. Something a bit more complex than a traditional widget, they provide a framework that can be customized with interactive content and then placed anywhere widgets can be. They provide the same kind of analytical tools so you can track where your widgets are going and even limit them by domain.

Widgets are a great way to engage users and the most powerful thing about the is that users can consume them in ways they control - desktop, web, Facebook, mobile, etc. So their value as an advertising engine is significant and with the ways the infrastructure is moving, it’s going to be easier and easier to create and deploy widgets.

As I mentioned on RIA Weekly, I think there are a couple of core components to RIAs. One is a much improved graphical user interface and layout mechanism. This is part of the appeal behind technologies like Flex and XAML - they’ve got a robust set of components and it’s very easy to get pixel perfect layout. They also support vector graphics, another benefit of that increased rendering capability. The other is video and multimedia. Canvas kind of enables the first case on the HTML side, something Google could get behind. But video is tougher. Now Google has that piece. And as Dion notes, it’s not like they don’t have a way to deploy this in a wider, developer-friendly way.

The technology behind it seems a little ambiguous. They’re supposedly using some technology from Vidyo and they rely on the Flash Player for something whether that’s some behind-the-scenes communication or webcam support, I have no idea. But I’ve also heard rumblings that parts of this could be contributed back to the open source community. That would make it an interesting play for the HTML5 video tag.

So this is a big deal and it’s something to keep an eye on. Google has never been associated with the “rich” in rich Internet application, but that could start to change.