November 13th, 2008

Google's video chat plugin - a big deal for RIA developers

Posted by Ryan Stewart @ 11:36 am

Categories: Google, Rich Internet Applications, Rich Media

Tags: Video Chat, Developer, Google Inc., Rich Internet Application, Video, Plug-in, Corporate Communications, Marketing, Ryan Stewart

A couple of days ago Google released a video chat plugin for Gmail. With Google, it’s always a little hard to figure out where all of the pieces fit - that’s why there are entire blogs dedicated to the company - but in this case, I think this seemingly innocuous Gmail feature hints at something bigger.

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.

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.

November 4th, 2008

Architecting your Rich Internet Applications

Posted by Ryan Stewart @ 1:24 pm

Categories: Rich Internet Applications

Tags: Rich Internet Application, Slide, Josh Holmes, Ryan Stewart

Josh Holmes has posted a set of slides and detailed explanation for a talk he and James Ward did about architecting rich Internet applications. The post and the slides are well worth a read. One of the things that has been both fun and terrifying to watch as Flex evolved was the increasing complexity of the applications. And with both Flash and Silverlight you have a lot of visual options at your disposal so it’s easy to focus on flashy visuals without architecting both under the hood and the overall user experience.

That’s one of the things I like about Josh’s slides, it covers both the design architecture as well as the application architecture. I’ve started to see this a lot with AIR applications. People spend a ton of time architecting the visual aspects but they aren’t thinking about the fact that this application is going to be open for long stretches of time so they haven’t thought out things like memory consumption or destroying objects - things that should all be part of a well architected application.

Both the post and the slides (below) are excellent and well worth the read for anyone building RIAs.