The Universal Desktop

April 4th, 2008

AIR Twitter client Twhirl gets bought by Seesmic

Posted by Ryan Stewart @ 12:13 am

Categories: Rich Internet Applications, AIR

Tags: Desktop, Web, API, Rich Internet Application, Twitter, Twhirl, Ryan Stewart

I think this is the first case of an AIR application being acquired so it’s a pretty cool day for RIAs on the desktop. Twhirl has been gaining a ton of momentum because it’s so well designed and I think it shows off why RIAs on the desktop are going to be a big deal. You’re empowering a whole lot of people to build brand new kinds of applications. One excellent developer, Marco, was able to put together Twhirl, integrate a lot of community feedback and have it running cross platform all using web technologies.

In Loic’s post (the founder of Seesmic and purchaser) he gave a bunch of reasons for the acquisition including the first one, “Staying in touch with your friends using microblogging is much easier using a client than through your browser”. I think he nails it. We’ve got a ton of APIs floating around the web. Shouldn’t we be able to provide the best possible experience using those APIs? It doesn’t matter how you interact with the data, only that it’s there. The web ecosystem that has been built up is such a great fit for RIAs on the desktop because we’ve exposed data at its most basic level and let people create great experiences around it. Regardless of the platform, those APIs make it easy to create the right blend of desktop and browser.

Congrats to Marco. This is a cool day for RIAs.

March 30th, 2008

Adobe AIR alpha for Linux is out

Posted by Ryan Stewart @ 10:19 pm

Categories: Rich Internet Applications

Tags: Adobe Systems Inc., Adobe AIR, Beta, Linux, UNIX, Operating Systems, Open Source, Software, Ryan Stewart

We released an alpha version of Adobe AIR for Linux today so now we’ve got some form of support for Mac, Windows, and Linux with the exact same code/.air file. I’ve been playing with it for a few weeks and it’s really impressive to see most AIR applications just work on Linux exactly the way they do on Mac or Windows. Linux support is one of the things I’m most excited about with AIR because I love using Ubuntu and I hope that a lot of the applications I use will be built on AIR so I can spend more time in Linux and have the same experience I do on Mac/Win.

We also announced we’re joining the Linux Foundation so we can help push the idea of RIAs on Linux. In addition to the AIR Linux release we also released an updated alpha version of Flex Builder for Linux so we’re hoping developers can both build AND consume RIAs on Linux.

We’re working on a 1.1 version of AIR that will include some localization as well as some bug fixes from the 1.0 release. The Linux 1.1 version will lag a little but but after 1.0 our plan is to release a Linux version of AIR together with Mac and Windows so all three platforms will have the same release cycle.

March 26th, 2008

RIA Weekly #11 - Wavemaker, Silverlight, Prism, and more

Posted by Ryan Stewart @ 4:19 pm

Categories: Rich Internet Applications, Ajax, Silverlight, Prism

Tags: Microsoft Silverlight, Rich Internet Application, Corporate Communications, Marketing, Ryan Stewart

Coté just published our 11th RIA Weekly podcast and in this one we invited the CEO of WaveMaker, Chris Keene, to come talk with us about Ajax and general RIA technologies. We also get into some of the Scott Guthrie interview and the latest news with Prism.

I had to take a week off because I was in Asia but we’ve got a lot of stuff up from SXSW/MIX including a video rundown and a couple of episodes about this year’s MIX. We also have some video from this year’s Engage where I was rocking the sweater vest.

March 26th, 2008

blist rolling out a bunch of new features

Posted by Ryan Stewart @ 12:56 am

Categories: Rich Internet Applications, Blist

Tags: Team, Friend, Team Management, Management, Ryan Stewart

blist, which recently won an award at Under the Radar is opening up some new features this week that makes it easier to create and track your blists.

To start with, they’ve added the ability to import functions from Excel. You can also now analyze your blist and see who’s viewing them and get statistics. It’s also easier to search for blists now which ties into the entire community aspect of blist. Almost behind the scenes it seems like the blist team has built a fairly robust social network around lists. You can share, comment, tag, and enhance lists from other people. It includes the ability to add friends and rate other friend’s public blists. I haven’t been able to play with the collaborative features of blist (because I don’t have any friends) but enhancing that seems like the next logical step and opens up some very, very cool possibilities.

The blist team keeps on doing great things around a very well-designed RIA. They’ve got a lot of money in the bank, a great team and a wide open market. Still very much a company to keep an eye on. Especially if/when they start rolling out an API.

March 25th, 2008

Does the iPhone count as a “desktop”?

Posted by Ryan Stewart @ 11:41 pm

Categories: Rich Internet Applications, Apple, iPhone

Tags: Apple iPhone, Desktops, Hardware, Ryan Stewart

This week I wrote a letter to the desktop welcoming it back. Then I got an email from one of my long time commentors asking if the iPhone counted as a “desktop”. Sure it’s not a desktop in the traditional sense, but in the application sense, it might be. This article about Microsoft looking at ways to create iPhone applications seems to help support that thought.

The iPhone is unlike any other mobile device partly because the general experience, both user and developer, is so similar to a desktop. We’ve already seen a lot of Ajax-RIAs created specifically for the iPhone. It has rich media capabilities, and while I haven’t spent much time with the SDK, I assume application developers can take advantage of some of those.

So the iPhone has some native, desktop-like traits. Should it be included in the desktop conversation? What do you think? Are iPhone applications going to be counted as RIAs?

March 24th, 2008

Dear desktop, welcome back

Posted by Ryan Stewart @ 3:05 pm

Categories: Flash, Windows Presentation Foundation, WPF, AIR, Mozilla, Prism

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 19th, 2008

Knowledge@Wharton interview with Scott Guthrie on everything

Posted by Ryan Stewart @ 8:10 pm

Categories: Rich Internet Applications

Tags: Microsoft Silverlight, Knowledge@Wharton, Microsoft Corp., Web Browser, Kendall Whitehouse, Kendall, Scott, Flash, Web Browsers, Microsoft Windows

Kendall Whitehouse has a really fantastic interview up with Scott Guthrie, the man helping to lead Microsoft’s charge into rich Internet applications. The interview covers a ton of ground including Microsoft’s plan to make money off of Silverlight and Scott Guthrie’s thoughts on AIR. Kendall has been following the space for quite a while so he has a pretty good sense of what to ask and how to get good answers. Some of the highlights for anyone interested in RIAs.

One question that I thought was very interesting was about the demo at MIX. Scott makes a case that all the keynote demos demonstrated things that couldn’t be done in Flash:

In the [MIX08] keynote we were careful in showing specific examples that you can’t build with Flash. You couldn’t do the Olympics [Silverlight-based website] with Flash. It doesn’t have the media capabilities; it doesn’t have the adaptive streaming capabilities to host that type of experience.

The kind of performance that was shown with the AOL mail reader as you…scrolled up and down — the Flash Player would not be able to handle that many million emails inside an Inbox without choking. If you look at the Hard Rock example of zooming in and out with the Deep Zoom technology — you can’t do that with Flash. If you look at the Aston Martin experience, where they were showing both the Deep Zoom, where you can see the stitches in the [car’s leather interior], but also the 3D rotation of the car inside the browser — Flash today doesn’t have the graphics power to do that on typical hardware.

I have a quibble with a couple of those but I think it’s good that Microsoft is trying to differentiate between Flash in a lot of areas. I think that helps push both companies. Another good question was about how committed Microsoft is to cross-platform and I really liked Scott’s answer. He said they didn’t want to add features to Windows that couldn’t be added on Mac:

For example, in a previous alpha last year we did not have East Asian font support, we didn’t have a text box, and people would say “How hard is it to add that?” Well, it turns out that if you want to add it in a cross platform, a cross browser way, it’s actually really hard. We now have those in the Silverlight beta that we shipped this week. We could have added it in the alpha to work on Windows first and then caught up with the Mac. But we explicitly said no, we are going to wait until we have the features everywhere because we want to make sure that there’s no ambiguity about the importance of having a consistent API and a consistent set of features that run in all places.

One thing I think is odd is Scott’s response to AIR and specifically the security concerns. I know we’ve spent a lot of time at Adobe focusing on the security model but the important key is that AIR applications are desktop applications, just like .NET. Scott says that “People want to know that if they type in a URL and visit a website, that it can’t access their local documents, it can’t steal content from their file system.” but that can’t happen with AIR. You have to go through an install process just like any other desktop application so you have to ultimately trust the source you’re installing from, just like .NET. It’s going to be very interesting to see how this evolves.

March 19th, 2008

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

Posted by Ryan Stewart @ 9:43 am

Categories: Rich Internet Applications, Flex

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.

March 19th, 2008

Adobe now offering protected content in Flash

Posted by Ryan Stewart @ 4:17 am

Categories: Adobe, Flash, Rich Media

Tags: Adobe Systems Inc., Media, Video, Flash Media Rights-Management Server, Corporate Communications, Marketing, Ryan Stewart

We announced a new server product today called Flash Media Rights Management Server which will let content providers protect their Flash video content. But the goal isn’t to mess with the current Flash experience. Flash is successful because it’s easy and it’s everywhere. No one at Adobe wants to see that go away.

But AIR opened up some interesting possibilities and undeniably the video space is a lot more competitive with Microsoft and Apple all in the mix. So now that you can take video content offline with AIR we needed a solution that would let content providers monetize their content and protect it, so Adobe Flash Media Rights Management Server was born (wow, that’s a mouthful).

Ultimately, while I’m not a fan of any kind of content protection, I think this is good. One, I think there will be pressure on everyone to make the DRM experience very unobtrusive. Two, I think it’s a growth market for Adobe and rich media. It matures the Adobe product line so that you can take an FLV and now distribute it and protect it just like any other video solution. I’m all for digital delivery of media. I think that the Blu-Ray/HDDVD war is the last of the physical media wars. But in order to enable that, right now you have to have some kind of content protection.

With this announcement, now Adobe and Microsoft are in a position to compete for that market with cross-platform, easy to use video content. I hope this leads to more innovation and that we see benefits across the board for RIAs.

March 18th, 2008

Apple’s RIA platform - Safari 3.1

Posted by Ryan Stewart @ 8:32 am

Categories: Rich Internet Applications, Microsoft, Adobe, Apple

Tags: Apple Safari, Rich Internet Application, Apple Inc., Ryan Stewart

This just gets more and more interesting. Apple just rolled out Safari 3.1 and by all accounts it’s fast, it’s good, and it’s basically an RIA platform complete with video and animation support (and offline storage). There are a lot of other things that go into plugins like Silverlight and Flash but Safari is the first browser to really start pushing the envelope around the HTML5 spec which enables things like video and CSS animation and really push HTML into a richer spectrum.

Safari still has tiny, tiny penetration on Windows and higher on Mac (obviously) but the big players are still Firefox and IE. So can Safari bring HTML to the promised land? It’s a tough call. But I think it’s clear that this is Apple’s RIA play, and that’s a good thing. It’s good for web standards because Apple is a strong company with a LOT of clout in the design/experience world, and it’s good for companies like Microsoft and Adobe. Frankly, the standards process is broken and it’s been incredibly difficult to innovate around HTML/CSS/JavaScript. Apple looks like they’r taking a lead and that will put pressure on Microsoft and Adobe to keep innovating.

So now I think it’s safe to say we have three major RIA players: Apple, Adobe, and Microsoft. Mozilla also continues to innovate around Firefox with things like offline storage and Prism but I’m not sure they have a “rich” direction quite yet. Safari 3.1 may be a smallish blip on the radar overall, but it’s a big, big shot in the battle for RIAs. If there’s one absolute guarantee here, it’s that the web is going to get a whole lot richer and that’s always a good thing in my mind.

Update: I can’t believe I forgot to mention this but j.m.galvin commented below that the majority of this work is in WebKit which is an open source project. Adobe uses WebKit in Adobe AIR and while I’m not sure what our plans are to incorporate the changes, the fact that this is all open source is a very good sign.