Ben Galbraith’s Blog

eBay released their AIR application last night. It’s a cool, flashy way to interact with eBay. If you’ve been to an Adobe event in the past year, you’ve seen this demo.

We didn’t go to the desktop to do off-line, we did it because browsers were not built for applications, and AIR is a platform that *is* built for applications. It’s amazing that we’ve been able to build complex applications in the content platform that is the Web.

In a Web environment, there are constraints to what users expect in terms of the user interface (e.g., bookmarkability). With the AIR app, we could start over and invent our own conventions. (He presented this as an advantage.)

They have all kinds of usability enhancements for the eBay Desktop application that dramatically improve the website’s usability. They had tons of examples. Plus, eye candy!

They also have desktop widgets for tracking key auctions.

Nick.com is talking about their platform for off-line gaming. They wanted to bridge the off-line piece with their website, so they created a dealio where you have to find puzzle pieces on the website and drag-and-drop them into the AIR application. Once you find all the pieces, you get a 2 minute video and then a link to a full-length video.

They’re also showing something called neopets. It’s a Populous clone that lets you build colonies of “pets”. He’s going into great detail on how the game works. It’s got a lot of hooks that make players want to go back to the website, like the ability to craft your own breeds of pets.

“It’s been a pleasure to work with Adobe, they were great to work with, gave us tons of access”, blah blah.

This was created with two full-time developers, along with supporting folks.

BusinessObjects/SAP is on. They’re talking about their desire to create more engaging products. Once again they repeat the theme that the move to the Web cost theme in terms of their user experience and with Flex/AIR they can recapture some of that.

They’ve got a new application–Polestar–that helps casual users generate reports. The first feature they demonstrate is a simple Google Search style interface to the system. Enter “sweaters” and it finds the data you want.

When you choose a search result, you’re given a very intuitive way to query the data. Having used BusinessObjects and hated it in the past, this is very interesting stuff. The UI actually looks… usable.

The UI is built dynamically based on the data in the system. They’re spending a lot of time on specific use cases for the UI. One of the cooler things about the charting system is that the charts transition in meaningful ways. When you transition chart types or change chart scopes, you can see the data move to the appropriate part of the screen.

They also have widgets. Everyone has widgets. Goodness. They have a widget “factory” that can be used to generate new widgets on demand. Neat.

We are very interested in social networking and our products, especially to learn about the types of people in the company and bring them the right data.

Yahoo! is up talking. They’re talking about their increased use of Flash (including a new AS3 Maps API). They’re here to show two AIR apps they’ve written.

They’re showing a widget–what they call a “sidebar” application–written in AS2 wrapped as an AS3/AIR application. The widget has four different areas all pulling data. Wrapping the AS2 app took very little effort, so all of their old AS2 code can be ported to AIR very easily.

They feel putting this stuff on the desktop as a “sidebar” will drive a lot of traffic to their web property; people can interact with the widget to get more detail on stock information, more info on a news story, and so forth.

Now they’re showing a Music Blog Remixers. The developer is talking about how much he loves the Flex tools and is a Java/PHP convert.

Apparently, music blogs are the new distribution channel for music on the web, especially indie music. Their app helps you navigate the music blogosphere and remix them; take the best parts of music blogs and combine them into a custom playlist. You can then export the playlist and post it on your blog.

Now available on next.yahoo.com.

Now we’re seeing Yahoo! Live, which lets you view live video feeds. It’s currently a Flex 2 app but they have plans to upgrade it to Flex 3 / AIR. They let you embed the live video feed all over the place. They want to use AIR so the video feed stays live even if you close the browser and so they can do alerts in the native OS.

We’ve been very happy with how rapidly we can build solutions with Flex and AIR. We built Live in 6 months with 4 full-time people. Software development moves slower the more developers you add to the project, so it’s important for us to choose technologies that let us build software rapidly with small teams.

Marc Benioff is talking about Salesforce.com. I’ll skip transcription of why Salesforce is so great, blah blah blah.

“We used to get releases every four years at Oracle; we’ve had 25 major releases in 8 years at Salesforce.”

After a long presentation on why Salesforce.com is so great, the SVP of Platform has taken the stage to talk about technology stuff.

We’re now looking at a custom application called “Cinema Management” written by Dolby to manage aspects of theatre management. Dolby wanted to do something custom for the UI, so they built a custom UI on top of Salesforce’s APIs.

So far, the new application seems to have nothing whatsoever to do with Flash. The graphs they’re showing are generated by Google’s Chart API. Ah, wait, they use an embedded Flash movie player.

Ah… now they’ve launched an off-line version of the custom Dolby application that works off-line with AIR. It uses SQLite to store all data off-line. Once you connect back on-line, it automatically synchronizes with the server (there’s no sync UI, it just magically happens).

Wow, that’s pretty cool.

We’re now doing a Q&A with Kevin Lynch and Marc Benioff.

Q: Do businesses care about the quality of UX in enterprise internal apps?

A: Consumers are growing to expect rich experiences, so they are demanding it of CIOs. The question is not if they should care, it’s about how quickly they can do it. We want to enable rapid creation of applications with compelling user interfaces.

Q: Do you see any metrics about how to measure the improvement of productivity [associated with high-quality UIs]?

A: Adoption. CIOs have been dealing with lack of adoption, so we give you tools to monitor usage to determine if users are actually adopting the application. We check to see what people are actually using. Users can also rate the applications.

Three guys from AOL. “We’re making a big bet on AIR; why? Two reasons (three if we had more time):

- Make it easy to upload data to share it
- Recapture some of the UI richness that was lost when the Web gained prominence

They’re now showing off Xdrive, which provides 5 GB of on-line storage. They have a new AIR interface for it that was launched today. It’s a file browser a la Windows Explorer or OS X Finder for browsing the files on your Xdrive.

You can see your local filesystem from within the AIR application, and you can drag-and-drop to upload and download, or you can simply drag files from the actual desktop into the AIR application. You can even drag-and-drop folders.

They also have the ability to share documents in the Xdrive and control fine-grained sharing permissions.

“We just stayed up late finished this last night… Thanks to Adobe for all their support.”

Now we’re looking at the “Top 100 Videos” application. They want to create a new distribution channel for the content so they can grow their audience.

Unlike the UI for Xdrive, the UI for Top 100 Videos is very polished and aesthetic.

They use SQLlite to store your favorites videos persistently, etc. They also have a full screen view and a few different widget views.

Available right now from music.aol.com.

Q: What’s the biz model?
A: “For Xdrive you can buy more storage.” Upgrading the free storage is the model. (Spaced out during the Top 100 Videos monetization answer.)

Adobe’s been a fantastic partner for us at every level.