Monthly Archives: August 2006

FlexTV and the Adobe Digg Army

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This post is two fold, one, you need to go check out FlexTV at Ted Patrick’s blog. From what I understand, this is going to be to help people learn Flex, gain insight into the Flex community, and see what other people are using Flex for. It should be a great resource, and I think it’s going to put a lot of faces with Flex, making it more personable and give it more mindshare.

Secondly, I want to talk about the Adobe Digg Army. Right now, it is very small. When a post goes up about Flex (say, FlexTV), it gets between 5-15 diggs, never hitting the front page. I’ve added as many Flex people as I can think of to my friends list on Digg, so I can track what they are digging and digg accordingly.

Is digg important? Ehh, maybe not. Is it useful? Again, maybe not. Is it a good way to get traffic and generate buzz? Yes. It’s like the grassroots of a political campaign. It won’t make a difference in the long term, but it is invaluable for getting something off the ground. If you aren’t using digg, check it out. If you are, let me know what your digg account is so I can add you to my list of friends and see what you’re digging. I would love to get 40-50 friends all digging Flex stuff so that more of it can get to the front page.

[tags]Adobe, Flex, FlexTV, Digg[/tags]

Google Serving up MP3 Flash Player in Gmail

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I just saw over on Amit’s blog that GMail is now including an MP3 Player. From what Amit says, the player is just a modified version of their Video player, but you will be able to embed it in blogs and websites just like the Odeo player. It is heartening to see a company like Google continue to turn to Flash as their multimedia delivery mechanism. Most of us have known all along that Flash is the best way to do that, but Google is a company with a lot of clout. As you’ll remember, no one was talking about Ajax until Google Maps came along.

I think this portends great things for Flash. Right now, the multimedia integration is very “nailed on”. We haven’t yet gotten to the point that the multimedia is really a part of the application. However with the explosion of easily accessible, user generated multimedia, it is only a matter of time before people start to take the next step and build applications around that. We are already seeing this in applications like Jumpcut.

With Ajax, people wanted to use a technology they were familiar with. As multimedia becomes the focal point of appliations, people are going to want ot build those applications with what they’re familiar with, in this case Flash. It’s a good time to be a Flash developer.

Thinking About Apollo’s Killer App

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News about Apollo has slowed in the past couple of week. We had a number of mainstream articles about the project, an official Apollo FAQ and a couple of podcasts covering Apollo by Mike Chambers. Hopefully this means that the team is heads down working to have something to show at MAX. I think it is a good time to reflect on what would make a “killer app” for Apollo that would help drive adoption and get people to download the runtime.

I’ve said before, and I still believe, that initially, a majority of Apollo applications will be done in Ajax. Giving Ajax developers the security sandbox and file system access that Apollo provides is going to mean a lot of new things for Ajax. But I don’t believe that the “killer app” will be written in Ajax, because I think the “killer app” should be a media player.

One of the strengths of Flash has always been its ability to present multimedia. One of the first Apollo applications we saw was an MP3 player, but I think a killer app should expand on that. Showing video is a logical next step, but the app should also take advantage of the file system access. I think it would be great to see an application that leverages a service like box.net to synch up media you have from multiple computers. You could then play that media from anywhere when you were online, or have your files sync with whatever computer or device you have when you are offline.

It would be a real world example of solving the online/offline problem while leveraging the power of the web. Being able to share media through your box.net account and/or use your Apollo media player to play files that your friends had shared would make for a great second version.

Multimedia is growing more and more important, and more and more people are seeing how great it can be. The vlogging of the 79 year old man shows exactly how prevelant video on the web has become. iTunes and Windows Media player are both good solutions, but I think Apollo could take that same experience and make it RIA based. It would be an awesome killer app demonstrating both the power of Flex and Apollo.

Flex on Wall Street

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I found Yakov Fain’s article via Digg and thought it made some pretty good points. I think one of the reasons that I like Flex so much is because it is such a good fit for Wall Street. I have always been enamored with the technology on Wall Street and I remember very fondly being able to take a tour of the floor of the New York Stock Exchange and seeing how all of the systems run. There is a ton of computing power in that building, and everyone from the traders to the analysts need a robust interface that can handle things in tenths of seconds.

Flex 2 was built from the ground up to handle this kind of transaction. I think Adobe always saw Wall Street firms as natural adopters of Flex, and it seems like that is starting to happen. One of the things I enjoyed at Wharton was being able to build these kinds of applications in an educational setting.

Unfortunately, most of the coolest Flex apps built for Wall Street are hidden away. In order to make sure that trade and company secrets stay that way, most of us will never see some of the best Flex 2 applications being built. That’s too bad.

Revisiting JamJar

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I was thinking about JamJar today and popped over to Adobe labs to see if it was still there and how it was doing. Logging in for the first time in a while it seemed to me like they’ve been polishing it quite a bit. The interface seems a lot smoother and more intuitive. I still don’t have any friends, so I can’t check out anyone’s space, but it appears that a lot of work has gone into the application.

Is anyone still using JamJar? Has it become a bigger hit than I realized? When it was released I intended to watch it very closely because of what it represented. It was essentially Adobe’s first Web 2.0 product, and the Google AdWords only made it seem more like a product than just a technology showcase. But since then, I haven’t heard much about it.

Update: Whoo! I have a friend! Nisse Bryngfors hooked me up with an invite. Nisse is also a pretty good source of Flash news on digg.

[tags]Adobe, Flex, Flash, JamJar[/tags]

Measuring RIA Performance

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I just found a very interesting article on measuring RIA performance over at Performance Matters. He describes three standard metrics to use when measuring performance; Initial response time, Page display time, and Page download time. The first two he describes as being the same metrics used when evaluating web page performance, but the third he attributes only to RIAs to describe the hybrid nature of the applications. He also has a six seven part series on Managing Rich Internet Applications which looks promising (to see all seven parts, view the last part).

He doesn’t seem sold on Flash as an RIA technology, instead preferring to describe Ajax as the only real solution out there. I definitely don’t agree on that point, but this kind of analysis is very beneficial to the adoption of RIAs. Posts like these help us convince the decision makers within companies that the value of RIAs is measurable from both a performance standpoint and a business standpoint.

[tags]Flash, Ajax, performance, RIA, Rich Internet Application[/tags]

Kevin Lynch Interview in Chinese

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Kendall Whitehouse pointed out to me that the articles Knowledge@Wharton did for Supernova are now up on the Chinese edition of the newsletter. I don’t read Chinese, but I know there are a LOT of Flashers over there, so hopefully they’ll catch this.

An (unofficial) Adobe PHP SDK by Mike Potter – Go Digg it!

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Mike Potter posted about a project he’s been working on which “is intended to enable PHP developers to build solutions with Adobe RIA technologies quickly.” Mike, this is a great thing for Flex and RIAs, and I’m looking forward to seeing the project grow.

It is open source, licensed under the Creative Commons license. In addition, the project is hosted over on Google Code and there is a Google Groups mailing list you can join.

Enabling PHP developers to easily jump into Flex is something that could really help adoption, and I think this shows Adobe is thinking in the right direction. I love ColdFusion, and I think that it is the best way to build world class RIAs using Flex. But there are a lot of new companies who use PHP because of cost, and with Flex as cheap as it is, this will allow them to create some phenomenal (dare I say Web 2.0?) applications.

So to get the word out, make sure you digg it!

[tags]Adobe, php, flex, Rich Internet Applications[/tags]

RIA Consultancy on Web 2.0

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Mitch Olson, of Outmsart, had a great post about what he thinks of Web 2.0. I liked the post because it came from someone who has a lot of RIA experience and it breaks down Web 2.0 into specific categories – something that I don’t think we do enough of. Web 2.0 is so nebulous that I like it being divided into more easily consumed bits.

The two parts that I enjoyed reading the most were his first bullet point, The web as an application platform, and the final bullet point, Being online versus going online. He nails the last one. RIAs have helped speed up the trend of “being online” instead of “going online”. For too long the Internet was chained to a mindset of “this is how things work” even though those experiences had nothing to do with real life. RIAs are enabling a new form of application, one that grows with the user and simulates how we interact with things in real life. To an RIA consulting company like Outsmart, being able to develop that gives them a huge advantage.

It’s an excellent post, and I’m hoping to see more like this from the Outsmart guys.

[tags]Outsmart, Rich Internet Applications, Web 2.0, experience[/tags]