Tomorrow I’ll be heading down to San Francisco for Expression Session and hope to get a good look at how Expression works with developers and specifically WPF and WPF/E. My flight leaves at 6:00 in the morning which means I need to be at the airport at 5:00. Normally not a big deal, but my wife is a city planning graduate student and she’s been touring New Orleans this week as part of a class. She was supposed to get in around 9:00 which would leave me some time to get sleep and be refreshed for my early flight. Sadly, she is flying through Dallas, which I guess is having terrible weather and she’s not coming in until 12:30 tomorrow morning.

In summary, SeaTac and I are going to be real friendly tomorrow. I’m not staying overnight in San Francisco, but if you’re planning on being at Expression Session, drop me a line. I’d love to hear what you’re working on or what you think of Expression. I’ve got some meetings lined up, but I want to check out the Designing Rich Web Experiences session with Jeff King.

[tags]Expression Studio, ExpressionSession07, SeaTac[/tags]

I don’t get the Linux people (and I realize this is a bit of a generalization). Yesterday Adobe released Flash Player 9 for Linux. A big release and one that Linux users have been waiting for for a long time. They were right to be miffed at being skipped over in 8, but now that 9 is out, they’re up to par with everyone else and are no longer left out in the cold. Adobe stood by their word and continues to support the Linux community even though it accounts for a very, very small percentage of customers. Linux support for Flash is one of their stories and they do a great job.

So what do the Linux users do? Bitch about no 64 bit. Scroll down on the Digg thread and you’ll see plenty of complaints about no 64 bit Flash Player. On my ZDnet blog posting the one comment I got was about how without 64 bit support this wasn’t news.

So here’s my question, what are they going to bitch about when 64 bit support is here? The fact that Apollo doesn’t run on Linux? That it’s too hard to install? I just don’t get all the critisim.

[tags]Linux, Flash Player, Adobe[/tags’

I know I mentioned Christophe’s appearance at the Java user group but I also wanted to let anyone know who didn’t go to that yesterday (my hand is up) that Christophe is coming to the FLEX user group meeting to talk with us tonight.

The meeting is over in Fremont at Adobe’s campus (best Adobe location in the world) and starts at 7:00. Be there or be square as the kids say. Actually, no one says that.

Christophe Coenraets worked at Powersoft–which then became part of Sybase–from 1994 to 2000. He started working with Java in 1996 and became the Technical Evangelist for the company’s Java and Internet Application Division. Christophe then joined Macromedia as the Technical Evangelist for JRun, the company’s J2EE application server. In this position, Christophe started working on Rich Internet Applications and on ways of integrating Flash front-ends with J2EE back-ends. Christophe is currently the Senior Evangelist for Adobe’s developer-centric Rich Internet Applications initiative. Christophe has been a regular speaker at conferences worldwide for the last 10 years.

[tags]Flex, Adobe, Christophe Coenraets, SeaFlex[/tags]

I’m clearly a big fan of Rich Internet Applications and it’s been amazing for me to see the growth of interest in RIA development and technologies. As I’ve continued to track the space, I’ve kept a special eye on one group that I think has a disproportionate impact: Consultants.

There seem to be a wide variety of RIA consultant shops out there and they’re starting to have a big impact on how people see RIAs because they develop the applications that users visit and not only public facing sites. These guys are often the ones building the enterprise level applications that bring in big dollars (or yen, or euros) but aren’t seen by anyone outside of the company. As a result, these shops are in the view of decision makers and business influencers which has a profound effect on general adoption of Rich Internet Applications.

So here’s my worry: I don’t think we’re ready. It’s not that RIA consulting companies haven’t created some great applications, because they have; there are some phenomenal RIAs that most people never see. But the question is; as the need for world class RIAs grows, from all sectors, can the consulting companies keep up? A small team can do a couple of great RIAs, but what happens when they try to take on more projects? This is one of the reasons I enjoyed Dave Wolfe’s post , It Takes a Village.

Now obviously Dave is biased, because he runs an RIA consulting shop, Cynergy. But the point is valid, and one of the things that Cynergy has done well is concentrate on building up an infrastructure that can provide what the clients need in a variety of areas. RIAs are complex and they’re only going to get more complex. Having a good workflow as well as separating the designers from the developers is going to be key as the market matures and grows. Just like any other business you have to be able to scale and specialize at the same time.

It’s exciting to see so much work out there for RIA developers. There is a huge demand which means people are getting a lot of fantastic opportunities. So far, everything has been smooth sailing, and I have no reason to believe that it won’t continue to be. But the consulting landscape seems very wild west right now, and I’d love to see it go to the next level.

I knew RoboHelp as one of the Macromedia applications that everyone thought was going to go away. But recently I got a demo of the new version which is being announced today and it was a really cool application.

What was most interesting/exciting for me was how it handled help documents for Flash applications. If any of you are doing large scale Flex or Flash apps, and you need to implement a help system, RoboHelp does all the hard work for you.

I hadn’t given a lot of thought to documentation before, but after the demo I found myself impressed and feeling inadequate about my previous applications. I’ve done a terrible job at the “help” section and I really wish we could have used this for some of our online simluations while I was developing at Wharton. It would have been an excellent fit. It seems like a solid application for help documentation of any kind and I suggest that you RIA developers give it a look and see if it fits your needs.

Update: Just saw the press release which has some more (corporate) info.
[tags]RoboHelp, Documentation, Rich Internet Applications[/tags]

I had a post over on ZDNet that I wasn’t that happy with. I’ve had writer’s bloc the past week and it carried over from the weekend. Partly it’s just because I’ve been heads down on my project so haven’t had time for news – my primary source of inspiration.

After I posted today Matt asked me an interesting question, “can they still be called RIAs if they’re desktop apps?” And it’s a valid question. I think the answer is it depends. As Matt noted while we were chatting (he has some great thoughts up on his blog from our conversation) there are a lot of desktop applications that aren’t rich. Something I think the web has been very good at is bringing more of a design-eye to small scale development. There are a lot of good web apps that are more usable than desktop applications.

I think in the end there is a kind of application, one that uses web technologies and incorporates multimedia, design and user interface work, that is that much better than what we have now. It spans to mobile devices, to browser applications and the desktop. Is the ideal term for this kind of application a Rich Internet Application? Maybe not, but the term has come to be an umbrella for a better software experience no matter what the delivery mechanism. I think that’s an indication of how much growth and interest there is in focusing on experience and building richer apps.

[tags]Rich Internet Applications[/tags]

I don’t think The Flex Show has been added to MXNA yet, so I’m bumping this up here. Steve Johnson at Total Training gave us a copy of their Adobe Flex 2 training video to give away for the podcast and we’re soliciting suggestions for topics and interviewees.

We’re going to take all the suggestions and then draw one as the winner, so if you’re interested in winning 8 hours of Flex 2 goodness, head over to The Flex Show blog for the full info.

[tags]Flex, Total Training, The Flex Show[/tags]

I just noticed that Christophe is going to be in Seattle presenting Java, Mozilla Tamarin, and Flex at the Seattle Java User Group – SeaJUG (I love that name). Unfortunately it falls on the same night as the Seattle Flash User Group AND it’s over in Redmond which means I have to fight terrible traffic across Lake Washington if I decide to go. I’m also supposed to be getting dinner with Dan over on the east side that night so maybe I’ll try to grab dinner with Dan and see if he wants to go to the SeaJUG with me. 

Christophe is also doing a three hour hands on session the next day for the SeaJUG attendees.

[tags]Christophe Coenraets, Java, Tamarin, Flex[/tags]

There was some buzz today about the planned features for Firefox 3 and the first item on the list involved the Add-ons, something I’ve often talked about as an example of Mozilla creating their own Rich Internet Application platform. In these requirements the goal seems to be to make them more user friendly:

Improved interaction with Add-ons: clearer, more coherent language; less steps to install; more visible way to configure add-ons, probably to be moved back to the general Options window, which I hope deeply; more noticeable alerts when updates are available; a permanent restart Firefox button.

Obviously if users can’t figure out how to install your extension, it’s going to be tough to grow a platform around that.

In the end, it’s going to be interesting to see how XUL can advance in this next version of Firefox. I caught a comment in a good post over at Lab49 that mentioned XUL and how it was difficult to get started and documentation was poor. As the Guiding Principles of Firefox note:

Be, if possible, a vehicle for emerging Mozilla platform APIs including XULRunner, which will allow application developers a means to deploy useful software to people that is not necessarily tied to a particular operating system.

We’ll see if they can make that happen.

[tags]Firefox, Mozilla, XUL, Rich Internet Applications[/tags]

For me, XBAP‘s (which stand for XAML Browser Applications) are one of the more exciting ways to implement Windows Presentation Foundation. WPF gives you the ability to create some fantastic applications for the desktop but in some cases, the desktop deployment model isn’t ideal.

Which is where XBAPs come in. I’ve been trying to find out if people are using them and so far I haven’t had much luck. But today Karen Corby had a great post about what XBAPs get you. When I break down the Adobe/Microsoft technology competition, it goes something like this:

• Apollo vs. Windows Presentation Foundation
• Flash Player vs WPF/E
• Flex vs XBAP

Now there is the very real issue of cross platform compatibility, but for someone locked into using Windows, I think XBAPs are a pretty compelling way to build an RIA. You get all of the richness of WPF but it runs in a browser just like other web applications. I’m stunned there hasn’t been more attention about this so Karen’s post is a welcome addition.

[tags]XBAP, Microsoft, WPF[/tags]