I noticed that Identity Mine is announcing a campaign with the tagline “Love Your Software“. The team at Identity Mine provide WPF-based solutions for companies that want to leverage the .NET Framework. It’s pretty much a sales pitch, bit what makes the campaign noteworthy to me is the focus around the emotional connection to software. It’s not trying to appeal to developers as we might have in the past, but to companies that want their users to love the software.

There really isn’t any reason we shouldn’t love to software we use and it’s good to see a company start to use that as a selling point. Building great software experiences should reward companies by having users fall in love with the applications. Rich Internet Applications provide a way to build those kinds of solutions. Hopefully more companies start using experience as a differentiator.

[tags]Identity Mine, WPF, Experience, Love Your Software[/tags]

I just realized my post about following Flex and Apollo with Twitter isn’t working for you guys. People told me it was broken, but when I clicked on it, I could see the post, so I thought it might be a cache issue. Well it was, the cache of grey matter I have isn’t working. I had the post set to private so no one else could see it.

If you’re interested in checking out my Twitter accounts for Flex and Apollo, the info is here.

Yaniv Golan doesn’t get Flex, which is fine. He talked to Mark Anders at the Future of Web Apps and he doesn’t understand why people would choose vendor-lockin when you can do the same things with standards based Ajax. Well one, it just isn’t possible to build a rich user interface with Ajax. But then Yaniv goes on to list some complaints about problems with Flex in the browser. I’m not picking on Yaniv here, because these arguments come up all the time. He’s just one of the more articulate naysayers. The problem is that people still think of Flex as a “browser technology” because it runs inside the browser. That’s bad because the great thing about Flex is that it breaks you free of the browser while maintaining the idea that we can browse to applications. But people get caught up in how Flex breaks the rules, so I want to run down the Yaniv’s list:

• And what about search engines and other content-aware tools, which cannot easily access the content delivered by Flex applications? Flex is meant for web applications. How do you search an application? Help documentation, maybe, but a full application? Sure there are things you want to associate with your application so it shows up in Google, but is that really searching an application? Web search isn’t meant for applications, and the current methods just don’t apply. I think this goes for both Ajax and other RIA technologies.
• And permalinks, which do not work as naturally with Flex as they do with HTML? How do you bookmark a piece of content in a Flex application on Delicious? This always kills me. Applications aren’t made up of pages, they’re made up of states. Inherently, states aren’t made for the bookmarking model of the browser. States are all about which path you followed and what feature of the application you’re using. Trying to shoehorn that into the page model won’t work. Saving states is valuable, but the browser bookmark is a poor way to implement that.
• And – which surprises will you run into when you hit the browser’s Back button? There is no back button in Microsoft Word. Or Life. Again, the back button is great for turning a page, but when you’re in an application does “back” mean undo? Does it mean up one row? Does it mean the previous menu? Going back with pages is easy, but applications aren’t meant for the back button, and with good reason.

In this rush to throw all of our applications into a web browser, it seems like we haven’t stopped to ask ourselves why these old rules should apply to this new software medium. Is it because we love tradition? Because users expect it? The browser is a great delivery mechanism for web applications, but that doesn’t mean the applications within that browser should try and implement all of the browser rules. It vexes me why we try and fit a square peg in a round hole. But then again, I’m hopped up on caffeine, so what do I know.

[tags]Flex, browser, usability[/tags]

Jeff just posted the first of a two part episode for our Flex Show this week. It’s been really great to watch Jeff and I progress through this thing and we’ve had some great guests which make it a lot of fun. This week we talked to John Wilker and Tom Ortega about the 360Flex conference. We covered everything from how the conference was created, to what you should look for in the sessions and where people are staying. Aside from me needing a new microphone, I think this episode went off without a hitch and I learned a TON about putting on conferences and what to expect for 360 Flex. Huge thanks to those guys for coming on the show.

Go over and have a listen and let us know what you think! I’m also going to be doing some Flex Show work at the 360 conference, so come find me and tell me what you’re working on or what you think of Flex.

[tags]podcasting, flex, the flex show, 360 flex[/tags]

There are a bunch of cool events coming up including 360 Flex and Apollo camp among others. But 360Flex is sold out and the Apollo camp is just for one day, which makes it tough to go to for those outside the bay area. So, for those people that want to keep track of what’s going on, but won’t be there, I’ve created Twitter accounts for Flex and Apollo.
Liveblogging is sometimes tough to pull off with spotty wifi and a long string of barely intelligible posts. I figuring Twittering the events is a bit more fun. This way at least you know going in that it’s going to be barely intelligible but it’s in slightly easier to consume chunks. If you have a Twitter account, you can add Apollo or Flex, but if not, you can subscribe to the RSS feed (Apollo, Flex). I may also post news as it happens, depending on how ambitous I am, so if you have any thoughts, feel free to leave them.

Update: I changed the Apollo account to ‘apollocamp’ because I thought it was a better fit than just ‘air’ which sounds kind of silly.
[tags]Twitter, Flex, Apollo[/tags]

Mike Chambers and Ted Patrick both blogged about Apollo Camp (I think that logo is really good – pointers for logs, HAH!). It’s going to be a great chance to look at Apollo and talk to the team before the bits go out on labs for a public release. AND, it seems like if you attend, you might get to take home bits for Apollo, or at the very least, get access to it while you’re there. The event page instructs you to bring “any Flex apps you might want to get running within Apollo”. It also says they’ll be providing the bits. I have to assume that means Apollo bits.

It’s also looking like it’s going to be a star-studded affair. Lee Brimlow is going to be there, Andre Charland from Nitobi, Anthony Franco from effectiveUI, Jeremy Geelan of Sys-Con, Chuck Freedman of the Yahoo Flash Platform team, Mike Kollen, Tony MacDonell of Teknision, Lynda Weinman and Hart Woolery of yourminis.

That’s an impressive list, and it should make for some fantastic conversations about where Rich Internet Applications are going and how Apollo fits in the mix. I’ll be there and I’m staying the night, so feel free to ping me and see about getting beers! There are only 158 tickets left as I write this, so it’s filling up quickly. Go register, it’s free!

[tags]Apollo, Apollo Camp, Lee Brimlow, Andre Charland, Anthony Frnaco, Jeremy Geelan, Chuck Freedman, Mike Kollen, Tony MacDonell, Lynda Weinman, Hart Woolery[/tags]

Interested to check out what WPF can do? Chad Brock has put together a pretty sizeable list of cool WPF applications that are out there. The only one that might be missing is StandOut, an application by Electric Rain that I saw at Expression Session. It looks really slick and I’m hoping to get my hands on some beta bits so I can review it over on ZDNet. It shows how presentations should be. There is also Tim Sneath’s list of great WPF applicaitons that is still running on his blog.

A lot of these show that Rich Internet Applications on the desktop can become great experiences.

[tags]WPF, Rich Internet Applications[/tags]

Intelligent Enterprise an interview with Jeff Whatcott, senior director of product marketing at Adobe that covers Rich Internet Applications and the enterprise space. I thought it was a little bit odd to have Jeff do an interview like this, but in general it’s a solid interview. I also wish we saw more information about RIAs in the enterprise. I talked with Primavera systems about how they’re using Flex, and have a post planned for The Universal Desktop but it’s always good to see focus on enterprise RIAs.

The only thing that struck me the wrong way about the interview was his response to WPF:

That’s an incredibly powerful tool set. It’s really cool stuff and good technology, but it’s still a little early. It’s not yet widely proven in a lot of rollouts, so there may be lurking issues that we don’t know about.

I’m not sure I’d take the angle that there may be lurking issues because it’s a new technology. I haven’t heard of anything like that, though feel free to correct me.

[tags]Enterprise RIA, Rich Internet Applications, Flex, Flash, Adobe, Jeff Whatcott[/tags]

There is a great article in MSDN magazine this month by the RIA coding rockstar, Lee Brimlow, that talks about adding video to controls and 3D surfaces with WPF. It’s a pretty technical overview, but it has some good code examples and does a nice job of explaining the features in WPF.

I love the 3D in WPF and being able to map video to those 3D surfaces creates a very cool effect. It can be overdone of course, but in the right areas, it adds a lot to any interface. If you’re just starting to check out WPF and you’re dabbling into video integration, this is an excellent start.

[tags]WPF, Rich Media[/tags]

Adobe is presenting Apollo tomorrow, the 21st, at the Future of Web Apps conference in London and Mike Arrington mentioned the platform in his talk (Adobe is also the lone Diamond sponsor which I found interesting). As a result, there’s been a bit of chatter today about Apollo so I thought I’d try and bring some of it together.

Richard MacManus over at Read/Write Web on Mike’s Talk:

He also felt that the new Adobe platform Apollo is going to be big news and will help bridge the gap between the web and desktop. Adobe is a sponsor of this event and were on hand in the reception area, showing off some slick looking applications written in Apollo. However they shied away from questions regarding the ever-changing launch date.

Lars has a cool mindmap of Mike Arrington’s talk including a branch on Apollo.

Paul Lomax bullet pointed the Apollo section as opportunities for 2007:

1. Offline / Online· Adobe Apollo (www.adobe.com/go/apollo) lets you create offline apps using html, ajax, etc· Firefox 3.0 is rumoured to include offline capabilities· Websites that access the filesystem

Corante also had some content:

- Apollo, Adobe platform, very important, new platform outside of browser that renders flash, Java, etc. so you can run apps offline as well as online. Can create, say, a mail app that’s the same online and off, stores data locally but also in the cloud. Think of Flickr vs. Picassa – why not have one app that does both online and offline?

Firefox 3 was mentioned by Mike in his talk along with Apollo under the idea of an online/offline web. I think I’m going to see Mike next week, so I’m looking forward to asking him about that. I think online/offline implies the desktop, but does it?

[tags]Apollo, RIAs, Future of Web Apps[/tags]