Alexey Gavrilov is the man. He ran a bunch of different speed tests on a bunch of Rich Internet Application technologies as well as browser and operating systems and ended up with some very cool results. He admits that the result sets are small, but he enlisted the help of other people to bring the number up to 73.

He ran a 2D animation benchmark between the browser and found that the Apollo Alpha was significantly faster than all of the other browsers. That kind of surprised me, but it does make for some interesting conjecture about how diversely Apollo can be used to deploy applications.

Hey then took on RIA platforms and found that WPF was the fastest at rendering 2D animation at 45 frames per second. Flex (as a cached swf using the cachedAsBitmap setting) clocked in second with 38.6. WPF/e ran it at 35.6875 frames per second while “stock” Flex seems to have lagged at bit at 25.6 frames per second.

The best part of the survey were some of Alexey’s observations. A couple stuck out for me:

5. Microsoft is serious about WPF/e — the traffic from Microsoft to these pages was probably 40x bigger than from Adobe and Macromedia combined (I know they are the same company now — but networks are still different). Good for them.

6. Apollo (Flex version) has extremely good performance and it’s faster and lighter than WPF. Unfortunately Adobe is not going to allow deeper integration with native applications, so there is no real competition between WPF and Apollo. Bad for Adobe.

I don’t really think the native application integration is a big deal, and Apollo does outperform WPF by a wide margin. I know native apps are a source of contention, but Apollo is a pre 1.0 product, so I think we just need to wait and see how it all plays out.

Alexey, you are awesome! Thanks for doing these.

[tags]Flex, WPF/E, WPF, Apollo, Firefox, Opera, Performance Test[/tags]

While populating the link blog, I found this forum post regarding some problems with Windows Vista and Flash Player 9. They mention that with the Administrator account, they can’t view Flash sites without turning User Control off (that sweet Vista feature that makes you confirm everything you do).

I’ve been using Vista for a while and I’ve also noticed some odd issues with Flash and the operating system. Most of the problems tend to be on IE7, which isn’t the browser I primarily use, so I don’t run into them often. Most of the time they seem to be just annoying little things, but when they’ve happened, they’ve struck me as things that normal users would be thrown by.

I’m not saying there’s a conspiracy at all, and as I said, all of my issues have been minor, so I don’t remember specifics at all. I do wonder if other people have run into issues with Flash and Vista though. The tech elite seem to all have switched to Mac, so Vista issues rarely come up.

[tags]Vista, Flash Player, Adobe, Microsoft, Windows[/tags]

I just finished watching Kevin Lynch’s presentation from the Adobe Analyst Summit and it got me pretty pumped about where the next generation of the web is going. I realize that a lot of this is Wall Street spin, but if you take a look at the numbers, Adobe is very well positioned to transform how people think of software and the web.

The numbers are great. Flash Player is on 98% of computers in the world, and by 2010 it will be on a billion devices. Flash Player 8 penetration is at 95% and the update mechanism ensures that when Adobe rolls out a new version of the Flash Player, people quickly and easily grab it. With Apollo, they’ve now embedded the platform into the desktop making the “Flash stack” run from devices, to video game systems, to web browsers, to the desktop. And all of these access points use the same tools and technologies so developers can become proficient and then access the entire spectrum.

There is still a lot of noise about open standards and how the browser (with no plugins) is the best delivery model. If you listen to the influentials, you’ll get that impression. However if you look at the apps people are creating, it’s clear that Flex has had a gigantic impact on the web. From startups to enterprise, Flex 2 has given developers access to the Flash Platform in a way that they didn’t have before. The result has been some astounding experiences that make people step back and say “whoa, this is cool!”. Picnik, Fauxto, Buzzword, StockFetcher, Fidelity Investments, and just this week Scrapblog had a blogger preview which resulted in a cascade of positive comments about how good the experience was.

Flex 2 really jump started things with Flash, and Adobe is hitting the web at the right time. Startups and Enterprises alike are realizing how important Rich Internet Applications are, and they’re embracing the Flash Platform. There will be bumps for Adobe. Already we’re seeing a developer squeeze for Flex and obviously Microsoft is going to bring big guns to the table. But Adobe has a head start, and as more and more people understand the value of RIAs, the market is just going to grow. That’s a good thing for Adobe’s tool business.

[tags]Adobe, Rich Internet Applications, Flex, Picnik, Fauxto, Buzzword, StockFetcher, Fidelity, Scrapblog[/tags]

Someone has taken the Google Web Toolkit Mail sample application and ported it to Apollo. Awesome to see, especially with the Ajax support still coming along. Anyone know of other frameworks who have already test stuff on Apollo?

[tags]Apollo, Google Web Toolkit[/tags]

MIX, Microsoft’s designer/developer conference in May was always going to be interesting. With “WPF/E” on the horizon and Microsoft’s design suite, Expression Studio, launching, the conference looked at the very least like a chance to see what people thought of the new Microsoft stuff.

But recently, I’ve been getting rumors of bigger and bigger news coming out of MIX. It’s nothing I have concrete enough to talk about, but I’ve gotten bits of information from multiple sources that Microsoft is planning to make some fairly significant announcements. I’m hoping to have more info, but I’m not much of a “story breaker” so it may just wait until MIX.

As Microsoft and Adobe have started moving into each others territory, things have intensified. It’s been unfortunate to watch the rivalry get ugly in some places, but there’s a lot at stake. While Microsoft is starting off at a huge disadvantage, they definitely got Adobe’s attention. I think this is going to mean a lot of innovation in a short timespan. Capitalism at it’s best

All the (supposed) news out of MIX should make Dx3 very interesting.

[tags]Adobe, Microsoft, MIX07, WPF/E, Expression Studio[/tags]

• Scrapblog, one of the better Flex 2 applications that I’ve seen, launched today with some high praise. In the conversation, I came across a post by Tara Hunt and I thought it was worth highlighting because I think it shows just how easy it is to take a full, production Flex application and port it to Apollo:

On Tuesday afternoon, Chris and I stopped by the Adobe booth at ETech to chat with Michelle Turner about Apollo. Adrian Ludwig was also there, preparing for the hot Apollo demo they were going to do on Thursday morning. Somewhere in the conversation Scrapblog came up and Adrian said, “You know, if they could get that working in Apollo by Thursday, we really need another great app to demo….”

So, instantly, I called Carlos, who only hesitated because he had been pushing his lead developer, Omar, so hard.

“I’ll see what Omar says.”

Carlos is a super organized guy. He sends us all sorts of timelines and feature roll out plans and has everything planned down to the minute of the day. A radical shift to building Scrapblog as an Apollo app was not in the cards for some time. Within a couple of hours, they confirmed that they would do it and Adrian jumped in with some Adobe resources to help them out.

They demo’d a beautiful Apollo version of Scrapblog this morning to many oooo’s and aaaaa’s.

Now I’m not sure what kind of functionality they built into Apollo, they may have just wrapped some window chrome around it, but it was demoable. Hopefully we’ll see a lot of awesome Flex applications create Apollo versions that break them out of the browser and add features.

[tags]Scrapblog, Apollo, Adobe, Flex[/tags]

  The Rich Internet Application Summit website is up so it looks like I can finally talk about it. Adobe and effectiveUI are partnering up to put on what looks like a great one day conference in Denver. The agenda looks like it’s going to have something for everyone, and I’m excited to be in a group with such good speakers.

The conference is going for one day, May 3rd, in Denver. It’s one of the first RIA conferences that I’ve seen which has an emphasis on the business side of Rich Internet Applications. There will still be a ton of information for developers, but I’m exited to see the RIA world start talking about how this can make money and how investments in Rich Internet Applications can have big returns.

I’m hoping to see you there, so take a look and then register!

Thanks to John Wilker for giving me the heads up about the site going live.

[tags]Rich Internet Applications, effectiveUI, Adobe, RIA summit[/tags]

Adobe brought together a bunch of industry analysts in New York City to hear about their products and discuss strategy. I’m not there (I’m actually in the bowels of Microsoft learning some WPF and Blend) but if you’re interested in how the day went, Michael Cote of RedMonk was twittering about it.

Most of the information is old news to people who follow the company closely, but if you’re a news junkie like I am, Cote will be your dealer for this event. I can’t wait to hear what the Teknision guys have to say.

[tags]Adobe, RedMonk, Michael Cote, Twitter, Teknision, Adobe Analyst Summit[/tags]

Mark Finkle ran a developer day session for people creating applications with XULRunner and he has some great thoughts about he platform on his blog. I’m hoping to cover XULRunner more on ZDNet because I think it’s an interesting aspect of the RIA space. At my panel during the Web 2.0 Expo, we’ll be talking with the Joost developers about XULRunner, so I’m looking forward to that perspective.

Mark’s post addresses a lot of interesting issues with XULRunner including the developer environment and how XULRunner integrates with the operating system. It’s a great inside look at the strengths and weaknesses of the platform. I disagree with Mark when he says that he believes “the breadth and richness of the Mozilla platform surpasses that of Apollo and WPF/E” but I do think XULRunner can compete. It just isn’t quite at the level of Apollo in my opinion (and it’s also interesting to note he mentions WPF/E).

In the comment, there is a link to a very interesting blog post from someone who seems to be doing some XULRunner. It’s an even more candid look at how the platform works. I think the post nails it when it says:

Some part of me wants to say, yes, Mozilla/XUL will make it, but the richness (graphics / video / animation, usable interface markup / widgets, developer community) of WPFe/Flex, the WPF/Apollo deployment stories, and their security models, debuggability, desktop integration tales, and at-least-one-developer statistic make it hard to say, with puppy-fox-eyes “please don’t hurt the web: use open standards”…

Good food for thought and some interesting talking points for anyone interested in XULRunner.

[tags]XULRunner, Rich Internet Applications, Mark Finkle[/tags]

I was wondering who would win the race for Adobe’s first Apollo application. Philo was the early contender (and may still win ultimately) but it sound like Kuler is making a big push, because it was mentioned today at the CS3 announcement. Marco Casario has some info and a screenshot while pixelfumes throws in some more info.

We saw some of this at Engage, and there is actually a big, big implication here. Adobe making use of Apollo is going to be one of the bigger drivers for penetration that they have. With things like the Kuler widget, they can get it on a lot of designer machines. Combine that with the applications from their partners (eBay, Finetune) and hopefully Apollo 1.0 will release with a bang.

[tags]Adobe, Kuler, Widget, Apollo[/tags]