Games Driving "WPF/E" Adoption and Great Stuff about Apollo’s "Competition"
Two posts that caught my eye today and deserved to be highlighted. I’m finally getting back into the swing of things after AjaxWorld, and the linkblog is all up to date.
First up is a post by Walt Ritscher of WPF Wonderland about WPF/E games and how that might affect adoption of the platform.
Flash is a great platform for building web-deployed games. Flash can build other type applications too, don’t get me wrong, but games certainly helped Flash adoptions rates. I’ve always said that adoption of any platform is aided by the perceived benefit to the customer. If the consumer wants to play a cool game, or listen to a viral video bad enough, they will think nothing of buying or downloading the software.
He’s got an excellent point, and while you sure can’t build the kind of applications you can right now with Flash, WPF/E doesn’t have to compete with that yet. It’s a version 1.0 product, so they can focus on getting penetration (which is where the “battle” is really won or lost). Two things that can drive penetration are video and games; the fun stuff. Flash nailed them both and that helped them get the 98% penetration that they’re enjoying now. WPF/E has both of those use cases well on the radar, so this could be a big boost for them.
The second post is by Andrew Shebanow who has been doing a great job evangelizing Adobe and Flex. I don’t agree with him 100% of the time, but he’s a good blogger, and in his most recent post he runs down “competitors” to Apollos and nails it.
Apollo really doesn’t have any competition. It’s just such a new way to think about development. Sure, you can take web applications offline with a lot of these technologies, but Apollo does more than that; it’s the combination of the two worlds and it creates a new kind of software. It’s a perfect RIA technology right now.
My only quibble with Andrew is that Firefox 3 is vaporware. It’s in the code baby! I also think XULRunner should be talked about as a “competitor” because it may be the closest of all these to Apollo, but he was going off of the TechCrunch list.
Whew! Sorry for the novel, but it’s good tohave energy again!
[tags]WPF/E, Apollo, Rich Internet Applications, Flash, XULRunner, Firefox 3[/tags]
Posted in Rich Internet Applications
March 25th, 2007 at 7:27 pm
“I’ve always said that adoption of any platform is aided by the perceived benefit to the customer. “
True, that… what experience do you want to deliver, to whom? and how much would it cost them to experience it, how much would it cost you to develop it, support it, maintain it?
Those remain the key questions….
(And hmmm… I may be reading between the lines too much Ryan, but are you saying that you’re hoping the Microsoft plugin can get enough audience deployment through games and videos that it might someday support RIAs…?_
jd/adobe
March 25th, 2007 at 7:42 pm
(And hmmm… I may be reading between the lines too much Ryan, but are you saying that you’re hoping the Microsoft plugin can get enough audience deployment through games and videos that it might someday support RIAs…?)
I don’t think those two are analogous. Big deployment doesn’t mean you can start building full applications, but it does mean that there is some traction for the platform. That’s what I’m hoping to see. I love what MACR/ADBE has done with the Flash Player, but I’m always looking for competition to push it further and in the process advance RIAs.
March 25th, 2007 at 10:32 pm
Ryan,
I disagree with your statement “Apollo really doesn’t have any competition”. You can write desktop RIA applications on Dekoh (same functionality as Apollo applications). You can do several more things on Dekoh that Apollo does not offer. Can you explain in what aspects is Apollo unique?
Vijay
Dekoh
March 25th, 2007 at 10:48 pm
@Vijay Run offline applications without a web server?
The reason I say that Apollo doesn’t have competition is because to the operating system, Apollo apps look like native applications. Apollo doesn’t use the browser to run, and it behaves more or less like any other desktop application.
March 25th, 2007 at 11:27 pm
Ryan,
There is a difference between web applications accessed thru a browser and a desktop application accessed thru a browser. In case of a web application if you have not opened the website in the browser there is no way for the website to interact with the user. Whereas, in the case of desktop applications the interaction can continue even when you dont have the browser open. Example: the application can pop-up a system tray bubble or the application can throw up a new window (like outlook event alert). The point to be noted is displaying the UI in the browser does not make it any lesser citizen of the OS. This ofcourse I mean in Dekoh context. I will show you the Google calendar offline and music app (that will have a separate desktop icon/launch) to demonstrate the point I am stating.
All I can say at this time, is so far every demo of application of Apollo I have read about is possible to be written on dekoh (if you knock off some special effects like fading, rotating…).
Vijay
dekoh