I just wrote a post on The Universal Desktop about The Fan, a new application that came out of Comcast Interactive Media Labs page. It’s a pretty nifty little application and there’s a lot of content that I hadn’t seen other places. But while writing the post, I found something better, a full breakdown of why the Comcast Interactive Media team chose to use Flex (It looks like this hit pretty big on MXNA, but I missed it).

It goes through a lot of the minuses behind Flex and why they weren’t an issue here. He also notes that most of the team was made of up long time Flash developers, so moving to Flex wasn’t a small decision. But his post is a shining example of why so many people are choosing Flex to build their applications.

I wish we had more of these, becuase I seem to find them sporadically and am always excited when I do. If you have written or found a post that explains why someone chose a Rich Internet Application solution, I’d love to see it.

[Via Mike Potter]

Note: I didn’t link directly to my Comcast article on ZDNet becuase I don’t want to look like I’m gaming Techmeme.

I’m going through my email this week and I have a TON of requests for people looking for Flex Developers. Most of the people I chat with on a regular basis are all swamped with work, so they don’t return my IMs or emails any more.

If you know Flex, and you’re looking for work, drop me a line. Just let me know if you’re looking for contract stuff or full time. Most of the requests I get are for full time, but the salary seems to be higher than the average.

And if you don’t know Flex, but you want to learn, we’ve got a good conference for you to go to here in Seattle in August

I’m also toying with the idea of setting up a job board here on Digital Backcountry. Something like CrunchBoard or the Read/WriteWeb Job Board. Obviously I wouldn’t charge what they charge, but I have a lot of RIA developers who read me, so it’s a pretty targeted audience. I’d like to list Flex, Apollo, WPF, “WPF/E”; basically all kinds of RIA jobs. What do you think? Would you guys and gals find a job board useful or have I had too much gin tonight?

[tags]Flex, Jobs[/tags]

Whenever you mention Microsoft and Adobe in a blog title, it gets a lot of clicks. Mostly that’s because people love to read about conflict, and right now, that’s in full force. Unfortunately, it’s taking some very negative turns, but that may be understandable because we have more question marks than answers.

A lot of people are confused both about what this RIA thing is, and what Adobe and Microsoft are doing. I talked to a reporter from the Seattle Times today who wanted to write about RIAs and was looking to compare Apollo and WPF/E. I told him that wasn’t necessarily a good comparison, but it’s one that people draw because that’s where the conflict is; Microsoft moving to the web with a Flash competitor and Adobe moving to the desktop with Apollo. The tone of his article sounds like it may have changed a bit based on that, but the fact that a reporter from a major metropolitan newspaper is talking about RIA is fantastic.

So now’s the time that we need help everyone who’s coming into this space for the first time understand what it’s about. Posts like Lee Brimelow’s do that. The next few weeks are going to be *gigantic* because we’re finally going to hear more about what “WPF/E” is and what it can do. I hope everyone is keeping an open mind about all of this, and realize that there is no one, true way, and it comes down to the best technology for the task at hand.

So blog proudly about the technology you know the best, talk about its strengths and weaknesses. Sell people with good arguments and technology examples, not more FUD.

[tags]Rich Internet Applications, Adobe, Microsoft, WPF/E, Apollo[/tags]

I was working with Daniel Dura’s TwitterCamp application today and wanted to see about changing the font. Danny was using a SWF file as the font source, so I went looking for a replacement and came across Stefan Isarie’s site. He has almost 300 fonts, all in SWF format, that you can use for your Flex or Flash application.

I think one of the best way to make your Flex applications stand out is to get in and customize the fonts. With this library, you should have no trouble doing that. Now back to your regularly scheduled RIA analysis.

[tags]SWF, Fonts, sIFR, Twitter, TwitterCamp[/tags]

“notaprguy” had a funny post in response to all of the news coming out about Apollo and WPF/E and everything else in the RIA space. As I read it again today, it struck a different cord, or maybe I’m just not sleeping enough. Here’s his quote:

If I weren’t jaded I’d think that RIA was the next big thing. Maybe even a bigger deal than its parent technobabble – Web 2.0.

I talk about it all the time, so clearly I think RIAs are the next big thing, but I also see them as an evolutionary step past Web 2.0 (not a segué into “Web 3.0″). With Web 2.0, we added a very social element to the web and we started to see the web as a platform for application delivery. We learned a lot, there was a ton of innovation, and we explored the boundaries of what web based applications looked like.

But just as with any other technology, the web isn’t perfect. We can’t take it with us, so if we’re offline, we don’t have access to it. By storing things on the web, we’ve giving our data to someone else, something some people aren’t a fan of. I see Rich Internet Applications as the convergence of what we learned about the web and what we already knew on the desktop. With RIAs, we have more knowledge than we did before, so we can make good decisions about the best medium (web, desktop, device) for our applications.

Now that we can do that more effectively, we can concentrate on things like experience in our software. We can think harder about design and spend more time on usability. It sounds kind of corny, and maybe I shouldn’t be blogging this late, but that’s why I get so stoked about RIAs. We’ve got enough knowledge to make good technology decisions, so we can start making better decisions about the experience we give users.

So wow, who knew a post about open sourcing the Flash Player would get people so riled up? My ZDNet commenters are riled, Ajaxian mentioned it, and I even got a link from Ted Patrick. polyGeek even sent a big lighting bolt my way

So here’s the thing, does having the Flash Player open sourced make my life better? No. Does it make the developer community any better? No not necessarily. Is me rambling about open source Flash in a blog post going to make anyone’s life better? HELL No. But I learned a lot from Ted Leung about how open source works, and Adobe is becoming a very open company. It’s things like Tamarin, but its also stuff like how open they’re being with Apollo (not to mention contributing to WebKit) and the plans for Flex 3. The great thing about Adobe is how good they are at listening and talking with people.

A lot of people use Ajax partly because it’s based on open standards and the technologies behind it are generally open source. I’m not an Ajax fan, and I think we all know that. I’m always looking for ways to get Ajax developer into the Flex fold, so any conversation that helps that is one I think has value. My post didn’t really do that, but I think it got people talking, which is all it was supposed to do. And hopefully people learned something about open source in the process. The governance issue was something I didn’t understand at all, so I wanted to talk about those issues in the context of Flash Player.

I’m not being baptized into the church of open source, I’m not sharpening my XULRunner skills, I just wanted to throw ideas around and engage some influential people (like Ted, or the guys at RedMonk) about how Flash can be more open and bring in more developers. Open sourcing it is not the answer, just something to add to the conversation.

Oh, and also talking about Open Source Flash always gets a lot of page views. (kidding)

[tags]Flash Player, Open Source[/tags]

I am very happy to announce that I’m joining up with John Wilker and Tom Ortega to bring you lots of 360|Conference goodness. I had a blast at the conference in San Jose, and I got a chance to see how excited developers are about Flex. The fact that it sold out so quickly showed that there was a ton of demand and that the conference really resonated with people.

So I wanted more. I’m going to be working with them to help put on 360|Flex here in Seattle as well as other things down the line. I think these guys have a great approach to conferences and that the three of us can do a lot of good for developers. I’m still doing my day job, and I’ll still be blogging as regularly as before, so nothing will change; I’ll just be sleeping less.

Huge thanks to John and Tom for letting me on the team. I think it’s going to be a blast, and I can’t wait to get feedback from people about what other conferences they want to see, and how we can fill those needs.

[tags]360Conferences, 360Flex, Seattle[/tags]

Lee Brimelow has a very interesting discussion going on over at theWPFBlog about whether or not time-based animations are a mistake in WPF. One of the things that Microsoft touts is that unlike Flash, which uses frame-based animation, WPF uses a timer. This means that no matter what the power or speed of your machine is, the animations will all run the same. But Lee notes that this doesn’t quite work for most animations and can result in some jerky animations. The comments make for a good read and an interesting discussion.

More stuff like this all over the link blog.

[tags]WPF, Animations, Flash[/tags]

Mike Arrington over at TechCrunch had the first crack at the news that the Finetune Desktop is officially launching tonight. The icon is now on the site, right below the player on the left side, so anyone can grab it.

I’ve been using the Finetune service for a long time now and continue to be impressed. The desktop client makes a huge difference in how I listen to music. It adds a lot to my experience because I don’t have to go sorting through tabs when I want to skip the song or push the pause button. It also doesn’t crash when the browser does, and with Firefox that happens often.

You’ll need to download Apollo if you haven’t already, but then go grab the Finetune Desktop and check it out. And if you’re looking for playlists, I have one right here.

[tags]Finetune, Apollo, Desktop[/tags]

Liz Gannes, over on NewTeeVee, is reporting that Widevine, a company up here in Seattle, will announce a DRM solution for Flash Video. She and I chatted about it and I’m a little skeptical about this being even possible.

As I mentioned in the article, DRM on Flash Video seems to be something most partners want to see. I hate DRM, and we’re seeing the waning days of DRM for music, but the battle over video isn’t there yet. But because Flash Video is so ubiquitous on the web, a DRM solution that works well might make bigger partners happy.

There are a couple of flaws with that notion though. One, while the On2 codec is good, if you’re looking for very high quality video (the kind you’d pay for), it won’t be as good as other already-DRMed solutions. So the market would be mostly smaller clips or things like TV shows that stations want to give people access to, but may want to control more closely. In that case, there’s Flash Media Server, but the price point is high for most people, and if your site really starts bringing in users, you’re beholden to Adobe for a lot of money.

We’ll see what Widevine offers, but I can’t imagine it’s a solution that will work for most users. Even if it is successful, and they start making money, Adobe can cut them off by implementing it themselves. My hunch here is that Widevine, which uses a downloadable client, wants to tie themselves to the Flash wagon so they can use Flash’s penetration to increase their own downloadable client numbers.

[tags]Flash, DRM, Widevine[/tags]