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Christophe Coenrates has posted some information and the source code for the Sales application that Kevin Lynch demoed during today’s Google Developer Day. The application is a live example of Flex and Google Gears working together to create an offline browser experience. Christophe is the man!

[tags]Google Gears, Flex[/tags]

There’s been some news today about Real Network’s announcement that they are going to release a player that takes videos in the major web formats (including Flash) offline so you can view it later. Andy Plesser has a video up with an interview with Ben Rotholtz which has some good information.

I think we’ve been able to do a lot of this with things like the Firefox extension Video Downloader but having a separate player is an interesting concept. I think it actually validates some of what Adobe is talking about when we talk about a desktop experience versus the web experience. Robert Scoble has some points about why watching videos on the web is not always ideal.

I think it would be cool to see something like this baked into AMP (Adobe Media Player) but I haven’t heard anything like that. I’m just giving my own thoughts here, so don’t take that as any kind of plan, I just think offline video makes for a good experience.

Update: In looking at things more closely, it looks like the player will also allow you to burn the videos to CD and DVD (for a fee). That’s a more interesting prospect if they mean burning it in native DVD format. Worth tracking…
[tags]Real Networks, Adobe, Flash Video, Rich Media[/tags]

The blogosphere is buzzing about Google Gears today because it’s a huge leap forward for browser applications. The fact that Google is open sourcing an offline solution that includes SQLite has gotten the attention of a lot of people. The fact that they have it working right now with Google Reader is even more significant. But one of the cool things about the response to the announcement is how the news of Adobe being involved added some weight to Gears.

Marc Orchant said it best “The reason I think this isn’t just crazy Web 2.0 hype is that Adobe has announced they are aligning their Apollo efforts with the approach Google’s taken with Gears as there are significant similarities in how the two companies have have approached their online/offline application solutions.”

As an Adobe employee, I am genuinely excited about what this means. The talk is all about how big this is going to be for the browser, and part of that comes from just having Google involved. But I think it also vindicates a lot of what we’re doing with Apollo. The browser and the desktop are getting closer, but they still provide very different experiences. The collaboration hopefully means that the Google vision for software development and the Adobe vision will match up more closely over time.

On the Adobe side, there are a few key announcements that should be highlighted and were mentioned in the keynote this morning by Kevin Lynch:

• Apollo will have an embedded database – The Apollo team has been working on adding SQLite to Apollo for a while and today it’s official that we’re going to be including it.
• Gears opens the doors for offline Flash applications – Flash is a great way to deliver applications in the browser. The fact that Adobe and Google are talking and the fact that Gears is an open source project means that adding offline support to your Flash application is a possibility.
• Gears and Apollo should have consistent APIs – Google and Adobe are working together with the aim of making the APIs for accessing the SQLite database similar for developers. The vision is that any Gears applications could be ported to Apollo (and vice versa) using roughly the same data structure that they use in Gears. The parallels will be great for developers. (More on all this from Mike Chambers)

I think people realize how important offline access is for web applications which is one of many reasons this is getting so much press. The fact that Google and Adobe are partnering to enhance applications in the browser and on the desktop is a good thing for Rich Internet Applications. It’s a very exciting time to be an RIA developer.

[tags]Google Gears, Flash, Adobe, Apollo[/tags]

I’m in San Jose tonight and tomorrow so that I can attend the Google Developer day here. Kevin Lynch is going to be demoing an Apollo application during the keynote and thanks goes to JD for pointing out the link where you can watch in live.

I’ll be blogging throughout the day tomorrow and I’ve been trying to keep the link blog updated but a lot of the news is about Google Gears so there isn’t a ton of new stuff there. If you have anything specific you want me to find out while I’m here, feel free to leave a comment or drop me an email.

Mike Potter has used coRank to build a Digg-clone for Rich Internet Application topics. He’s got some information on RIApedia and after playing with the site a bit, I think it is a really cool way to promote and highlight RIA stories. The new site is over on http://ria.corank.com/ and we’re all hoping for stories about *every* kind of RIA technology. As Mike mentioned, there are bookmarklets for every browser so you can add stories very easily. I’m going to use this a lot as I go through items for my RIA link blog.

[tags]Apollo, Flex, Flash, Silverlight, WPF, Laszlo, Rich Internet Applications, Digg[/tags]

Channel 10 has the scoop on a brand new product from Microsoft called Surface. It’s basically an interactive table that has a touch screen which lets you interact with objects on the glass. Scoble has some good information and the videos on the Surface website are amazing (Popular Mechanics has some more video).

This is the kind of innovative user interface thinking I love, so Microsoft deserves huge props. I’ve heard rumors about something like this for a while but to actually see the demos is great. Supposedly the interfaces are all built with WPF. As an RIA developer, this would be such a great canvas to have. Forget trying to break out of the browser; with Surface you could create entirely new UI paradigms and really push the envelope (in a good way) about what it means to create interactive applications.

So Microsoft, will Surface run the Flash Player?

Update: Richard MacManus’ new blog, last100 has a good writeup. It looks like a great new property, so it’s worth subscribing to.
[tags]Microsoft, Surface, interface design[/tags]

Mike Chambers pinged me a link to Saffron, which is a UML modeling tool that was built on top of Apollo using Flash CS3 by Samuel Agesilas. Sam has a screenshot up of the application and a lot of details on his blog. No word on when this is going to be available, but I’m really excited to get my hands on it.

On why he used Apollo:

As I mentioned earlier Saffron is a perfect fit for Apollo. It allows Saffron to run seamlessly on both OS X and Windows platforms and hopefully in the future a Linux will be available as well. It leverages a lot of what Apollo has to offer like file search, multiple native windows and file deleting/editing/saving.

For other Flash UML goodness you can check out Nate Chatellier who took a whirl around gModeler after looking at Gliffy as well.

[tags]UML, Flash, Apollo, Gliffy, gModeler[/tags]

At the Where 2.0 Conference today Google announced ‘Streetside View’ which allows you to drill down into Google Maps and then get a street-level view of the buildings and road based on where you are.

The map interface is still all Ajax but the street view itself is all done with Flash. Combine this with Google Maps and Google Analytics and it’s apparent that Google 1) knows how to get a lot out of combining Ajax and Flash and 2) that Google sees the value in Flash as a way to add to the experience of traditional Ajax applications.

Both are great signs and hopefully developers all over take notice of what Google’s doing and dig into ways to combine Flash and Ajax. The two do work very, very well together.

Sadly, no Seattle on the Streetside view yet. Hopefully soon.

[tags]Flash, Ajax, Google, Streetside View[/tags]

I like to consider myself a student of technology but I only barely remember Hypercard after looking at the screenshots on Wikipedia. The reason it came up today was because Scott forwarded me a link to a post by Andrew Wooldridge that talked about the similarities between Flex and Hypercard:

I was almost too young for Hypercard, but I know that it represented a huge leap for non-programmers. They could actually create “apps” (or “stacks”) With just a few bits of data and some drag-drop action you could create something that does something useful like organize your CD collection or generate a Star Trek quote. I believe that this quality is what is making Flex take off like it is.

Andrew really does an excellent job of both understanding and explaining some of the value propositions behind Apollo. I wish I was smart enough to really learn the ins and outs of C++, but I’m not. I come from a web development background. There are a lot of people like that, who got into programming from digging into HTML pages and figuring out how to build things for the web. One of the coolest parts of Rich Internet Applications is being able to take that knowledge and play in the deep end.