A Slow, Bummin’ Summer

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Reading my RIA feeds has gotten almost depressing this summer. I don’t know if it’s the summer lack of news or if people are discovering the various rich internet application technologies for the first time and not trying to understand what everyone brings to the table. Stuff like this just makes me shake my head and pray we get an influx of unbiased understanding in the RIA world.

It’s actually been a really good summer from an RIA standpoint. Silverlight is close to release, our on AIR Bus Tour has been a huge success and 360|Flex sounds like it was an excellent conference. But despite all that it just seems like the conversation has gotten less interesting. We’re arguing about time-based animation over frame-based animation. That stuff is lame. We should be talking about RIAs are important and trying to get more people to understand the value.

Maybe I just need to get out and go backpacking :)

[tags]RIA, Summer[/tags]

Related posts:

  1. Time Based Animations Versus Frame Based Animations
  • David

    Wait, do you mean the post you linked to is wrong, as well as boring? MXML dude – he totally left that out, which may require a re-write of #6 & #9 (if not pulling them totally).

    Cheers,

    Davo

  • http://www.convos.com Matt

    I agree man – especially the month of August. Everyone is either on vacation or busy building cool things. Hopefully, it’s the latter and we’ll see some cool stuff this fall.

    On a positive note, I’ve been out to some tech meetups here in NYC this summer and when we tell people we’re using Flex 2, a good percentage of people get really excited.

    Did you check the comments in that post? Glad to see someone corrected the points…

  • http://blog.digitalbackcountry.com Ryan Stewart

    Hey David,

    Yeah, the post sucks for a lot of reasons. The reason I get so annoyed is because I’ve seen that post linked to by a lot of other people. Maybe they’re starved by lack of any good information, but it still sucks.

    Matt, that is great news. I can’t wait to see what you guys are cooking up!

    =Ryan

  • http://sithsigma.wordpress.com Darth Sidious

    Have no fear Lord Stewart, channel those negative feelings… It gives you focus, makes you stronger!

    If it makes you feel any better we’re using a Flex based 3D interface into our latest EMail (Empire Mail) application. It supports the latest SAPI (Sith API) where we can use the powers of the Force to move Jedi Spam into the junk folder.

    The Sith continue to innovate…and dominate using Adobe technology. Meanwhile my spies tell me the Jedi are full go on JavaFX – oh right, that’s just vaporware, I guess they’ll have to keep waiting and pretending they have an RIA technology.

  • http://www.flex-fanatic.com Chris S

    Don’t sweat it man…Adobe platforms are going to blow the roof off the whole game this winter and next year. Follow the Apollocoders group Ryan….there are AIR devs just itching to get rid of those install screens, I never saw so many people actually excited to get out production apps on a platform in beta before and we are like kids in a candy store waiting for Adobe to unleash us. We already have gobs of public applications in beta and once final release ships the commercial crowd will be coming onboard too…wait and see.

    Watch when Buzzword hits the desktop in all it’s Flex/AIR beauty. That baby is going to make quite a few rivals bitter and others like Saffron will drop jaws.

    These people are doing what they are doing on purpose and you know it. Sure there are plenty of hobbiest bloggers getting it wrong and it can be blamed on ignorance but I’ve seen a fair share of pro bloggers who somehow never manage to do their homework and misinform about Adobe products like AIR rather than make comparisons based on facts. Even now we see blogs posted that still are using Apollo specs in comparison to other platforms. It’s no accident…it’s done to plant a bad seed and hope weeds grow. Don’t water their garden bro or let their crappy gardens get you down. We take the high road and we set the standards :)

  • http://www.swartzfager.org/blog Brian Swartzfager

    Like others have said, I wouldn’t worry to much. Summer does seem to be the time when developers go quiet for a while, either to take a break/vacation or to work on personal projects. The main podcast serving the ColdFusion developer community (www.coldfusionweekly.com) even went on hiatus for several weeks in recognition of this fact.

    And I wouldn’t worry about the run-of-the-mill bloggers “not getting” RIAs. While their misinformation may muddy the waters, any serious developer who wants to try out one of the RIA technologies will figure out the truth. And really at this stage, it’s the developers who are running the RIA show.

    Hope to see you at the Monday event in DC.

    –Brian

  • http://www.firemoss.com Joe Rinehart

    Hey Ryan,

    We’re not quiet because we’re despairing – we’re quiet because we’re too darn busy building RIAs! Adobe’s got a platform that actually works, the market’s got a demand, and there’s a shortage of people who can do the work. Not much time to blog in this situation!

  • http://www.simplfiedchaos.com TOdd

    Yeah, that article is total crap. Unfortunately, there’s so much mis-information out there about Flash/Silverlight. It took me a couple of months to wade through it and really understand how much further ahead Adobe is at the moment with Flash/Flex than MSFT with Silverlight (don’t even start about misunderstandings of AIR). But, I DO enjoy the competition. MSFT upped the ante with a HD codec, and sure enough, you guys at adobe have one, too. (I’m not really sure who came up with it first, that’s not really the point I’m trying to make.)
    One thing, MSFT is going to be a tough competitor. First, they’re going to be able to push out the Silverlight player in a windows update, giving them a huge spike in a market that Adobe presently dominates (can you say, taking advantage of the desktop monopoly?). Second, they already have the ears of many corporations (management doesn’t yet get fired for buying MSFT). Third, all the tools required will be included in existing MSDN subscriptions, so there’s not going to be anything new for the corporate manager to purchase. Fourth — and this is totally a developer preference and really has nothing to do with the big picture of what a platform can accomplish — is that MSFT will give some choices to the language used to develop Silverlight (whether the dynamic languages really pan out is another thing). C# 3.0 has some fantastic new syntactical sugar. I’m going to have a preference for IronPython. If IronRuby materializes, then I’m sure some will opt for that route. But, like I said, this doesn’t really affect “what can be built” versus “how the geek wants to build it.” A big question mark that remains for me regarding Silverlight is really how cross-platform/cross-browser it becomes. MSFT can promise anything, but if you look at how they implement their own web standards, they aren’t to be trusted. Adobe on the other hand, has several years of cross-platform delivery, just look at Photoshop and all their high-end tools. (I know some Linux desktop users will talk trash about Adobe’s support for Linux.)
    One thing, MSFT has alway built the best developer tools, though they aren’t cross-platform, though I haven’t been happy with the last couple of releases of Visual Studio. (I’m still waiting to see how much bloat in need to run Visual Stuido 2008).
    MSFT will be tough competition.
    Anyway, I’ve loved the past three months of developing in Flex/Flash. The things I’ve been able to come up with are truly amazing. It’s really the ideal tool that offers nearly unlimited freedom to express your creativity in building cutting edge UIs. Plus, it’s just so dang easy to connect to web services. I’ve never used the Adobe server products (probably never will), and Flash/Flex API for connectivity just feels so natural for all these disparate server backends.
    The prudent developer will keep his eye on both technologies (like Ryan does). In the long run, they’ll become a commodity technology, like Oracle and Sql Server. The good developers, those who understand OO design patterns and lower-level details will have no trouble switching back and forth between the two technologies.
    Oh, one other thing, I’m interested in how the digital media development companies (the Digitas’s of the world) incorporate the Silverlight platform, as traditionally these type of companies have a much smaller influence from Microsoft.
    Sorry for rambling, too much coffee this morning and reading that terrible comparison post got me thinking.

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