Monthly Archives: November 2007

“Users don’t care about Flash vs Javascript; they care about usability and productivity.”

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I really liked Tim Anderson’s post in response to a Zoho blog post that I’ve seen circulated a lot about why they chose JavaScript vs. Flash. I’ve definitely been guilty of JavaScript vs. Flash debates in the past but I thought Tim did a good job of making all of us look a little silly. In the end it really doesn’t matter what you use, all that matters is whether or not you can provide a better experience for your users.

Tim compares the design decisions (not technology) behind Buzzword and Zoho and compares and contrasts. As an obvious supporter of Flex and other “plugin” RIA technoogies I thought it was an interesting comparison. To me, those technologies make the desktop metaphor much easier to implement in the browser. I don’t think it’s an accident that Zoho and Buzzword have such different design goals or that Flex applications generally tend to look more sophisticated than Ajax applications. Another aspect is that you’re focused less on having to make your application cross platform so you can spend more of that time on design and usability. There are still some issues with designing in Flex but we know that and Thermo will go a long way towards improving the workflow. Then you can get back to focusing on usability and productivity.

[tags]Flash, Flex, Ajax, Zoho, Buzzword[/tags]

Ted’s AMF Secret

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When Ted blogs something like “There is some big AMF news coming in December” my email and IM always gets a bit more traffic. I’m not going to spoil the secret, but you should be excited. I have the full briefing about it tomorrow but it’s been a project a while in the making so I’ve been able to follow it and get info in bits and pieces. I usually try not to do “this is going to be cool” posts, but I got a lot of questions about it so I wanted to post something publicly. It will be worth the wait, I promise.

[tags]AMF, Flex[/tags]

I Still Love My Zune 1.0

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ZuneThe New York Times has an article today about the Zune 2.0. I was just chatting with a couple of friends last night who are thinking about going to work on the Zune team so it was kind of serendipitous and I felt chatty. I’ve got a big long post for sometime soon about Microsoft’s living room/media initiatives (awesome but way too hard) but with all crap the Zune got I still love mine and 2.0 sounds like it’s even better.

One thing that was really awesome of Microsoft was the firmware update for the original Zunes. When the 2.0 stuff came out they gave that new UI and even some new features to the original Zunes. Wireless Sync? Awesome. Now I just need to figure out how to get a free Zune 2.0….but I think I’ll break down and buy one after Christmas.

[tags]Personal, Zune[/tags]

A Tool for Designers Who Want to Code

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Before Thanksgiving there was a post by Rick Barraza that caught my eye. He was talking about transitioning from Flash to Silverlight and gave some of his thoughts on Blend. One of components of Microsoft’s designer/developer workflow story is the “throw it over the wall” method between Blend and Visual Studio. They figure that designers will work in Blend and then coders will finish it in Visual Studio. As a result, there is no code editing in Blend and the XAML editor is pretty basic. Rick makes the point that Flash developers are pretty creative people who have been both building interfaces and coding for a long time. That workflow is tough for them to jump in to.

I love the Blend model and for large projects I think a very strict designer/deveoper workflow is important. But I also understand that I don’t know how you work and flexibility is key. That’s why I think people like Rick will like Thermo. We’re building Thermo on top of Flex Builder so you’re getting a powerful design tool with some coding features you’re used to behind the scenes. We’re doing a lot to hide the “Eclipseyness” so that designers will feel comfortable in the tool, but our code editor will have a lot of the same features that your regular copy of Flex Builder has. You’ll still need/want Flex Builder to take advantage of some of the more powerful profile and debugging features but if you’re a designer who wants to code or a coder who wants to design, I think you’ll find Thermo a really great tool for building RIAs.

[tags]Thermo, Devigner, Blend, Flex[/tags]

Silverlight Not Supported on Some AMD Athlon Chips?

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This is an interesting thread on the Silverlight forums. It turns out Silverlight requires a processor that supports SSE and some of the older Athlon chips don’t. How many people does this affect? Probably just those four people in the forums. In other words, I realize this is a VERY small subset of the population and isn’t really that big a deal.

But I think it does show one of the things you get with 10 years of experience. Flash is arguably the most successful piece of software in the world from a ubiquity/deployment perspective and it’s due in large part to the fact that we keep the runtime small and try to include as many users as possible. 64 bit people, don’t yell at me, I know, I know, I’m sorry.

[tags]Silverlight, AMD[/tags]

Flex in the Wild – Command and Conquer

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Command and Conquer 3It’s always kind of cool to be doing something totally random on the web and come across a Flex application. In this case I was checking out the Battlecast feature (may require a login) Command and Conquer because I picked up Command and Conquer 3 : Tiberium Wars over the holiday. As I went to the Battlecast screen I saw that familiar loading screen and then ended up in a Flex application that looks pretty well customized. One run through of James Ward’s “is it Flex” proves it.

Command and Conquer Battlecast

I’m terrible at this game but it’s a lot of fun (mostly). I was never much of a rusher in strategy games and that appears to be the way to win Command and Conquer.

[tags]Flex, Command and Conquer, Battlecast[/tags]

Microsoft Office Competitor Built in Flex and AIR

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There’s a bunch of news today about Live Documents, an online competitor to Microsoft Office. I realize this is become less and less notable but they’re using Flex for all of the applications as far as I can tell and it’s founded in part by the guy who sold Hotmail to Microsoft.

Matt Asay has a followup to his original post and it sounds like they’re actually going to offer a desktop version of all the applications using Adobe AIR. Zoli has my favorite thought (last bullet point) but I think the use of Flex/AIR means it isn’t the case.

I don’t have an account yet, but when I do I’ll be posting a review on ZDNet. If anyone does have one, send a long some screenshots!

[tags]Live Documents, Flex, AIR, Microsoft Office[/tags]

An Impassioned Defense of Ajax from Kevin Hoyt

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It’s a separate topic, but somehow I think that with the news of Firefox 3 shipping it’s first beta, Kevin Hoyt’s post on Ajax is very appropriate. Kevin is responding to a post by Richard Leggett in which Richard says Ajax is dead. He cites some good examples. Those that have read this blog for awhile know I’m not the biggest Ajax fan (by far) but seeing how people are using it inside of AIR has been cool. Frankly I’ve come down off of my fan-boi pedestal and I realize that a lot of people out there are doing cool things with Ajax. It’s also an important part of browsers and will continue to be important as both browsers and web development evolve.

So Kevin’s response was great and is well worth a read. If you think that Adobe is moving full speed ahead with Flash and doesn’t care about Ajax then hopefully after reading you’ll see that isn’t the case. Adobe is a web company and we support web development in any capacity. The Flash and Ajax crowds have a lot to learn from each other and I think we’ll see some great times ahead as the communities start to work together. Kevin and his attitude will be a big part of that bridge going forward.

[tags]Kevin Hoyt, Ajax, Flash, Firefox[/tags]

“Fanalytics” on Facebook

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Facebook AnalyticsI was poking around the other day and discovered some of the management features for “pages” in Facebook. Pages are the sections for brands and products that you can become a fan of. I created one for Adobe AIR and one for Thermo when they first came out. Now that I’ve found the analytics for the pages I’m pretty impressed. They’ve got a nice Flash chart that lets me graphically track things like views on my fan pages, number of wall pages, number of fans, and picture views. You can also get a snapshot of how many fans you have today vs. yesterday and the change in page views and unique visitors to each of your fan pages.

I haven’t played with the advertising campaign stuff because I don’t really have anything to advertise but part of me wants to try it out for fun. The analytics dashboard has been fun to play with though and it’s an interesting snapshot of how Thermo and AIR are doing on Facebook. So far we’ve been pretty steadily tracking upward. I’m really curious what will end up causing spikes. The release? New news? I think that might be one way to tell which parts of our marketing or which bits of news is resonating with the tech community on Facebook.

[tags]Facebook, Analytics, Adobe[/tags]