Are these Contenders for Acquisition by Adobe?

Wednesday, 23rd April 2008 in Strategy, Technology by Simon | No comments

Adobe has progressively been developing an online presence with Buzzword, Share, Brio and Photoshop Express. But the online presence falls short of important spreadsheet and presentation applications.

So who could the contenders be? Here are two extremely promising applications built on the Flash platform:

SlideRocket

SlideRocket LogoSlideRocket is a rich Internet application, built on the Flash platform, that provides for every part of the presentation lifecycle. It integrates authoring, asset management, delivery and analytics tools into a single hosted environment that allows you to quickly create stunning presentations, intelligently manage your assets, securely share your slides, and measure the results.

There are already a number of companies that are striving to be the web-based presentation application of choice, including Google, Zoho and Empressr.

SlideRocket is the first online productivity application that embraces business level features such as collaboration, robust security, dynamic data binding and business integration with applications like Salesforce.com. SlideRocket aims to differentiate itself from other presentation products by including a community marketplace where content and services can be shared and transacted. SlideRocket also embraces the best of the Internet with features like asset tagging, web content mashups, embedded data services and seamless rich media support.

It’s absolutely one of the best presentation creation applications out there. And because it’s built on rich Internet application technologies you can add interactivity and create a cinematic experience that I haven’t seen done any where else.

Ryan Stewart, Adobe’s Rich Internet Evangelist writing in ZDNet – SlideRocket – the king of presentation applications.

SlideRocket - main presentation screenSlideRocket - incorporating videoSlideRocket - adding Flickr to the librarySlideRocket - manipulating images

(click on the images for more detail)

SlideRocket has been designed from the ground up with extensibility and portability in mind as well. To this effect, third party developers will be able to build components into slideshows using the application’s APIs, creating compelling presentations.

You can find more information on the SlideRocket website.

blist

Blist LogoBlist makes it easy for anyone to create private or collaborative databases.

Blist is not alone in the online database market. Zoho DB, DabbleDB and Trackvia are all web-based tools that provide users the ability to create and administer databases.

Although Blist’s simplicity makes it seem like you’re not dealing with anything more complicated than an online spreadsheet, the Blist user interface is actually hiding a complex relational database backend.

Unlike other online database systems, such as Zoho DB, using Blist doesn’t require the user to know SQL to use all it has to offer. This makes Blist great for users who need more than an Excel spreadsheet, but who don’t want to delve into the complexities of a database software application like Access.

Blist BetaBlist BetaBlist BetaBlist Beta

(click on the images for more detail)

Blist’s focus on making database creation and management a straightforward process, built on an always available, rich Internet application suggests it can fill a niche. Demand will prove the depth of such a niche, but if it grabs enough attention from people as regular users, it will become an extremely interesting prospect for acquisition.

You can find more information on the blist website.

Why Silverlight? Microsoft Explains…

Thursday, 13th December 2007 in Development, Technology by Simon | 3 comments

Silverlight aims to compete with Adobe Flash and the presentation components of AJAX. It also competes with Sun Microsystems’ JavaFX, which was launched a few days after Silverlight.

Microsoft Silverlight is a proprietary runtime for browser-based Rich Internet Applications, providing a subset of the animation, vector graphics, and video playback capabilities of Windows Presentation Foundation. The runtime is available for Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X, with Linux support under development via the third-party Moonlight runtime.

Microsoft describes its advantages as follows:

Compelling Cross-Platform User Experiences

  • Deliver media experiences and rich interactive applications for the Web that incorporate video, animation, interactivity, and stunning user interfaces.
  • Seamless, fast installation for users, thanks to a small, on-demand, easy-to-install plug-in that is under 2 megabytes (MB) in size and works with all leading browsers.
  • Consistent experiences between Windows-based and Macintosh computers without any additional installation requirements.
  • Create richer, more compelling Web experiences that take greater advantage of the client for increased performance.
  • Stunning vector-based graphics, media, text, animation, and overlays that enable seamless integration of graphics and effects into any existing Web application.
  • Enhance existing standards/AJAX-based applications with richer graphics and media, and improve their performance and capabilities by using Silverlight.

Flexible Programming Model with Collaboration Tools

  • Based on the Microsoft .NET Framework, Silverlight enables developers and designers to easily use existing skills and tools to deliver media experiences and rich interactive applications for the Web.
  • Simple integration with existing Web technologies and assets means Silverlight works with any back-end Web environment or technology. No “rip and replace” required.
  • Silverlight integrates with your existing infrastructure and applications, including Apache, PHP, as well as JavaScript and XHTML on the client.
  • Choice of development languages including JavaScript, Ruby, Python, C#, Visual Basic .NET, and more.
  • Role-specific tools for both designers and developers that take advantage of Web standards and the breadth of the Microsoft .NET connected software features.
  • For designers: Microsoft Expression Studio for creating interactive user interfaces and media rich experiences, preparing media for encoding and distribution, and creating World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) standards-compliant sites using modern XHTML, XML, XSLT, CSS, and ASP.NET.
  • For developers: Microsoft Visual Studio for developing client and server code with full Microsoft IntelliSense, powerful cross-platform debugging, rich language support, and more.
  • Consistent presentation model by using XAML, the declarative presentation language used in Windows Vista–based applications. Controls, visual designs, media, and other elements can be presented with full design fidelity in both Silverlight and Windows-based applications.
  • Extensible control model makes it easy to add rich content and behaviors while enabling efficient code-reuse and sharing.
  • Dramatically improved performance for AJAX-enabled Web sites with the power, performance, and flexibility of Silverlight and .NET-connected software.

High Quality, Low Cost Media

  • Unified media format that scales from high definition (HD) to mobile with Windows Media Video (WMV), the Microsoft implementation of the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers (SMPTE) VC-1 video standard, as well as support for Windows Media Audio (WMA) and MP3 audio.
  • Add vector-based graphics and overlays to media with support for integration of graphics that scale to any size and broadcast-style overlays for tickers and closed captioning.
  • Flexible ad-insertion solutions with video and animation, including the ability to deliver fluid, broadcast-style video or animated advertisements without loss of visual fidelity or motion quality.
  • Lower-cost media streaming with Emmy Award winning Windows Media technologies that can lower the cost of streaming delivery by up to 46%, and enjoy the flexibility to work with your existing Windows Media streaming deployments. Even further cost reductions are possible with the upcoming Microsoft Internet Information Services (IIS) Media Pack for Microsoft Windows Server 2008.
  • Broad ecosystem of media tools, servers, and solutions compatible with the Windows Media operating system.
  • Microsoft PlayReady content-access technology that delivers a single solution for digital rights management support on both Windows-based and Macintosh computers for content providers (coming in Silverlight 1.1)
  • Powerful encoding tools for live and on-demand publishing of media experiences with Microsoft Expression Encoder, including hardware-accelerated encoding of WMV and VC-1 at up to 15 times the performance of software alone when paired with a Tarari Encoder Accelerator board.

Connected to Data, Servers, and Services

  • Mash-up and incorporate services and data from the Web by taking advantage of the Silverlight support for LINQ while accessing that data with common protocols like JSON, RSS, POX, and REST.
  • Increase discoverability of rich interactive application (RIA) content that can be indexed and searched due to the text-based XAML format that describes interface and content in a Silverlight-based application.
  • Rapidly scale applications with Silverlight Streaming by Windows Live to host and integrate software services and media content.

Streaming audio and video

  • Silverlight Streaming by Windows Live offers a free streaming and application hosting solution for delivering high-quality, cross-platform, cross-browser, media-enabled rich interactive applications (RIAs). With the ability to author content in Microsoft Expression Encoder and other third-party editing environments, Web designers maintain complete control of the user experience.

Web 2.0 and Beyond with Silverlight and XAML

Monday, 10th December 2007 in Development by Simon | 5 comments

Microsoft is finally making real efforts to woo the designer community who have traditionally worshipped the Adobe and Mac product ranges. One new product that addresses this previously overlooked community is Silverlight, which uses the XAML technology and is touted as Microsoft’s Flash killer. For anyone who is keen to listen, Microsoft proposes that Silverlight will achieve similar results to Flash, but it does so in an entirely different way and has different aims. So, the big question is, will Microsoft be able to break the dominance of Adobe’s Flash platform, that is available on the PC, Mac and mobile devices alike? I’m sure the jury is out on that one, but it can be said it is an uphill task.

So what is Silverlight and XAML proposition? How does it vary from Flash?

Microsoft Silverlight is a proprietary runtime for browser-based Rich Internet Applications, providing a subset of the animation, vector graphics, and video playback capabilities of Windows Presentation Foundation. The runtime is available for Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X, with Linux support under development via the third-party Moonlight runtime.

Not much difference to Flash so far…

Extensible Application Markup Language (XAML) is a declarative XML-based language used to initialize structured values and objects. XAML is used extensively in the .NET Framework 3.0 technologies, particularly in Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF), where it is used as a user interface markup language to define UI elements, data binding, eventing, and other features, and in Windows Workflow Foundation (WWF), in which workflows themselves can be defined using XAML.

Not much difference to Adobes’s MXML…

Browser support…

A frequently asked question is which browsers and operating systems will it run on? If XAML is limited in this area, its usefulness in the web world will also be significantly limited. Previous encarnations of XAML, were limited and justifiably criticised as it would only work with an ActiveX control. However, this has now been resolved with support for Firefox, Opera, Safari and Netscape, Windows and OSX alike. Support is provided by a downloadable plugin, much like Flash!

Like Flash…

Silverlight enables web developers to create visually rich user interfaces and animations, play video clips and stream media within the web page, again, much like Flash! But it is different! The comparison doesn’t end there. Animations are organised using timelines and frames within the tool…how else would you organise an animation without timelines?!

Like Flex…but not!

Where things differ from Flash are the tools used to develop the Silverlight applications. Silverlight is supposed to be a way of designing and building rich user interfaces. However, standard HTML elements are missing. The way you design a particular interface is to build a standard HTML form in your favourite editor, e.g. Dreamweaver CS3, and then open this page in Silverlight to add the visual enhancements that your design requires. This sounds complicated to say the least. In comparison, Flash has a brilliant tool and framework called Flex that does this far more gracefully and with the development of Thermo, designers can really feel comfortable in the web application development mix.

Silverlight applications will also run on mobile devices, but the plan is for the applications to only run within a mobile web browser. This is unlike Adobe who are feaverishly developing the AIR runtime to allow Flash applications to run independently of the browser environment and offline.

So, Web 2.0 and beyond with Silverlight and XAML may be somewhat jumping the gun. You may say that there is nothing new or innovative with the Silverlight offering. It does, however, serve to emphasise how important the Rich Internet arena is becoming or indeed has become.

Future Directions for Rich Internet Applications

Thursday, 19th July 2007 in Strategy, Technology by Simon | 2 comments

Rich Internet Applications (RIAs) are just the beginning. A key trend taking place throughout the Web industry is the urgency to integrate disparate systems and software tools to reduce costs, increase developer productivity, reduce the need for manual processing and intervention in transactions, and decrease time to market. To achieve these objectives, organisations have endorsed the adoption of standards-based systems (e.g. XML, Design Patterns, CSS, ECMAScript) combined with the migration to Web Services and Service Orientated Architecture (SOA). This has led to a requirement to create a consistent and intuitive interface to applications, data and services. The immediate goal of these efforts is to provide simpler, quicker and more efficient access and processing of information. Increasingly, Web applications are also offering customers application interfaces that are more personalised and customised to each individual’s specific requests and requirements.

It is clear that RIAs offer the potential to fundamentally change the user experience and in doing so, yield significant business benefits. However, in order for RIAs to be widely employed, and for more companies to receive these kinds of returns, technologies to build RIAs will need to appeal to a wider range of developers. The ability to cost effectively create rich, engaging user experiences that support corporate objectives and reach a broader developer audience without sacrificing development productivity require a new generation of RIA tools. These tools are being developed by a large number of organisations with Adobe, Microsoft, Google, Apple and Sun leading the way with the AIR/Flash/Flex combination, Silverlight, Gears, Quicktime and JavaFX respectively.

The new generation of RIA tools being developed by the likes of Adobe and Microsoft must do the following to allow developers to truely harness the power of RIAs in the commercial environment:

  1. Allow developers to write applications using familiar development models to utilise and extend their current skills without requiring them to adopt entirely new or different skills
  2. Use standard and standards-based technologies
  3. Use industry specific programming models and patterns
  4. Use and/or leverage the existing IT infrastructure through wrap and reuse rather than rip and replace
  5. Provide pervasive, familiar programming models and an expressive user interface across platforms and devices; and
  6. Allow developers to create a solution that delivers scalable, secure, high performance solutions that are bandwidth efficient

These new RIA tools will need to provide the features that enhance IT developer’s abilities to be more creative and to accomplish RIA development with the same or less effort than the tools they use to create other types of applications. What is required are the tools that can help developers achieve these objectives without relying on only HTML or other scripting languages, or having to learn a completely new development approach.

Two vendors which have the technology and capaibility to fully deliver Rich Internet Applications are Adobe and Microsoft. With Microsoft’s Silverlight and XAML, developing rich internet applications to run on Windows platforms will progress at a fast rate. In turn, Adobe has had a head start with the aquisition of Macromedia and the subsequent addition of Flash and Flex to its product offering. Flash and its relative ubiquity across platforms and devices ensures that RIA development and production will be accessible to a large user base and as such puts Adobe at a distinct advantage over Microsoft.

Why You Should Consider Rich Internet Applications

Saturday, 14th July 2007 in Strategy, Technology by Simon | No comments

The Web has long promised to be a conduit to connect a business directly with its sales prospects, clients and partners. Yet often the Web fails to live up to its expectation due to limitations of the traditional, prohibitative HTML page-based model.

While Rich Internet Applications (RIAs) apply across a broad spectrum of industries and uses, one of their well-established merits is to allow a company to reduce the complexity that stands between where they are today with their traditional Web applications and where they want to be in the short to medium term. RIAs are consistently bringing companies closer to their vision of their application, closer to their customers, and closer to the business impact they believed the Web could actually have on their overall business model. This is expressed most clearly in what RIAs have allowed or enabled companies to do, namely provide Software as a Service (SaaS) as part and parcel of a Service Orientated Architecture (SOA).

Software as a Service

Companies have considered and are choosing RIAs because provide the following:

  1. Develop new kinds of applications with features or capabilities that would be extremely difficult or impossible for a developer to create using traditional Web technologies.
  2. Engage, guide and listen to their customers on-line more intimately or more closely to how they would do it in person to increase loyalty, improve service, deepen the customer relationship, distinguish the company, or guide product development.
  3. Create compelling, attractive and interactive Web sites using audio, video, text and graphics that generate leads, increase sales, simplify communication and create a unique online experience worth returning to.
  4. Simplify typically complex processes like registration, configuration or purchasing leading to increased leads, sales, bookings, time on the site and repeat visits.
  5. Present information to their employees, management and partners in clear, innovative, intuitive and effective ways to increase productivity, information sharing, decision-making and competitive advantage.
  6. Provide an engaging, highly interactive presentation layer to underlying Web Services.
  7. Reduce bandwidth costs associated with frequent page refresh for high traffic sites.
  8. Dramatically increase sales of their products and services through their Web channel; and
  9. Build an engaging, highly interactive Web site or application at a reduced cost compared to using alternative Web technologies.

The Future of the Rich Internet

Friday, 22nd June 2007 in Strategy, Technology by Simon | 2 comments

The Internet has emerged from obscurity to become a dominant platform for application development and is integral to the idea of Software as a Service (SaaS). Unfortunately the demand to build applications of increasing complexity has continued to outpace the ability of traditional Web applications to represent that complexity and expectation. Utilisation of AJAX technologies attempts to reconcile some of the issues, but frequently the result is a frustrating, confusing or disengaging user experience resulting in unhappy customers, lost sales, and increased costs.

We are in a period of expanding opportunity for Internet and intranet applications. The growth in adoption and usage of the Internet has acted as a driver behind technology spending, spawned such terms as Service Orientated Architecture (SOA), Software as a Service (SaaS) and Web Services, and enterprise integration trends that seek to combine back-office infrastructures with new front-office applications and the Internet.

Integral to this is the need to communicate better with employees, customers, suppliers, and partners. Intranet applications, including enterprise information portals and employee facing applications, are increasingly depended upon to share information across a company, while outwardly focused extranet applications seek to more tightly bind networks of partners, suppliers and customers and make communication, business transactions and support easier.

A key reason Web applications cannot represent these types of complexity is because of the limitations of HTML pages. The Internet grew up on the notion of a network of loosely coupled, unintelligent clients that communicate with increasingly intelligent servers by sending requests for pages. The emergence of Rich Internet Applications (RIA’s) has served to blur the distinction between the desktop and the Web and has resulted in smart, powerful and dynamic user interfaces. RIA’s seek to combine the best of the desktop, Web and communication technologies.

As one would expect, the driving forces behind Rich Internet Applications are the big guns in the technology and Web industry; namely Adobe, Google and Microsoft. Each company has produced their own RIA platforms:

Rich Internet Applications

Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR)

AIR is a cross-operating system runtime that allows developers to leverage their existing web development skills Flash, Flex, HTML, Ajax) to build and deploy desktop RIA’s.

Applications can be built using the following technologies:

  • Flash / Flex / ActionScript
  • HTML / JavaScript / CSS / AJAX
  • Combination of these technologies
  • PDF can be leveraged with any application

Adobe Integrated Runtime can be found at http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/air/

Google Gears

Google Gears is an open source browser extension that lets developers create web applications that can run offline.

Google Gears consists of three modules that address the core challenges in making web applications work offline.

  • LocalServer Cache and serve application resources (HTML, JavaScript, images, etc.) locally
  • Database Store data locally in a fully-searchable relational database
  • WorkerPool Make your web applications more responsive by performing resource-intensive operations asynchronously

Google Gears can be found at http://gears.google.com

Micrsoft Silverlight

Silverlight is a cross-browser, cross-platform plug-in for delivering the next generation of .NET based media experiences and rich interactive applications for the Web. Silverlight offers a flexible programming model that supports AJAX, VB, C#, Python, and Ruby, and integrates with existing Web applications. Silverlight supports fast, cost-effective delivery of high-quality video to all major browsers running on the Mac OS or Windows.

Microsoft Silverlight can be found at http://silverlight.net

Rich Internet Applications – A Background

Friday, 22nd June 2007 in Strategy, Technology by Simon | No comments

Rich Internet Applications (RIAs) combine the best user interface functionality of desktop software applications with the broad reach and low-cost deployment of Web applications and the best of interactive, multimedia communication. The end result is an application which provides a more intuitive, responsive, and effective user experience.

Rich Internet Applications Venn Diagram

More specifically, the best of the desktop environment includes providing an interactive user interface for validation and formatting, fast interface response times with no page refresh, common user interface behaviours such as drag-and-drop and the ability to work online and offline. The best of the Web includes capabilities such as instant deployment, cross-platform availability, the use of progressive download for retrieving content and data, the magazine-like layout of Web pages and leveraging widely adopted Internet standards. The best of communication means incorporating two-way interactive audio and video technologies.

This means that in a RIA environment, the client is capable of doing more than just rendering pages. It is able to perform computations, send and retrieve data in the background asynchronously from the user’s requests, redraw sections of a screen, use audio and video in a tightly integrated manner, and so forth, independently of the server or back end to which it is connected.

An RIA environment provides a strong technical platform that effectively restores the client’s abilities to be more like that of desktop software applications, or a traditional client in a client/server system. It fits into the traditional n-tier development process and integrates into legacy environments to extend existing applications without the need to rework them. And it also can serve as an interactive presentation layer above underlying Web Services. It is able to address various kinds of complexity. It enables development of applications that have complexity requirements, reducing the cost of development and frequently making development of such an application possible in the first place.

Because of their architecture and capabilities, RIAs have the potential to fundamentally change the way companies engage and interact with their Web users, leading to more effective user experiences with top- and bottom-line results.