Toluu

The Universal Desktop

Advancing User Experience with Rich Internet Applications

The widget conundrumDecember 1

There’s a pretty good article in Advertising Age about the benefits of widgets and the fact that not a lot of people are using it. AdAge says that “entire segment” will amount to around $100 million. That sounds like a chunk of money, and especially one for an industry that I consider a subset of rich Internet applications, but as the holy grail of advertising, it’s not much money. And AdAge talks to people that bring up a number of issues around widgets including non-standardization, cost, and scale. All decent reasons, but I think we’re just now getting to the point where the technologies are viable for widgets on a wide scale.

I consider widgets a subset of rich Internet applications mostly because of the technology behind them. Almost all widgets tend to be pretty interactive which makes platforms like Flash and Silverlight ideal for deployment. The fact that the embed model works so well with those technologies makes it easy to port them. Adobe AIR provides desktop functionality that lets you persist and create notifications. Then think about Flash and Silverlight’s move into the mobile world and how easily it will be to repurpose widgets across devices.

That last part is key. There is a fairly sophisticated ecosystem building up around monetization of widgets. yourminis was one of the first companies to the space and have focused on customization

Google’s video chat plugin - a big deal for RIA developersNovember 13

A couple of days ago Google released a video chat plugin for Gmail. With Google, it’s always a little hard to figure out where all of the pieces fit - that’s why there are entire blogs dedicated to the company - but in this case, I think this seemingly innocuous Gmail feature hints at something bigger.

As I mentioned on RIA Weekly, I think there are a couple of core components to RIAs. One is a much improved graphical user interface and layout mechanism. This is part of the appeal behind technologies like Flex and XAML - they’ve got a robust set of components and it’s very easy to get pixel perfect layout. They also support vector graphics, another benefit of that increased rendering capability. The other is video and multimedia. Canvas kind of enables the first case on the HTML side, something Google could get behind. But video is tougher. Now Google has that piece. And as Dion notes, it’s not like they don’t have a way to deploy this in a wider, developer-friendly way.

The technology behind it seems a little ambiguous. They’re suppo

Aviary launches with brand new domain, pricing modelNovember 10

This is a bit old, but I haven’t had time to dig in and play with the public version of Aviary until recently. After a long beta period they’ve officially taken the wraps off of Phoenix, their bitmap editing tool and consolidated everything under the aviary.com domain. The launch not withstanding, the Aviary crew has been very, very busy and Aviary continues to be one of the most innovative set of RIAs that I’ve seen.

The beauty of Aviary isn’t the set of tools or the fantastic design and branding - though those all help - but how they’re building up their community. On their blog they’ve got a ton of samples to get you started. And baked into the tooling are all the steps that you take to create the end result. That means that if you want to, you can share all of the steps and settings that you used for your masterpiece. New users can look at that and figure out exactly how to get the most out of the tool. They’ve become famous on digg for their various creations. They’ve also started to roll out a way to make money by

Architecting your Rich Internet ApplicationsNovember 4

Josh Holmes has posted a set of slides and detailed explanation for a talk he and James Ward did about architecting rich Internet applications. The post and the slides are well worth a read. One of the things that has been both fun and terrifying to watch as Flex evolved was the increasing complexity of the applications. And with both Flash and Silverlight you have a lot of visual options at your disposal so it’s easy to focus on flashy visuals without architecting both under the hood and the overall user experience.

That’s one of the things I like about Josh’s slides, it covers both the design architecture as well as the application architecture. I’ve started to see this a lot with AIR applications. People spend a ton of time architecting the visual aspects but they aren’t thinking about the fact that this application is going to be open for long stretches of time so they haven’t thought out things like memory consumption or destroying objects - things that should all be part of a well architected application.

Both the post and the slides (below) are excellent and well worth the read for anyone building RIAs.

Architecture of RIA from JAOO

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SlideRocket opens up to the publicOctober 28

One of the most impressive Flex-based applications out there, SlideRocket, is now open for anyone to go and sign up. (Screenshot Gallery) They’ve been doing a private beta for the past few months but they launch today with some new features and a business model.

In talking with Mitch Grasso, the founder of SlideRocket, the plan was always to do a fremium model. They’ve got a free version which lets you have up to 250 megs of storage and gives you the basic online editor functionality. Then for more business users there are a couple of tiers - one for individuals and one for a group of people at a company - that includes more advanced features like collaboration and access to the offline presentation viewer which they built in Adobe AIR. It’s one of the first examples that I’ve seen of Adobe AIR being used as a pay-for extra.

Another notable feature is the marketplace. They’ve got a few partners including a stock photography site that will be populating the marketplace