Blogs

“Herman Wong will be presenting on PureMVC. PureMVC is a lightweight framework for creating applications based upon the classic Model, View and Controller concept. Herman is a Flex / Air Developer for Nitobi.”

The event is Thursday at WorkSpace in Vancouver. Go here to register.

Duane stopped by the Nitobi Office earlier this year to chat with me about RIAs, what we do and where it’s all going. We also chat a bit about RobotReplay.

I wasn’t sure where it was all heading, but I guess I ended up on the first episode of Duane’s World for Adobe TV. Very cool. If you think you have a topic that would be good for Duane’s show leave me a comment and I’ll put you in touch.

I should call out that Adobe has done a great job with the content and UI of Adobe TV but has failed to provide clean URLs that are actually updated in the address bar. Thus it’s kind of a pain to find and share URLs and impossible to navigate with back button. Too bad it would be so easy to make it a great example of public facing Flex RIA. Someone _high_ and Adobe really needs to start hammering this sort of thing home if Adobe is going to successfully make the leap to Saas and web services. I guess it’s not enough to have Kevin Lynch talking about it. I also can’t resize this video, so it’s best to go to Adobe TV to watch it.

[Disclaimer Duane's a good friend and on Nitobi's Advisory Board]

Just saw this course posted online. I wish I was in NY so I could go.
Ineraction design for RIAs.
Some problems you will be able to solve when done with this class:

1. You will work on the redesign of a mission-critical financial services application to be rolled out to 6,000 financial consultants. The previous system was deployed as a desktop installed application using .NET services. You are tasked with redesigning it to work within a web browser. What is the right set of technologies to consider? What are the differences? How do I and should I replicate the behaviors of the desktop application in this new medium? What pitfalls should I be aware of when working on my design?
2. You are hired to design a hotel reservation system for the latest brand hotel to come from a major hospitality organization famous for top tier service. What advantages are there in using RIA behaviors and technologies to help enhance this new brand? What can go wrong to cause a backlash effect?

David Malouf is the instructor and is a very skilled interaction who’s well respected in the community and an active member of IXDA list. Hey David want to make a trip to Vancouver to put this course on here too? The weather is nice in summer:)

We’re pretty excited to be starting a new project that allows users to make low cost calls and sms with their existing phones over VOIP. The client is Verb Exchange another Vancouver startup that specializes in VOIP. They originally went down the .Net path but have now selected Flex/AIR for the user experience and platform portability.

Verb Exchange and Nitobi Partner on Tabrio; Application Built in Adobe Flex and Adobe AIR

With Tabrio, users choose from web, desktop or mobile access to place high-quality long distance calls or send and receive SMS text messages to anywhere in the world. It utilizes existing networks to provide best-of-breed call quality, while still offering VoIP’s significant cost savings. Additional features allow users to synchronize their contacts, send instant messages, and perform web searches from directly within the application.

“Tabrio targets the millions of people around the world who need a better way to stay in touch. Our goal is for those people to download Tabrio and understand it immediately,” says Christian Jensen, VP, Products and Services, Verb Exchange. “That’s where Nitobi excels. Their work will translate directly to more users, higher customer satisfaction, and increased profits.”

The interactive UI is being developed with Adobe Flex, a Flash-based rich Internet application (RIA) development framework, and the Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR), a platform that enables RIAs to run on the desktop. Flex and AIR were chosen for the ability to deliver highly interactive applications that deploy consistently in all major browsers on Mac and PC.

I’m in a rush to get out the door to NY and Europe…but stay for more updates on this exciting app.

The Adobe on AIR Tour is Headed to Europe And I’m on board to talk up Ajax development in AIR, our Dreamweaver Extensions and some usability topics.
Here’s the schedule:

* Madrid - March 31
* Paris - April 2
* Amsterdam - April 4
* Brussels - April 7
* London - April 9
* Dublin - April 11
* Stockholm - June 2
* Berlin - June 4
* Warsaw - June 6
* Prague - June 9
* Munich - June 11
* Milan - June 13

Please let me if you’re in any of these cities and would me to buy you a beer;-) Also would love to get some recommendations of stuff to do an check out.

Here’s a little clip of me talking about AIR on the Lab with Leo Laporte show.

We talked a little bit about what AIR is and then checked out some demos including Pownce, a Google Analytics app (correction there is no API for Google Analytics) and our SalesForce demo.

I was recently invited by my good friends Ryan Stewart and Cote to participate in their weekly podcast about Rich Internet Applications. Episode 3 is up on Redmonk’s Podcast.

We covered quite a range of topics:
* Usability, User Experience
* Designer/Developers and Workflow
* BlazeDS
* 2008 RIA Predictions - Ajax all the way baby!

Download the the MP3 here.

I’ll be giving a quick overview of developing with AIR Jan 30th at WDN 08. Should be a blast.

Web Directions North - Crash Course in AIR
There comes a time when web developers need to reach beyond the browser to allow users to go offline, use local files or get rid of the hideous browser chrome. The Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR) is an up an coming runtime technology that allows desktop applications to be developed with HTML, JavaScript, Flash or Flex. The AIR runtime and SDK are completely free so anyone can get started immediately.

Andre Charland will will give an overview or AIR, the APIs you get access to and how to build a simple Flex and HTML application with it. From there we will explore some of the tools available to make AIR development easier and faster. We’ll finish up with a few important usability guidelines and real world case studies of AIR projects.

Oh ya there’s a ski trip included in the conference so it’s probably worth dropping everything else in life to attend:)

Dave Johnson just put up a post titled “Ajax Alive and Kicking” that looks at where Ajax is today and what some of the new innovations in the space are. He identifies the key factors in why Ajax is still continuing to the be successful versus other RIA technologies and in particular Flex.

An additional benefit to Ajax (HTML + JS) is that its interactions are somewhat measurable, which is much more difficult in the Flash world. If you put Google Analytics on your Flash site and you don’t get much, a little bit more now with “Events” in Google Analytics but not much. How meaning is a page in the historical sense in an RIA? Of course this falls down in Ajax sites too, but tools like our RobotReplay are springing up to fill that void already, but I don’t see the same happening for Flash/Flex. Of course we’re looking at it, but it’s definitely a chicken and egg thing. One might choose Ajax over Flex because they can measure interactions and effectiveness of their public facing Ajax more easily, and we chose to build RobotReplay for Ajax first because more people use it. This is a very important decision if ad revenues and/or conversion rates mean anything to your business.

Ryan Stewart pointed out that Yahoo has added charting to their framework:

YUI, one of the most popular Ajax frameworks, has implemented charting functionality using Flash. Using Flash for charting with Ajax isn’t a new concept.

I agree that this is great news for Adobe and the Flash platform. However, I think it’s a little ridiculous Adobe didn’t facilitate this with Flex Charting, FA Bridge and External Interface. It’s been almost 2 yrs since we did this, and it should have been a model for how Adobe should move forward supporting the Ajax community. Instead Adobe has this kick ass charting capability locked up in a component that costs a few hundred dollars and not getting much play. Especially when you see articles like this pitting Adobe against Ajax. Adobe has jumped into the Ajax game with Webkit in AIR, has tooling with JS Eclipse and Dreamweaver but just needs to go a little bit further to really dominate the RIA space. I’ve pondered before on what impact Flash and AIR can have as dominant runtimes, but but the lions share of web apps today are in the Ajax camp, so Adobe has to win there too. We’ll see what happens.