This will be my last post on ZDNet. Blogging here has been one of the most fun things I’ve been able to do in my career. In fact, basically everything started here. Almost all of the various connections I’ve made over the past couple of years are as a result of this blog. It’s given me an unprecedented level of access to all of the smartest people in the RIA world. And it’s been a crazy ride. We’ve seen RIA go from something of a niche to a core part of the web. Almost every company has come up with some kind of RIA story including Apple, Google, Microsoft, Sun, and of course Adobe. The mindshare and ecosystem of RIAs has never been stronger and more diverse.

And that’s part of the reason why I’m giving up the blog. As RIAs have hit the main stream smaller niches have developed within the RIA space and the major technologies are being covered by the prominent bloggers and press. That’s been great for more coverage of RIAs and it also means that I’m busier than ever with my day job for Adobe. I haven’t had time in the past couple of months to do the blog justice and I hope RIAs get even bigger taking up more and more time.

I want to say thanks to all of you who made my particular road possible while I’ve had this blog. Thanks for the comments, the information, the support, the criticisms, and the demos you’ve given me. You’ll be able to find me on my personal blog, DigitalBackcountry (it’ll be generally Adobe-centric) and if you want to hear my take on RIAs you can catch me on RIA Weekly every week. I may also be popping up on BTL every once in a while.

To get your RIA fix I suggest Mary Jo Foley for Microsoft and Ed Burnette for JavaFX on the ZDNet side. Tim Anderson probably does the best job of covering all of the technologies together. My RIA Weekly co-host, Coté, has a great slant on things. Jeffrey Hammond is a fantastic analyst who knows the ins and outs of the RIA business. With those links you should be covered on all things RIA.

Thanks again for everything.

The news is a pretty depressing place right now but there was a small article in the Economist about how the Fashion industry is responding to the downturn that caught my eye. Towards the end of the article the Economist mentioned how designers are looking for ways to leverage digital distribution:

One firm, Halston, recently released its autumn collection through a music video. Others are also likely to pursue digital means to reach a broader audience. Catherine Malandrino, a popular French designer, has spent the past three months rworking her website to make it more “human and interactive”. Fashion, she points out, was historically old through intimate salons. She wants to re-establish that accessibility - and the internet allows her, and the others, to do it cheaply.

Fashion, and industries like it, are a perfect fit for the world of interactivity and RIAs. Clearly any kind of internet revival won’t be driven by fashonistas looking for some interactive work. But industries like Fashion, where there are strong emotional and design ties, will be ideal candidates for the more collaborative, video, and interactive applications for which RIA technologies are so well-suited.

It’s been oft-repeated that economic downturns, and the scarcity of resources during them, are what help the good ideas float to the top and succeed. But RIAs are seeing a tremendous amount of innovation at the runtime level which has been helped by a lot of competition in the space. Things like higher quality video, real-time communication and collaboration, a focus on design and design efficiency, as well as performance enhancements mean that we have an infrastructure in place that we haven’t had before. This is going to appeal to a wider range of industries who are using the web but looking for more value added services than just a website or even some of the social advancements from Web 2.0. It’s a good time to be thinking about and working with RIAs because they can provide a lot of value - even in this climate.

One of my favorite RIA events is 360|Flex. The organizers, Tom Ortega, and John Wilker, do a great job of getting the community excited and putting on an event with great technical content and great networking opportunities. The 360|Flex events end up feeling like a week hanging out with friends with some great sessions thrown in. And since we’ve seen an incredible interest on the part of RIA developers to start building things for the iPhone (and 200,000 applications can’t be wrong), they’re putting on an iPhone development conference in March called 360|iDev.

One of the things that I think is going to be interesting about this particular iPhone conference is the RIA background. The iPhone has become a big deal in the Flash community and gurus like Keith Peters have taken a head first plunge into the iPhone development world. Keith will be doing a session at 360|iDev, so this is going to be a great event to get some Flash perspective on iPhone development.

So if you’re doing RIA development and are looking to get started on the iPhone, check it out. It runs from March 2nd to the 4th at eBay’s San Jose office. Ticket prices are staggered and start at $200 so first folks to buy get the best prices (I think there are a few $200 tickets left). There are also four tracks: Game Development, Non-game Application Development, The Business of iPhone Development, and Hands-on Training, so there’s a lot of range in topics.

One of my favorite RIA events is 360|Flex. The organizers, Tom Ortega, and John Wilker, do a great job of getting the community excited and putting on an event with great technical content and great networking opportunities. The 360|Flex events end up feeling like a week hanging out with friends with some great sessions thrown in. And since we’ve seen an incredible interest on the part of RIA developers to start building things for the iPhone (and 200,000 applications can’t be wrong), they’re putting on an iPhone development conference in March called 360|iDev.

One of the things that I think is going to be interesting about this particular iPhone conference is the RIA background. The iPhone has become a big deal in the Flash community and gurus like Keith Peters have taken a head first plunge into the iPhone development world. Keith will be doing a session at 360|iDev, so this is going to be a great event to get some Flash perspective on iPhone development.

So if you’re doing RIA development and are looking to get started on the iPhone, check it out. It runs from March 2nd to the 4th at eBay’s San Jose office. Ticket prices are staggered and start at $200 so first folks to buy get the best prices (I think there are a few $200 tickets left). There are also four tracks: Game Development, Non-game Application Development, The Business of iPhone Development, and Hands-on Training, so there’s a lot of range in topics.

I’ve been really enjoying Richard Monson-Haefel’s blog on multi touch lately. Now that RIA technologies are able to do so much, it’s become apparent that the mouse and keyboard are simply too limiting as input devices. The maddening number of iPhone clones that do “gestures” but not true multi touch continues to leave me underwhelmed at the space. But with the iPhone and larger devices like Microsoft Surface or multi touch startups like Intuilab show that there’s a lot of innovation around these new interfaces and I think there is a very significant role for RIAs to play here.

We already know that Windows 7 will have multi touch support which means that anyone building WPF applications can incorporate multi touch functionality. Snow Leopard, Apple’s newest operating system, supposedly will include it as well but what I want to see are the RIA plugins include it: Flash, Silverlight, JavaFX, etc - because I think that’s where the exciting cases are.

Those plugins were built from the ground up to be rich in animation, multimedia, and experience - the perfect use case for multi touch. But I’m also very excited about what’s starting to happen with real time communication and collaboration with things like WCF and Cocomo. The web seems to be ready for real-time to take off, so we’re getting to the point where we have very rich data layers underneath extremely powerful user interface frameworks and technologies. The only piece that’s missing is an input mechanism that can actually make some of these things less cumbersome to use.

As the UIs and the data become more complex, there’s going to be a draw to move to better ways of actually interacting with the content. Multi touch technology gives us that, and as we’ve seen with the iPhone, people pick these applications up very, very quickly. That usability boost is critical if we want to start seeing widespread adoption of the more interesting user interface ideas out there. We’ve got all the parts of the puzzle, but it’s taking more time than I would have liked to bring it all together.

Apologies for the long hiatus. Between Christmas, a vacation to Japan, and everything else, things have been hectic. But hopefully I’m back with a vengeance.

I’ve been really enjoying Richard Monson-Haefel’s blog on multi touch lately. Now that RIA technologies are able to do so much, it’s become apparent that the mouse and keyboard are simply too limiting as input devices. The maddening number of iPhone clones that do “gestures” but not true multi touch continues to leave me underwhelmed at the space. But with the iPhone and larger devices like Microsoft Surface or multi touch startups like Intuilab show that there’s a lot of innovation around these new interfaces and I think there is a very significant role for RIAs to play here.

We already know that Windows 7 will have multi touch support which means that anyone building WPF applications can incorporate multi touch functionality. Snow Leopard, Apple’s newest operating system, supposedly will include it as well but what I want to see are the RIA plugins include it: Flash, Silverlight, JavaFX, etc - because I think that’s where the exciting cases are.

Those plugins were built from the ground up to be rich in animation, multimedia, and experience - the perfect use case for multi touch. But I’m also very excited about what’s starting to happen with real time communication and collaboration with things like WCF and Cocomo. The web seems to be ready for real-time to take off, so we’re getting to the point where we have very rich data layers underneath extremely powerful user interface frameworks and technologies. The only piece that’s missing is an input mechanism that can actually make some of these things less cumbersome to use.

As the UIs and the data become more complex, there’s going to be a draw to move to better ways of actually interacting with the content. Multi touch technology gives us that, and as we’ve seen with the iPhone, people pick these applications up very, very quickly. That usability boost is critical if we want to start seeing widespread adoption of the more interesting user interface ideas out there. We’ve got all the parts of the puzzle, but it’s taking more time than I would have liked to bring it all together.

Apologies for the long hiatus. Between Christmas, a vacation to Japan, and everything else, things have been hectic. But hopefully I’m back with a vengeance.

Marshall has the news up that Sprout Builder will no longer be offering free accounts. Sprout Builder is one of my favorite applications on the net and I always thought what they were doing for the Flash Platform was good. So while I share Marshall’s sadness at the loss of the free service, I think this is much healthier for the ecosystem. In my talks with Carnet Williams, the CEO of Sprout Builder, they were getting a ton of demand from companies that wanted professional created widgets as well as a “white label” version of the service called FanKits that they could brand and let people easily build widgets around a specific campaign. Both provide direct revenue to SproutBuilder and I think show that there is money to be made in the widget business.

And as Marshall notes, the prices are far from daunting. When SproutBuilder first came out there were some whispers that this might be an interesting online version of the current Flash tool. It’s not going to replace Flash in any way shape or form, but by having a very targeted model they’re showing that it’s possible to make money from web based tools that leverage the Flash Platform. I think this is good news for everyone in the RIA space as it shows there is a fairly robust ecosystem to create targeted tools on top of any given platform.

Marshall has the news up that Sprout Builder will no longer be offering free accounts. Sprout Builder is one of my favorite applications on the net and I always thought what they were doing for the Flash Platform was good. So while I share Marshall’s sadness at the loss of the free service, I think this is much healthier for the ecosystem. In my talks with Carnet Williams, the CEO of Sprout Builder, they were getting a ton of demand from companies that wanted professional created widgets as well as a “white label” version of the service called FanKits that they could brand and let people easily build widgets around a specific campaign. Both provide direct revenue to SproutBuilder and I think show that there is money to be made in the widget business.

And as Marshall notes, the prices are far from daunting. When SproutBuilder first came out there were some whispers that this might be an interesting online version of the current Flash tool. It’s not going to replace Flash in any way shape or form, but by having a very targeted model they’re showing that it’s possible to make money from web based tools that leverage the Flash Platform. I think this is good news for everyone in the RIA space as it shows there is a fairly robust ecosystem to create targeted tools on top of any given platform.

This morning Brightcove made an announcement that they’re adding a few new faces. A couple of those faces will be familiar to anyone who has been involved in the RIA world for the past couple of years. Jeff Whatcott, who was vice president of marketing at Adobe, is joining as senior vice president of marketing for Brightcove. The biggest news in my mind was that David Mendels, who was senior vice president at Adobe, is joining the board of directors. I was devastated when David left Adobe because he was a great outward presence on blogs, email, and every other form of communication. As an SVP it was always impressive to see him leave a comment on someone’s blog and I can remember thinking how cool it was when he would leave a comment on my blog when I was still a community member.

Brightcove has a ton of old Allaire/Macromedia/Adobe people, so it isn’t surprising that they would draw from that pool again, and both David and Jeff were based in the Newton office. There may be some more old Adobe faces popping up at Brightcove down the road. In part because they seem to be doing so well. As Jeremy’s letter said, they released Brightcove 3 which included a chance in direction away from individuals uploading content to more polished and branded work. It seems to have been received very well.

They’ve also don a ton of work on the developer side to make it easy to use and integrate the Brightcove platform. They’ve got an XML-based BEML langauge which lets you create and customize Flash-based video players. They’ve got a Media API which lets you use REST-based web services to get actual content and metadata out of your Brightcove account. They’ve also got a number of custom components and hooks for you to build your own, so that you can add basically anything you want to your video player like stock quotes, news tickers, or anything that might enhance the experience around your content.

Brightcove continues to do a good job. As I think we’ve seen with Hulu, content is king. Brightcove has a ton of content and they’re making that accessible in a number of different ways and letting people get in and customize it to make the experience their own. The addition of Jeff and David is yet another step in the right direction.

This morning Brightcove made an announcement that they’re adding a few new faces. A couple of those faces will be familiar to anyone who has been involved in the RIA world for the past couple of years. Jeff Whatcott, who was vice president of marketing at Adobe, is joining as senior vice president of marketing for Brightcove. The biggest news in my mind was that David Mendels, who was senior vice president at Adobe, is joining the board of directors. I was devastated when David left Adobe because he was a great outward presence on blogs, email, and every other form of communication. As an SVP it was always impressive to see him leave a comment on someone’s blog and I can remember thinking how cool it was when he would leave a comment on my blog when I was still a community member.

Brightcove has a ton of old Allaire/Macromedia/Adobe people, so it isn’t surprising that they would draw from that pool again, and both David and Jeff were based in the Newton office. There may be some more old Adobe faces popping up at Brightcove down the road. In part because they seem to be doing so well. As Jeremy’s letter said, they released Brightcove 3 which included a chance in direction away from individuals uploading content to more polished and branded work. It seems to have been received very well.

They’ve also don a ton of work on the developer side to make it easy to use and integrate the Brightcove platform. They’ve got an XML-based BEML langauge which lets you create and customize Flash-based video players. They’ve got a Media API which lets you use REST-based web services to get actual content and metadata out of your Brightcove account. They’ve also got a number of custom components and hooks for you to build your own, so that you can add basically anything you want to your video player like stock quotes, news tickers, or anything that might enhance the experience around your content.

Brightcove continues to do a good job. As I think we’ve seen with Hulu, content is king. Brightcove has a ton of content and they’re making that accessible in a number of different ways and letting people get in and customize it to make the experience their own. The addition of Jeff and David is yet another step in the right direction.