Category Archives: flash

.net, adobe, flash, microsoft, silverlight, software development, web authoring

New York Times switches from WPF/Silverlight to Flash and AIR for Reader 2

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The New York Times has released Version 2 of its Times Reader, for seamless online/offline viewing of its content. It’s interesting from a media perspective, but hardly a breakthrough, since it is not new. What’s more interesting to me is that the Times switched from a hybrid approach using WPF (Windows Presentation Framework) on Windows and Silverlight on the Mac, to Adobe AIR. Switches like this are bad PR for Microsoft, since it gives the impression that the developers were sufficiently unhappy with WPF/Silverlight, or so strongly attracted to AIR, that they were willing to throw away much of their previous development effort.

I’ve been tracking Times Reader for some years. It was presented at Microsoft Mix07 and I wrote up a panel discussion on the subject:

I asked about the cross-platform issue. According to Bodkin a Silverlight implementation is on the way, which includes most of the features in the full version, in “a matter of months.”

That was optimistic; but a Silverlight version was delivered and I used it successfully on the Mac; though it lacked some features of the WPF edition. It also attracted hostility from Mac users who are Microsoft-averse, as I reported here, and apparently ran into further problems because of incompatibility with Safari 4.

I tried the new AIR edition and it seems pretty good, though my impression is that it is not quite as smooth as the old WPF version. I might be wrong, since I could not install both on the same machine. The new version does add video support. Here’s the old one:

and this is the new effort:

I think this is a fascinating case study which demonstrates a number of things.

First, that cross-platform support is not an optional feature any more (if it ever was) for this kind of public application. Let’s assume here that the WPF version was just fine for Windows users, but was not viable long-term for lack of cross-platform support. It was inevitable that the Times would eventually either use Silverlight on both Windows and Mac, or abandon both WPF and Silverlight for a cross-platform alternative.

Second, that Silverlight is not yet mature enough for this kind of application. Although the Times developers were able to deliver a Silverlight version, it required a bit of hackery for offline support (embedded Safari on the Mac) and apparently ran into version problems when Apple upgraded Safari. Silverlight is also known to be poor for text rendering – a Google search for “blurry text Silverlight” brings back plenty of hits. Adobe also made a big improvement to text handling in Flash player 10, with the new flash.text.engine.

Third, that offline support really is a big deal. Would Silverlight 3.0 have been good enough? Possibly, though I haven’t seen any suggestion that Silverlight 3.0 offline apps will be able to run in the background while showing just an icon in the notification area, to support continuous synchronization.

It is possibel that these problems may be fixed in Silverlight 4.0. That’s a long time to wait though, when you need your application out now (and your industry is in crisis).

It would be silly to extrapolate this case study into a broader statement about the superiority of Flash over Silverlight. For the specific needs of the New York Times though, it is easy to see why Adobe AIR appeals.

.net, adobe, flash, microsoft, software development, visual studio, web authoring

Silverlight: developer win, designer fail?

I posed this question in a post over on itjoblog. There are several reasons why Silverlight struggles to get designer attention, including:

1. Designers are pragmatic and target the runtime that is already deployed most broadly, ie. Flash.

2. Flash is already good enough so why bother?

3. The tools: Adobe’s designer tools are a de facto standard, target Flash, and run on the Mac.

Developer is another matter. The cross-platform .NET runtime is Silverlight’s big advantage; and this time the tools tip the balance towards Microsoft (Visual Studio) – not for everyone, but for the substantial Microsoft platform community. That’s going to be further reinforced by Visual Studio 2010 which gets full visual designer support, plus of course Silverlight 3.0.

Microsoft does have a problem with Silverlight out of the browser. Developers need a way to have these run with more local permissions, subject to user consent, otherwise they will turn to Adobe AIR. Actually the whole Silverlight on the desktop story is confused, since you can also do Silverlight Mesh-Enabled Web Applications, or stick Silverlight content in a desktop gadget or other embedded browser. No, not the one in AIR (nice idea though): Adobe only includes Flash support and the PDF plug-in.

The tension behind this is that ultimately developers and designers need to work on the same applications, so this remains a fascinating contest.

adobe, flash, internet, open source, silverlight, software development, web authoring

Flex Builder for Linux on hold: another sign of financial stress at Adobe?

On 21st April Adobe’s Ben Forta told a user group that Flex Builder 3 for Linux is on hold, citing lack of requisition, which is corp-speak for lack of demand.

Note that the Flex SDK does run on Linux. It is just the official IDE that is in question.

Linux is a free operating system, and this could be evidence that users of a free OS are less likely to purchase software than users of a paid-for OS. Or it could simply reflect poor market share for Linux outside servers. Even if it has just hit 1%, as hitslink reports, it is still barely more than 10% of the Mac share and a little over 1% of the Windows share. Some of those Linux machines will also be netbooks – secondary systems for users with a Windows or Mac for serious work such as design and development.

Nevertheless, I suspect there is more to it than that. I suspect Adobe would like to support Linux, because it wants to portray Flex as an open platform – the SDK is open source, though managed by Adobe, but the runtime engine is closed-source and proprietary. This may be another sign of Adobe’s financial stress. The company reported reduced quarter-on-quarter revenue for the the 3 months ending February 2009, and has been cutting staff numbers.

The backdrop to this, in contrast, is that Adobe is having great success with its Flash platform. There is no sign of Microsoft’s Silverlight denting the popularity of Flash on web sites, either for applets or media streaming.

The recession then? Partly; but this is also about Adobe’s business model. Adobe does not break out its figures in detail as far as I know: the last financial statement merely shows that its revenue is nearly 95% from product sales, the rest being services and support. Still, I’d guess that the largest component of its product sales must be Creative Suite. In other words, its business model is based on selling tools and giving away runtimes. When 47 million people watch Susan Boyle on YouTube, Adobe doesn’t make a penny, even though they are almost all using Flash to do so.

The tools market is a difficult one for various reasons, including competition from free products and the fact that the number of people needing development or design tools is always much smaller than the number needing runtimes. In a recession, deferring a tools upgrade is a obvious way for businesses to save money. Remaining primarily a tools company is a limit to Adobe’s growth and ultimately its profitability.

This is of concern to all Flash platform users. Adobe has proved to date a good steward of the technology. Some of us would like the balance of proprietary vs open tilted further towards open, but I doubt many would welcome a takeover or merger such as we have seen with Sun and Oracle (and there are a few parallels there).

There would also be many cries of “foul” if Adobe sought to further monetize Flash by starting to sell, say, a premium version of the Flash runtime.

Adobe is still a profitable company, and maybe when the economy recovers all this stress will be forgotten. Still, I’d guess that long-term Adobe will want to shift away from its dependency on sales of tools; and how and what it does to achieve that will have a big influence on the future of its RIA (Rich Internet Application) platform.

.net, adobe, cloud computing, flash, java, microsoft, silverlight, software development, Sun, windows

RIA (Rich Internet Applications): one day, all applications will be like this

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I loved this piece by Robin Bloor on The PC, The Cloud, RIA and the future. My favourite line:

Nowadays very few Mac/PC users have any idea where any program is executing.

And why should they? Users want stuff to just work, after all. Bloor says more clearly than I have managed why RIA is the future of client computing. He emphasises the cost savings of multi-tenancy, and the importance of offline capability; he says the PC will become a caching device. He thinks Google Chrome is significant. So do I. He makes an interesting point about piracy:

All apps will gradually move to RIA as a matter of vendor self interest. (They’d be mad not to, it prevents theft entirely.)

Bloor has said some of this before, of course, and been only half-right. In 1997 he made his remark that

Java is the epicenter of a software earthquake, and the shockwaves are already shaking the foundations of the software industry.

predicting that Java browser-hosted or thin clients would dominate computing; he was wrong about Java’s impact, though perhaps he could have been right if Sun had evolved the Java client runtime to be more like Adobe Flash or Microsoft Silverlight, prior to its recent hurried efforts with JavaFX. I also suspect that Microsoft and Windows have prospered more than Bloor expected in the intervening 12 years. These two things may be connected.

I think Bloor is more than half-right this time round, and that the RIA model with offline capability will grow in importance, making Flash vs Silverlight vs AJAX a key battleground.

adobe, flash, internet, iphone

BT brings Ribbit to the UK via Salesforce.com

Ribbit is an internet service for integrating voice communications into web applications. It is a US start-up that was acquired by BT in July 2008, but until now has not been available to UK customers. Today at Cloudforce BT announced Ribbit for Salesforce.com, an extension to the Salesforce CRM application and platform. In essence it adds a voice mailbox to your Salesforce.com account, enhanced with voice to text transcription. You can receive voice messages and have them sent to you as SMS or email; you can also use it as a voice memo utility where you dial in yourself to record the message.

A typical use case is for recording voice notes immediately after a meeting, perhaps when you get back to your car. These notes can then be attached to contacts or prospects for later reference.

The feature also adds a Flash-based VOIP phone to Saleforce.com, so you can make calls from your computer (not that this is anything new).

The cost will be around £35 per month.

I asked at the press briefing whether the voice-to-text really works. It’s good enough, I was told; the interesting part is how it done. First the message is processed using third-party technology. The automatic transcription assigns a confidence level to each word or phrase, and where confidence is low a human corrects it. Despite human involvement it is still only 80% – 90% accurate. I would like to know more about how many messages end up needing human intervention and how that impacts the time it takes – overall we were told 5-10 minutes for transcription on average. It would also be interesting to know who is doing this, where they are and how much they are paid – it sounds like an ideal use for Amazon’s Mechanical Turk.

Ribbit is also an example of Enterprise Flash. Its API is Flash/Flex. This works out well for Salesforce.com integration, as Salesforce.com also has a Flex API. It’s not so good for mobile devices, partly because Flash is not always available (hello iPhone), and partly because Flash Lite does not give access to a microphone, making it useless for voice communication. Apparently a REST API is also under development, though that won’t solve the client piece.

BT says there is more to come, both in terms of other Ribbit applications, and integration with other BT services.

My reaction: Ribbit/Salesforce.com integration looks convenient but is it really worth £35.00 per month, when you could just record notes on a portable device instead? Well, the big feature turns out to be the automatic transcription. One BT guy at the meeting says he uses the service to have his voicemail emailed to him, and as a result rarely needs to dial-in to listen to the message. That has real value – text is better than voice for lots of reasons. That said, is the transcription service really good enough? I sensed some hesitancy about this, though with human involvement it certainly could be.

.net, adobe, facebook, flash, microsoft

Flash library for Facebook, Silverlight library for MySpace

Adobe and Facebook have announced that ActionScript 3, the language of Flash 9 and higher, is now officially supported by FaceBook along with JavaScript and PHP. Information about coding for Facebook with Flash is here, and the library itself is on Google Code.

MySpace has announced the MySpace Silverlight SDK which will be hosted on Microsoft’s CodePlex open source site. The focus of the Microsoft Silverlight work seems to be on wrapping the Open Social API used by MySpace in a C# library.

Note that there is already documentation on creating Flash applications for MySpace. On the Facebook side, here’s an intriguing fact: there’s also an Fb:silverlight tag, though the documentation remarks: “For now this feature has no functionality.” Fb:swf is better supported. David Justice has been working on a Facebook library for Silverlight. It’s clear though that Flash is more widely accepted and supported on both platforms, reflecting its maturity and broader acceptance.

Smart developers can already devise code to access the public APIs of platforms like Facebook and MySpace from a variety of clients; this is about making that easier. It benefits the social networking sites if a wider group of developers has access to its platform, and with the advantages of multimedia features; equally it benefits the plug-in vendors if their runtime works smoothly with the broadest possible range of services. Therefore we should expect more of this type of announcement.

It is interesting to see technology partnerships bridging political divides. Microsoft has a stake in Facebook, for example, while Google has a partnership with MySpace.

Perhaps the most interesting outcome may be more Facebook applications based on AIR, Adobe’s Flash platform for the desktop. The existence of AIR applications like Twhirl and Tweetdeck has significantly boosted Twitter; maybe it is now Facebook’s turn.

adobe, flash, internet, silverlight, web authoring

RIA plug-in stats: Flash dominates

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I’ve just come across riastats.com which has statistics on which RIA (Rich Internet Application) plug-ins are installed on which browser.

The stats are from a relatively small sample: it claims to have analysed 1.5 million browsers across 42 sites at the time of writing.

The headline: Flash is on over 97% of browsers; but only 52% are at version 10. Java is on just under 75%, while Silverlight can only muster 20% penetration.

I also noticed that Firefox (25%) users are more likely to have Silverlight than IE (20%). Maybe all those locked-down corporate desktops.

Another snippet: less than 30% of Linux users have Sun’s Java plug-in installed.

Microsoft can take some comfort from the direction of the graph. In December 2008 only 15% of browsers had Silverlight. That’s pretty fast growth.

Still, the bottom line is that if you want to be fairly sure that your users have nothing to install in order to view your RIA content, use Flash. But stick to version 9.

adobe, cloud computing, flash, internet, microsoft, multimedia, silverlight, software, software development, Uncategorized, web authoring

How will Microsoft make money from Silverlight?

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Indeed, will it do so? I like Silverlight a lot; though I appreciate that to a Flash developer it may seem pointless. It does a lot of stuff right: small download, powerful layout language, cross-platform (with caveats), rich media, fast just-in-time compiled code.

Still, what intrigues me is how Silverlight has come from nowhere to what seems to be a central position in Microsoft’s product strategy in just a few years. What’s the business case? Or is it just that someone high up experienced a moment of horror – “Flash is taking over in web media and browser-hosted applications, we gotta do something”?

Let’s eliminate a few things. It’s not the design and developer tools. Making a profit from tools is hard, with tough competition both from open source, and from commercial companies giving away tools to promote other products. I don’t know how Microsoft’s figures look for the Expression range, but I’m guessing they bleed red, irrespective of their quality. Visual Studio may just about be a profit centre (though the Express series is free); but Silverlight is only a small corner of what it does.

Nor is it the runtime. Adobe can’t charge for Flash; Microsoft can’t charge for Silverlight.

I asked Twitter for some ideas. Here are some of the responses:

migueldeicaza @timanderson, my guesses:WinServer built-in-steaming;Strengthening .NET ecosystem, and client-server interactions;Keep share in RIA space

IanBlackburn @timanderson Isn’t Silverlight going to become the "Microsoft Client" and central to s+s?  Apps built with it can be charged in many way

harbars @timanderson no doubt with annoying adverts

mickael @timanderson isn’t silverlight a defensive move against other RIA platforms (like Adobe’s one)? They might only plan selling developmt tools

jonhoneyball @timanderson In the long term by hosting tv stations’ internet traffic and providing the charging/hosting/download/player model.

jonhoneyball @timanderson ie azure cloud + silverlight + someone elses content = ms revenue. no, it wont work, but its not unexpected ms-think.

jonhoneyball @timanderson why no work? price war to come on cloud host/delivery etc Someone will host BBC for free. Game over

There are two main themes here. One is media streaming; as the Internet takes over an increasing proportion of broadcasting and media delivery (note recent comments on Spotify) Microsoft plans to profit from server-side services. The challenges here are that there may be little money to be made; Adobe has a firm grip on this already; and Apple will do its own thing.

The other is about applications. This is the bit that makes sense to me. Microsoft knows that the era of Windows desktop clients, while not over, is in long-term decline; and that applies to applications like Office as well as custom business applications. Silverlight is a strong client platform for web-based alternatives. So I’m voting for Ian Blackburn’s comment above: it’s the Microsoft Client.

If that’s right, we’ll see Silverlight embed itself into more and more of Microsoft’s products, from desktop to server, just as Adobe is gradually remaking everything it does around Flash.

The difference is that Microsoft has far more invested in the status quo: selling Windows and Office. I’m guessing that there are heated internal battles around things like Web Office. The briefing I attended at the 2008 PDC on Office Web Applications was fascinating in respect of its ambivalence; for every web feature shown, the presenters wanted to emphasise that desktop Office was still the thing you should have.

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adobe, flash, software development

Adobe Flex community at odds over Fx prefix, lack of collaboration

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Some members of the community around Adobe’s open source Flex SDK are fuming at a decision made by Adobe back in October 2008, to prefix the new skinnable components in the forthcoming “Gumbo” release with Fx. This means you can disambiguate old and new components such as Button without relying on namespaces. On the other hand, what is wrong with namespaces? The issue has provoked a lot of debate, partly on the merits or otherwise of the Fx prefix, and partly on the open source development process itself. The Fx decision was announced rather than discussed. Simeon Bateman, who is now all-but proposing an Fx-less fork of the SDK, says:

Creating an open source project is about openness in planning and development. Not just about giving people the right to do with the code what they will. And this part of the Flex project is a complete failure … The current Flex SDK team has about 20 developers and they are fiendishly working on the code for the next version of Flex, version 4 code named Gumbo. And they are doing all that development in private, behind closed doors with nothing but commit logs for us to know what is happening. This is an open source project and we have no idea what is going coming or what the timelines are for milestones. What the hell are the milestones?

Manish Jethani argues that Fx is a sign of haste and corporate pressure:

Even though Flex is an open source project, it is very much run per corporate interests. In a truly open source project like the Linux kernel, there are no deadlines — it’s ready when it’s ready. That’s how research departments work. But Flex is no research, Flex is business. Why, wouldn’t the ‘Fx’ prefix give Flex Builder yet another advantage over competing IDEs? Think about it.

Ben Clinkinbeard has created a survey to allow Flex developers to express their opinions, though as a commenter notes, it is more of an objection petition than a survey.

Adobe responded with an online open meeting to discuss this and other matters which took place this morning – you can play the recording online. It may have been frustrating for those who felt strongly about it, since after presenting the reasons for the change the presenters deferred further discussion to the online forum. As far as I can tell, the Fx decision is unlikely to change.

Well, there is open source, and there is collaborative development, and they are not the same thing. Adobe retains tight control over Flex for the sake of its commercial interests. It is a reminder that although the Flex SDK is open source it is not a community property in the same way as Apache.

Once crumb of comfort for Adobe is that this kind of intense debate shows the high value of Flex to its developers. It would be far, far worse if nobody cared.

Update: you can vote against the fx prefix or discuss it in Adobe’s bug-tracking system here.

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.net, flash, java, silverlight, software development, Sun, web authoring

JavaFX code runs at the speed of Java

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The Java runtime used by Sun’s JavaFX is mature and well optimized, which means that non-visual code will generally perform well. I’ve just spotted that Josh Marinacci at Sun put up a version of my countprimes test to illustrate this. Here’s the JavaFX version. On my system JavaFX and Silverlight are neck-and-neck for this – sometimes one is faster, sometimes the other. Flash is much slower, and Javascript not in the race.

Next stop: an Alchemy version.