Category Archives: google

adobe, bbc, flash, google, linux, open source, professional, software development, Web

Cross-platform concerns as Adobe abandons AIR for Linux

Adobe is giving up on AIR for Linux – at least, in a fully supported manner:

To support the variety of Linux-based platforms across PCs and devices, we are prioritizing a Linux porting kit for AIR (including source code), which Open Screen Project (OSP) partners can use to complete implementations of AIR for Linux-based platforms on PCs, mobile devices, TVs and TV-connected devices. We will no longer be releasing our own versions of Adobe AIR and the AIR SDK for desktop Linux, but expect that one or more of our partners will do so. The last Adobe release of AIR for desktop Linux is AIR 2.6.

This is a curious message. OSP partners include ARM, Intel, the BBC, Google, Toshiba and other big names; but which of these might build an AIR SDK and on what sort of terms might it be supplied? Or it is more likely that, say, the BBC will deliver BBC iPlayer for LInux in a bundle that includes the AIR runtime? Or is it just wishful thinking?

Adobe’s open source evangelist Dave McAllister has a go at defending the decision, pointing out that the growing client operating systems are Android and iOS, not desktop Linux, and that AIR for Linux accounts for only a 0.5% download share. However, Linux developers observe that Adobe’s AIR for Linux effort has always been half-hearted and tricky to install, especially on 64-bit installations. AIR itself is still 32-bit, as is the Flash Player on all systems, though there is 64-bit version in preview codenamed “Square”.

Most people run Windows or Mac desktops, and will not miss AIR for Linux. That said, decisions like this do undermine confidence in the Flash platform as a cross-platform proposition. The problem is, Flash technology is not open source and ultimately whether a particular platform is supported is a matter for Adobe, with all the commercial and political factors that implies.

The risk for Adobe is that when it abandons smaller platforms, it make open standard alternatives and in particular the collection of web technologies we call HTML5 more attractive.

adobe, apple, eclipse, google, mobile, professional, software development

Appcelerator has released Titanium Studio, IDE for cross-platform mobile development

Appcelerator has released Titanium Studio, an IDE built with Aptana, the Eclipse-based IDE which the company acquired in January. It is an interesting products because it lets you build cross-platform mobile apps for Apple iOS, Google Android, and Blackberry, as well as desktop applications.

I downloaded the community edition and gave it a quick try. The download includes the Titanium SDK and is around 150MB.

Titanium Studio wanted to grab file associations for CSS, JS and PHP by default – but at least it asked first

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I noticed lots of Python scripts getting installed. The install completed and I was up and running.

Running the IDE requires login, which seems intrusive. You can avoid this by going offline.

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I created a new empty Android 2.2 project and got an error on first run. Required jarsigner not found. Required javac not found.

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I fixed this by adding the JDK to the path and setting Java_home to the JDK; previously my Adobe CS5 install had set this to its own JRE install.

Next, I built a hello world application.

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It feels like a version 1.0 release. When I clicked Run it started the emulator but did not run the app for some reason. A second run after the emulator had opened worked. Code Assist seems a bit hit or miss. There it tooltip help for some keywords, but too brief to be much use, and pressing F1 is unrewarding. No visual GUI designer. Finally, and this is purely a personal thing, the editor has a black background – something I will be sure to change soon.

Nevertheless, this is a step forward for Titanium and presuming the apps perform well I think it is significant and worth investigating.

apple, google, itunes, software development, Web, web authoring

Financial Times ports app to web to avoid iTunes

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The Financial Times, which is among the few web publications that seems able to make sense of paywalled content, is launching a web application [paywalled article] for mobile devices, specifically to bypass Apple’s iTunes App Store. Here they are side by side.

image image

Rob Grimshaw, managing director of FT.com, said the FT had no plans to pull out of any apps store, but that it would encourage users to adopt the web app with a marketing campaign, including a week’s free access.

The issue highlighted in the FT’s own article is analytics. The FT says it wants to "secure a direct relationship with readers." Apple currently does not divulge information about subscribers to publishers.

Another possible factor may be Apple’s insistence that all subscriptions and in-app purchases are offered through its own payment system, ensuring a 30% cut of every transaction. Publishers may also offer subscriptions on their own site, but may not undercut the App Store, nor include links to such offers within the app, as detailed here.

Is the web app as good? Well, A banner encourages the user to pin the app to the home screen so that it behaves more like an app:

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Further, the web app makes use of HTML 5 local storage to enable offline reading and prompts the user to increase its local storage space:

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With these two features, the web option can be nearly as good as a native app. However, while there are advantages for the FT, there will be little or no intrinsic advantage for subscribers, who like the convenience of purchasing through the App Store, unless the web option is cheaper or better. Perhaps it is: the FT’s Tim Bradshaw says it is “actually faster than native”.

The dark side of Apple’s success with iOS is the company’s control over the platform and tax on all transactions within it. Interesting to see the FT turning back to the open web in an effort to win back a little freedom.

.net, apple, google, internet, javascript, microsoft, mobile, professional, silverlight, software development, visual studio, Web, windows

Considering Windows 8 as an HTML platform

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Amongst all the fuss about whether Microsoft is deprecating Silverlight or even client-side .NET, it is easy to lose sight of the other angle on this. What are the implications of Microsoft embracing HTML and JavaScript as a new first-class Windows development platform? Here’s the quote again:

Today, we also talked a bit about how developers will build apps for the new system. Windows 8 apps use the power of HTML5, tapping into the native capabilities of Windows using standard JavaScript and HTML to deliver new kinds of experiences. These new Windows 8 apps are full-screen and touch-optimized, and they easily integrate with the capabilities of the new Windows user interface.

When Microsoft introduced IE9 with hardware-accelerated graphics, support for some key parts of HTML 5, and a new fast JavaScript engine, it was not only trying to recover ground in the browser wars. It also had in mind a new application runtime for Windows, for desktop as well as for web applications.

In order to achieve this, we can expect more hooks between the browser engine and the local operating system. There is potential security risk, but Microsoft of all companies will be sensitive to this and I would expect it to get the security right. The further implication is that some parts of a Windows HTML application will be Windows-specific. It is an “Embrace and extend” strategy, as I noted in this Register article back in September last year when former Silverlight product manager Scott Barnes broke the story of how the Windows team at Microsoft was favouring HTML and JavaScript above .NET.

The rationale for this is two-fold. First, I’m guessing that Microsoft thinks it will work better. Although .NET client apps are now commonplace, especially for custom business applications, problems like slow start-up and heavy memory requirements never really went away, though I would argue that in Silverlight they are almost eliminated.

Second, HTML and JavaScript is a universal programming platform. With the new model, any developer who can code a web page can also code a Windows app. Corporate VP Michael Angiulo said at Computex in Taipei:

Windows 8’s new application platform … is based on HTML 5, JavaScript and CSS, the most widely understood programming languages of all time. These languages form the backbone of the web, so that on day 1 when Windows 8 ships hundreds of millions of developers will already know how to build great apps for Windows 8.

These are both compelling arguments. Nevertheless, there are several reasons why making Windows an HTML platform might not be the instant hit that Microsoft will be hoping for. Here are a few:

  • Microsoft’s Visual Studio is .NET oriented. It does have a web design tool, Expression Web, which is OK but still falls short compared to Adobe Dreamweaver. Web designers tend to use Dreamweaver anyway, thanks to Mac compatibility and integration with other Adobe tools. Even Dreamweaver is not great as an application development tool, as opposed to a web design tool. Tooling is a problem, and it is fair to say that whatever goodies Microsoft comes up with in this area will likely be a step back compared to what it already has for C# or C++.
  • Standards are a mixed blessing if you are trying to sell an operating system. If Microsoft does such a good job of standards support that the same apps run with minor tweaks on an iPad and on Android, users may do just that. If Microsoft encumbers the standards with too many proprietary extensions, the universality of the platform is lost.
  • Windows plus HTML and JavaScript sounds a lot like Palm/HP WebOS, which has gained favourable reviews but has yet to take off in terms of sales. Otherwise, Palm would not have been taken over by HP.
  • The question of whether HTML and JavaScript will really take over app development is open. I certainly hear voices saying so. I interviewed Nitobi’s president André Charland, in charge of PhoneGap, and he makes a good case. On the other hand, App development today is still dominated by platform-specific development, Objective C for Apple iOS and Java on Dalvik, the Google Android virtual machine.
  • The standard in HTML/JavaScript app platforms is not Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, but WebKit, as used in iOS and in Google Android and Chrome. Microsoft did great work in standards support in IE9, but so far it has not stopped its browser share decline. Worldwide figures from StatCounter show Internet Explorer in continuing slow decline overall, and Chrome still growing and set to overtake Firefox in a year or so.

In other words, there is little evidence that embracing HTML and JavaScript as an app platform will ensure success for Windows 8.

That said, other factors count for more. Developers will go where their customers are, and if Microsoft turns out a version of Windows that wins substantial market share in the emerging tablet market as well as on traditional notebooks, the new platform will be a hit.

The risk though is that the market will continue to perceive Windows as an OS for desktop and laptop, and look to iOS or Android for mobile and touch devices. The dual personality of Windows 8 may count against it, if it means devices that are compromised by having to support both user interface models.

cloud computing, google, internet, microsoft, professional, security, sharepoint, Web

Cloud is identity management says Kim Cameron, now ex-Microsoft

Kim Cameron, formerly chief identity architect at Microsoft, has  confirmed that he has left the company.

In an interview at the European Identity Conference in Munich he discusses the state of play in identity management, but does not explain what interests me most: why he left. He was respected across the industry and to my mind was a tremendous asset to Microsoft; his presence went a long way to undoing the damage of Hailstorm, an abandoned project from 2001 which sought to place Microsoft at the centre of digital life and failed largely because of industry mistrust. He formulated laws of identity which express good identity practice, things like minimal disclosure, justifiable parties, and user control and consent.

Identity is a complex and to most people an unexciting topic; yet it has never been more important. It is a central issue around Google’s recently announced Chromebook, for example; yet we tend to be distracted by other issues, like hardware features or software quality, and to miss the identity implications. Vendors are careful never to spell these out, so we need individuals like Cameron who get it.

“Cloud is identity management,” he says in the interview.

Cameron stands by his laws of identity, which is says are still “essentially correct”. However, events like the recent Sony data loss show how little the wider industry respects them.

So what happened at Microsoft? Although he puts a brave face on it, I am sure he must have been disappointed by the failure of Cardspace, a user interface and infrastructure for identity management that was recently abandoned. It was not successful, he says, because “it was not adopted by the large players,” but what he does not say is that Microsoft itself could have done much more to support it.

That may have been a point of tension; or maybe there were other disagreements. Cameron does not talk down his former company though. “There are a lot of people there who share the ideas that I was expressing, and my hope is that those ideas will continue to be put in practice,” he says, though the carefully chosen words leave space for the possibility that another well-represented internal group do not share them. He adds though that products like SharePoint do have his ideas about claims-based identity management baked into them.

Leaving aside Microsoft, Cameron makes what seems to me an important point about advocacy. “We’re at the beginning of a tremendously complex and deep technological change,” he says, and is worried by the fact that with vendors chasing immediate advantage there may be “no advocates for user-centric, user in control experience.”

Fortunately for us, Cameron is not bowing out altogether. “How can I stop? It is so interesting,” he says.

apple, google, mobile, professional, web authoring

Apple, Google: risks of third–party platforms for developers

This week there are a couple of stories about companies whose business was affected by the third-party platform on which they deploy.

The first is from a post from Beamitdown Software’s Dennis Morin whose iFlowReader app for iOS is no longer viable following changes Apple has made to its developer agreement, insisting that add-on content for apps must be sold through Apple’s purchase system, where it is subject to a 30% fee. Beamitdown’s product is an eBook reader, and the content is eBooks, on which the company gets a 30% commission from the publisher. No profit.

It is also worth reading Morin’s interview with CNET in which he adds some detail.

Morin’s complaint is that Apple changed the rules; and reading his account of how difficult it was to communicate with Apple and how unsatisfactory and unreasonable the outcome is, it is hard not to be sympathetic.

On the  other hand, was it sensible to build a business on a platform that you do not control, and with a product that competes, and was always likely to compete, with a similar service from the owner of that platform?

Ask Skyhook, which is trying to offer location services on Android devices, and is suing Google for allegedly blocking Skyhook’s deal with Motorola to favour of its own services. The action has unearthed  correspondence between Google and Motorola that shows the limits of Android’s openness, though I have no idea about the merits of the legal action. Note that a key point here is not the Android OS itself, but Google’s applications which include Android Market. You will notice that the cheapest Android devices, like the famously poor Next Tablet, do not include the Android Market or other Google applications; they use Android source code but are not fully part of the ecosystem:

Is compatibility mandatory?

No. The Android Compatibility Program is optional. Since the Android source code is open, anyone can use it to build any kind of device. However, if a manufacturer wishes to use the Android name with their product, or wants access to Android Market, they must first demonstrate that the device is compatible.

How can I get access to the Google apps for Android, such as Maps?

The Google apps for Android, such as YouTube, Google Maps and Navigation, Gmail, and so on are Google properties that are not part of Android, and are licensed separately. Contact android-partnerships@google.com for inquiries related to those apps.

Who determines what will be part of the compatibility definition?

Since Google is responsible for the overall direction of Android as a platform and product, Google maintains the Compatibility Definition Document for each release. We draft the CDD for a new Android version in consultation with a number of OEMs, who provide input on its contents.

The Next tablet and devices like demonstrate why Google having a measure of control over Android is not a bad thing. However it gets uncomfortable if you want to put out a device that uses Android in ways that conflict with Google’s goals.

What are Google’s goals? It is a good question; but my assumption is that Android is intended to promote Google’s services such as search, and to make your Google identity central to your digital life so that you use Google mail, payments, Google Apps and so on. Further, Android is a strategic play to prevent Apple from owning mobile outright, at least at the high end, and in that respect it is proving successful.

The newly announced Chromebook is more closely tied to Google and delivers more obvious benefit to the company, but whether it will be as successful as Android is doubtful.

The bottom line is that if you choose to deploy on someone else’s platform, you have to take account of the risk that entails. This is nothing new – try marketing an office suite for Windows – but the extent to which the platform is controlled has been taken to a new level by Apple, and even Android has its risks. The nearest thing to an open platform that has broad reach is the Web and web technologies.

adobe, cloud computing, google, mobile, professional

Chromebook: web applications put to the test, and by the way no Java

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Yesterday Google announced the availability of the first commercial Chromebook, a Linux computer running the Chrome browser and not much else. There are machines from Acer and Samsung which are traditional laptop/netbook clamshell designs, with an Intel Atom dual core processor, 16GB solid state storage, and a 12.1” screen. Price will be a bit less than $400, or organisations can subscribe from $28 or €21 per month in which case they get full support and hardware replacement. There are wi-fi and 3G options. Nobody is going to be excited about the hardware.

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The Chromebook may be the most secure computer available, if Google has got it right. The OS is inaccessible to the user and protected from the browser, and system patching is automatic.

The strength and weakness of the Chromebook is that is only runs web applications – the only exception being utilities that Google itself supplies. Are we ready for a computer that is little use offline? I am not sure; but this will be an interesting experiment.

The Chromebook is a compelling alternative to a traditional PC with its susceptibility to malware and dependence on locally installed applications and data. If you lose your PC, getting a new one up and running can be a considerable hassle, though large businesses have almost cracked the problem with system images and standard builds. Lose a Chromebook, and you just get another one and sign in.

You sign into Google of course, and that is a worry if you would rather not be dependent on a single corporation for your digital identity and a large chunk of your data.

The problem for the Chromebook is that Apple’s iPad and numerous Google Android tablets and netbooks offer security that is nearly as good, and local applications as well as web applications, for a not dissimilar cost. These devices are also easy to restore if they break or go missing, slightly less so than a Chromebook but not much.

The choice looks a bit like this:

  1. Chromebook: Web applications only
  2. iPad/Android: Web applications and local apps

Put like that, it is difficult to see the advantage of the Chromebook. The subscription scheme is interesting though; it is a new business computing model that brings the cloud computing principle of operating expenditure instead of capital expenditure to the desktop.

The offline issue may be the worst thing about a Chromebook. When I travel, I frequently find myself without a good internet connection. The word “offline” does not feature in either the consumer or business frequently asked questions – a question Google would rather you did not ask?

Yet there is 16GB storage on board. That is a lot. In theory, HTML 5 local storage should solve the offline problem, but few web apps, including Google’s own, make this seamless yet.

A few other observations. While there are no user-installable client apps, Google is adding some utilities.

VPN is coming:

We’ve heard from our pilot customers that VPN is an important feature for businesses and schools, and we’re working very hard to bake this into Chromebooks soon. Support for some VPN implementation is already in the product and we’ll both extend support for more VPNs and get these features to stable soon.

Remote desktop access is coming:

we are developing a free service called Chromoting that will enable Chrome notebook users to remotely access their existing PCs and Macs.

Apparently this is based on Citrix Receiver.

There is a bias towards Adobe Flash:

Chromebooks have Flash support built-in, but they do not support Java or Silverlight.

Another blow for Java on the client.

apple, google, microsoft, mobile, nokia, professional, software development, sony

Developers and mobile platforms: lies, damn lies and surveys

I’ve been reading the IDC/Appcelerator developer survey about their attitudes to mobile platforms. The survey covered 2,760 Appcelerator Titanium developers between April 11-13, so it is certainly current and with a sample just about big enough to be interesting.

The survey asks developers if they are “very interested” in developing for specific platforms, with the following results, and with comparisons to 3 months ago:

  • 91% iPhone (fractionally down)
  • 86% iPad (fractionally down)
  • 85% Android phones (down from 87%)
  • 71% Android tablets (down from 74%)
  • 29% Windows Phone 7 (down from 36%)
  • 27% Blackberry phones (down from 38%)

The survey is titled:

Apple shines, Google slows, and Microsoft edges RIM in battle for mobile developer mindshare.

Is that a fair summary? It is not what I would highlight. I cannot read the exact figures from the chunky graphic, but it is clear that the iOS figures are also fractionally down, maybe by just 1%, but hardly much different from the Android figures on a sample of this size. Both are pretty much flat.

The figures for Windows Phone 7 and Blackberry are more dramatic; though we should at least note that Appcelerator Titanium is a cross-platform toolkit that does not currently support Windows Phone 7, and that its support for Blackberry is only in preview. That was true last time round as well, but I’m not sure that asking developers about their plans for a platform which the toolkit does not currently support is the best way to gauge overall interest.

Another question that interests me: is developer interest a cause or an effect of a mobile platform’s success? A bit of each, no doubt; but personally I think the “effect” model is stronger than the “cause” model. Developers pick a platform either because they have immediate customers for apps on that platform, or because they think they can make money from it.

Nurturing a strong developer community is definitely important for a platform provider; but I doubt it ranks as highly as other factors, like building a strong retail presence, delivering excellent devices at the right price, and focusing on usability and a good end-user experience.

If you are interested in Appcelerator Titanium you might like to read my interview with the CEO at Mobile World Congress; and this discussion on whether Titanium really builds native apps.

.net, google, hp, microsoft, mobile, professional, silverlight, software development, visual studio, windows

Windows Phone 8 will run Windows 8, with Silverlight centre stage?

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More information on Windows 8 is leaking out now; and it gives some clues about how Microsoft intends to make sense of its two device platforms, Windows tablets and Windows Phone.

Microsoft held back from making its Windows Phone 7 OS available on tablets, which is why most of the numerous tablets being pushed out to compete with Apple run Google Android, and a few of them Windows 7 with its excessive power requirements and a user interface poorly designed for touch control.

Now the strong rumour is that Windows 8 supports two user interfaces, one that is tile-based like Windows Phone 7, and another that is designed for PCs.

In other words, rather than continuing with the Windows Phone 7 OS which is built on Windows CE, Microsoft will build a new version of the Windows Phone 7 UI on top of full Windows.

My further assumption is that Silverlight apps will still run on the new OS, providing continuity with Windows Phone 7 which uses Silverlight or XNA, both based on .NET, for its application platform.

Silverlight might also be used as the platform for apps delivered by the new Windows app store. This is Paul Thurrott, though reported as rumour:

Windows 8 will also include a new app model codenamed Jupiter that will target a new Windows Marketplace app store. The app store will provide access to new, Silverlight based "immersive" applications that are deployed as AppX packages (.appx). The Windows and Office teams are betting very heavily on this new app type, according to my source, and development has already begun using a beta version of Visual Studio 2012. These apps can be written in C#, Visual Basic, and even C++.

We do know that Silverlight 5 supports full platform invoke of native code, a feature which tends to support the idea that it is becoming a key runtime for Windows.

Let me speculate a little further. Imagine you are Adobe, for example, which has said it will deliver the Flash runtime for Windows Phone. Although it competes with Silverlight to some extent, Microsoft needs to tick the Flash box for Windows Phone. But why would Adobe want to invest in Flash for Windows CE, when this OS is not going to be used for Windows Phone 8 and it will have to write new code? I will not be surprised if we hear that Flash is now not coming until Windows Phone 8.

Even within Microsoft itself, I would guess that investment is focused on the next generation rather than the one that is destined to be short-lived.

One partner that is no doubt close to Microsoft’s plans is Nokia. If the above is correct, then Nokia is buying into the Windows OS, not the Windows Phone OS. Will Nokia wait for Windows Phone 8 before launching devices on the platform? I have no idea – and delay will be costly – but I imagine its main plans will be focused on Windows Phone 8 and the possibility of tablet as well as smartphone devices.

The immediate conclusions would be:

  • Silverlight is safe as a development platform, but only for Windows. See also Silverlight the new Windows runtime, HTML 5 the new Silverlight?
  • The Windows Phone 7 OS will be short-lived but the new UI should be a natural progression from what we have now, and apps should still run, so Microsoft can position Windows Phone 8 to users as a new version of Windows Phone rather than a change of direction.
  • Microsoft will not have a coherent mobile and tablet platform until Windows 8 ships sometime in 2012. Google, Apple, RIM, HP, all have plenty of time to establish their competing platforms.
.net, apple, cloud computing, google, internet, iphone, microsoft, mobile, professional, silverlight, software development, visual studio, web authoring

Appcelerator CEO on Titanium, Aptana and the future of mobile development

I met with Aptana CEO and co-founder Jeff Haynie at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona last month.

Appcelerator’s main product is Titanium, an SDK which takes HTML and JavaScript source files and compiles them to native apps for several platforms, including Windows Mac and Linux on the desktop, and Google Android or Apple iOS for mobile. RIM Blackberry support is in preview. Appcelerator has recently acquired the Aptana IDE for HTML, JavaScript, CSS, Ruby on Rails, Python and Adobe AIR. The company has also partnered with Engine Yard for cloud-hosted Ruby on Rails applications to deliver web services to clients built with Titanium.

Haynie says that mobile is currently a three-horse race between Apple iOS, Google Android, and RIM Blackberry; but he expects further diversification. Microsoft Windows Phone is under consideration, and he says that cross-compiling to Silverlight would be possible for Titanium:

It’s a .NET SDK, we would have to build a translation into Silverlight. That’s how we do it for iOS, we translate code into Objective C. We don’t think it’s technically insurmountable.

I asked about the Appcelerator Freemium business model. Titanium is open source and you can download and use the SDK commercially for free. Haynie says it works well because companies can do a full evaluation and get to understand the value of the software fully before deciding whether to purchase. However he emphasised that larger companies, other than non-profits, are expected to take out a paid subscription.

This point could do with clarification. Indeed, the Appcelerator Plans and Pricing page shows Titanium Indie which is free but for companies of less then 25 employees, and other editions which are paid-for. But as far as I can tell there are no restrictions on the SDK. See the FAQ which says:

Can I use Titanium for a commercial application?

Yes. You can use Titanium in both a personal and commercial application regardless of what your license or price is.

What is your License?

The Titanium SDK is licensed under the Apache Public License (version 2).

I also took the opportunity to ask about Adobe AIR support in Aptana. It strikes me that this is under threat following the acquisition, since AIR competes with Titanium. Haynie was just a little evasive, but at the same time impressed me with his attitude:

Obviously we have a competitive platform from Adobe AIR. But we want developers to have the best choice, the best tools possible. So competitively we need to build the best product. If AIR is a better product and people want to use Aptana to build AIR apps, then fine. That means we need to continue to work to make a better runtime for the desktop.

Nevertheless, Haynie implied that AIR support will only continue if Adobe supports it; I am not sure what support means in this context but I think it includes a financial contribution:

We’re with Adobe on trying to figure out where we go from here … we have to spend a lot of money to support that, so we’re making sure that we’ve got Adobe’s support behind that.

I am not sure what Adobe gains from Aptana support, given that it has its own Eclipse-based IDE called Flash Builder, so I would not bet on there being significant updates to the current AIR 1.5 plug-in.

Finally, Haynie emphasised what to me are familiar themes in talking about the direction for Titanium and Aptana. Cross-platform visual design tools; designer and developer workflow; and integration in a single IDE of rich client and cloud back-end. This integration has long struck me as one of the best things about Microsoft’s Visual Studio, so it is interesting to see the theme reappear in a cross-platform context.

What I enjoyed about the interview is the way Haynie communicates the huge change and volatility that has arrived within the software development world, thanks to the impact of cloud and mobile. Times of change mean new opportunities and new products. Titanium has plenty of competition, but if Appcelerator is able to deliver a robust, cloud to device, cross-platform toolkit, then it will have a bright future.

I have posted a transcript of most of the interview.