Posted on by Mark Finkle

Inner Beauty

Ryan Stewart, new Adobe evangelist (sweet), is looking for sexy AJAX applications. You know, the ones that look like Flash:

So where are other sexy Ajax applications? I’m not talking about Gmail or even Google Calendar, I’m talking about applications you could mistake for Flash, the kinds of applications even *I* can’t help but admire (even if they could be built faster with Flash and Flex 😉 ).

What’s the point? Ryan, we all know that beauty is on the inside. The only time Flash impresses me is when someone uses it in an invisible way. sIFR, Google Finance & dojo Storage come to mind.

If we want to point to successful AJAX applications, why exclude GMail, Google Calendar, Zimbra, and Highrise?

Confucius says – Everything has its beauty, but not everyone sees it.

5 Replies to “Inner Beauty”

  2. I’m with you, Mark. Flash apps may as well be standalone executable files, they don’t leverage much in the browser and they don’t follow any browser standards.

  3. I love all the examples you gave Mark, sIFR, Google Finance and dojo Storage. I think those are awesome Flash applications because they blend two (or more) worlds so well and really leverage Flash at some of its strong points.

    By “sexy” I really meant desktop-looking applications. Gmail is great, but no one would confuse it for a desktop application any time soon. Are all desktop applications usable? No way. But the ones that combine rich and usability are always good.

    Thanks for the feedback Mark.

  4. Hm. I wouldn’t call Zimbra sexy — it works well when it works but it’s a heavy javascript monster that makes Firefox considerably slower at times. Sometimes I wish they had gone a little bit easier on the JS side.

Comments are closed.