Rants

The Adobe RIA crowd have been causing some echos in the chamber lately over Bubblemark, an animation benchmark originally released over a year ago. Personally, I have no real skin in the game, but a game it is. Some Flash developers were curious about variations in the results when run on different browsers, platforms and in the AIR runtime. It makes for some interesting reading and I came away with a better understanding the variations, browser limitations and timer mechanisms.

Zoho’s recent blog post about why they used JavaScript and not Flash when building their offline version of Zoho Writer has led to some interesting but somewhat predictable responses [1] & [2]. I could have fallen into a predictable (but not necessarily interesting) response myself, but didn’t. Until I saw Ryan Stewart post the following:

Adobe’s Ryan Stewart has a post on the friction between Open Web advocates and “RIA vendors”. I think Ryan does a good job describing the work being done at Adobe (and Microsoft) to become active in a larger ecosystem, namely open source and cross-platform. There are a couple bits I want to respond (emphasis mine):

Joel’s latest strategy letter is a long-winded diatribe on the current state of browser-based application development. There is some good stuff in there, but some of the metaphors are really stretched and the comparisons between desktop and web-based applications is a bit broken. Joel seems to think that web-based applications should support the same kind of features as desktop applications. This line of thought can only go so far.

Ryan Stewart has made a critical blunder in his attempt to create a Kawasaki-esque mantra for Adobe STEAM. This blunder will likely cause the failure of Adobe MIST and the eventual collapse of Adobe itself. I give you Stewart’s mantra:

Dave Humphrey’s latest post really got me thinking about a couple things. First, I think what he proposes is a timely, interesting idea. It illustrates the power of the web brought to bear on a particular problem. Specifically, the post got me thinking about building communities and lowering interface friction placed on users. Not exactly peanut butter and chocolate, but I think they are related none the less.

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