Tuesday, April 8, 2003

SharpReader. Brad '.Net Guy' Wilson: Oh, and isn't it interesting that the first wave of .NET rich client apps that we've seen have all been blazingly fast and look appropriate for the environment... that definitely has never been true of Java, even today 8 years after release. Microsoft has a real advantage here that they need to leverage, by encouraging people to get away from awful web UIs and get back to rich client/server UIs. Ouch! Brad is talking about SharpReader, a new .Net based three-paned RSS aggregator. I'm downloading it now. The related posts feature looks really cool. Update: OK, I'm sold. SharpReader is awesome. It has really leap-frogged Synderella. Update: it does not seem to detect updated posts like Synderella and Aggie do. [Blogging Roller] You can see here that other engineers are looking at .Net the way Macr wants people to look at RIAs and Flash. Also, I've looked at SharpReader, and it feels snappy. 3:26:42 PM

Defining Rich Interfaces I would like to start up a discussion on Rich Interfaces. We at Macromedia have been promotion them for quite some months now, and we see new RIA's popping up every day, which is great. However, there is one thing that I think we all should try to promote a littlebit more; Fluent Interfaces. Explanation: Almost all the RIAs that I see on the web have static designs, they have a fixed with or scale on larger screens. Instead of that, I prefer to have more content! (I did not buy a big monitor to not use 50% of it ;-)) Honestly said, the RIAs Macromedia has developed so far are not fluent as well, and I think we should improve that to show our users how to do it. Before I end up writing a huge post on this, I would like to have your feedback. What do you think about fluent versus fixed interfaces, are there reasons why to go for fixed instead of fluent, and are there things that are missing now to make you able to build better fluent interfaces, do you have tips for developers to create fluent interfaces, how can Macromedia help to achieve all this? Let me know what you think, I hope the end result is that we will all create fluent RIAs soon! [Waldo Smeets Weblog - Macromedia MX Sales Engineer Benelux] Well, thankfully I see a future for myself in RIAs, having more than a dozen years developing consumer-focused desktop software products. As I've said before, when I consider my options for building desktop applications, I look to ubiquity in platform deployment, and to simplicity in API design and usage. Apple offers Cocoa, MS offers .Net, Sun offers Java Swing, each with varying degrees of deployment and simplicity. I'm very much interested in seeing the details on how to build RIAs the Macromedia way. How will it stack up to these competitors? 3:21:16 PM