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In April I covered a simple scheduling RIA called When Is Good. I got really excited about the simplicity with which they approach scheduling a meeting - everyone gets online, clicks a single url, selects the times they're available, and the organizer gets a simple view of what time works for everyone. There's no login and no mess - just a very simple UI that everyone understands.
Since that posting the application has gone through a slight overhaul. It was originally a Flex app and has now been ported to HTML, with a few feature enhancements baked in.
I spoke with Keith Harris, one of When Is Good's developers, on the decision to move from Flex back to HTML. Keith indicated that the change was mostly due to Flash's inherent load time:
"Considering our main competition is people simply emailing each other to work out when they are free to meet up, we define our product on the amount of time you save. Waiting up to a minute to get the swf to load kills our entire proposition stone dead. The rebuild moves a lot of the processing back on the server and our users get their pages just as quick as their connection can supply them."
There are certainly ways that Flex users can mitigate these problems - techniques to reduce swf size, storing the framework in an RSL, etc. - but for an application as simple as When Is Good it's just not necessary. In my original post I said that without any of Flex's rich features, When is good makes more sense in HTML. I'm glad to see that Keith agrees, and I think the application is better for it.
If you haven't given When Is Good a spin, check it out, and let us know what you think here in the comments.
Nice app :) but in my opinion is not necessary moving back to HTML. Flex is relatively slow and heavy but there are others Ria solutions for apps like When Is Good. For example AsWing which gives you much smaller swf file and works much faster than flex. Look at it for example Grafeio desktop, its made in AsWing and has only 124kb core, what is more loading speed is almost like your When is good, has more features and RIA usability is for me always better than html.
Great app. Quick and easy! I definitely think that there comes a point where an developer needs to decide if his app really needs the richness added to it or if it can be just as great if not better in html. I love Flex, but I know there are times and certain apps that just make the idea of adding rich content impractical.
thank goodness they ditched flash. As it was completely unnecessary.