O’Reilly: Inside RIA

Yesterday Microsoft released IE 8 Beta 2. It's likely the most anticipated release of the browser to date, for developers anyway. This is because they've done a lot to support CSS 2.1 and HTML 5 standards, which is everyone agrees is a good thing. It might not be perfect yet but they seem to be making good progress.

Ted Patrick just posted a screencast from Mark Anders where he gives a great overview of the roadmap for Flex 4 aka Gumbo , Flash Player 10, Degrafa and Thermo at 360 Flex.

Dave Johnson, Alexei White and I have finally completed our video training series on Ajax development for high performance and large scale Ajax UIs. We took the book, Enterprise Ajax, we wrote last year and then recorded just over 8hrs worth of Ajax training. Hopefully it's a bit easier for folks to swallow than the 500 page book;-)

Google announced 2 new ways to make your apps location aware yesterday. One's a web service that any web can take advantage the second is built into Google Gears, and runs on the mobile version of this plugin.

It might be debatable whether a native app written Objective-C is an RIA, but most of the are internet connected at least part of the time and lots of the coolest iPhone apps I'm using run right in Safari on the iPhone. It's not however debatable whether or not iPhone has raised the bar for slick and aesthetically pleasing UIs and if you're going to develop a web app or native app for the iPhone you need to meet that bar to succeed. On that note here are a couple resources to make your iPhone apps look like Apple's very own apps!

The second annual iPhoneDevCamp has just started here at the Adobe offices in San Franciso. There's about 300 people and I think most of them are planning to build an app or at least hack a little bit. The even runs from Friday night until Sunday night. The highlight of the even is certainly going to be the Hackathon where developers and designers will be splitting off into teams and trying to build an iPhone by Sunday afternoon for the grand demo. This year's event has 60 sponsors as well!

I've been involved in web development for about 12 years now and have always been involved in the early stages and client facing aspects of the development cycle. More often than not I turned to very low-fi methods of sketching the early versions of a UI such as paper, whiteboard or Powerpoint. None of these are ideal and the early agreed upon designs seem to get lost along the way. Also it's hard to make changes to non digital mockups. Recently I've been playing around with with Balsamiq Mockups which seems to be a great quick and dirty design tool for developers, designers and those who aren't tech savvy at all.

Big news for one of the shining lights in the VOIP, Flex and AIR world this morning. Ribbit was acquired by BT. Ribbit has been acquired by BT one of the world’s leading providers of communications solutions and services. This marks the most important day yet in Ribbit’s history. As part of BT will be able to more quickly extend our vision beyond Silicon Valley and bring our products and technology to the entire world. We couldn’t be more excited than to announce this new partnership.

Grant Skinner has been thinking about and researching open sources licenses. I think this is timely blog post that everyone involved in software should take a look to get a quick high level understanding of the most popular open source licenses.

In case you haven't been following there's been some buzz about Dreamweaver recently and the next version is drastically improved for today's web developer. Whether you're focused on design or interactive user interfaces with JavaScript you should definitely take a look and download the beta. They're going away from WYISYG everything and just trying to make coding easier. In this screencast I caught up with Scott Fegette from the Dreamweaver product management team to get a demo of the new features.