O’Reilly: Inside RIA

This week media reigned supreme as both Microsoft and Adobe made announcements at the International Broadcasting Convention. In addition AIR announces a new version and some intriguing statistics, Tim Heuer discusses the Silverlight installation process, and some new Chrome resources have been released. All this and more on the weekly RIA RoundUp from InsideRIA.

Andy Powell, a fellow Universal Mind team member, has been experimenting with Merapi, the bridge which allows you to connect AIR with Java (we have covered Merapi before here on InsideRIA). In his experiments, Andy has managed to connect AIR with a GPS unit as well as an RFID receiver. These experiments begin to give us a view of what is possible with AIR and Merapi.

Mike Chambers announced today that pieces of the next version of AIR, version 1.5 ("Cosmo"), are now available with the nightly Flex SDK builds. Mike also includes a list of the new features in AIR 1.5 in the blog post.

This week saw Google unveiling it's Chrome, Project Rosetta calling to Flash developers, Adobe announcing the CS4 unveiling webcast, Flash video powering Amazon and the NFL, and much more...

• A new Gantt task chart that improves upon the existing 1.0 Gantt chart to cover new use cases.
• New heatmaps components
• New OLAP & pivot charts to mimic excel-like pivot charting.
• Improved flex calendar and numerical indicators components.

Silverlight brings us the news again this week, JavaFX demonstrates it's design skills, Adobe details some info on the future of the Flash Player platform, and more details are available on the next iteration of Flex and Flex Builder. All this and more on the RIA Weekly Round-Up.