O’Reilly: Inside RIA

You will notice that InsideRIA has added new listen functionality that allows you to listen to each blog post. This is great for people like me who are usually very busy trying to do more than one thing at a time. Click on the new listen link and a media player will open and begin reading you the post. You also have the option to download a copy of the mp3 file to take with you on your favorite portable devise.

I happy to announce the launch of a community resource center for user interfaces aptly title the User Interface Resource Center. The UIRC is a community driven site focused on providing interface resources and guidelines. Adobe and Microsoft are both partners, so this is sure to be big.

Announced on Ryan Stewart's blog and the Adobe Pressroom this morning is Adobe Open Screen: an initiative that involves not only releasing the SWF, FLV and FLV4 file format specifications, but also removes licensing restrictions around the next version of the AIR and Flash player.

I'm going to be at JavaOne May 6th-9th and CommunityOne on May 5th. This is going to be the most exciting JavaOne to date for RIA developers. There's lots of great Ajax, JavaScript and JavaFX content obviously. But there's a number or Flex sessions and at least on AIR session which includes a case study.

I've been holed up in meetings or in my hotel room working more than I've been over at the show, so my ability to speak as johnny-reporter-on-the-spot is rather limited. That said, here are a few impressions: --General Web 2.0...

Inforworld covered the announcement of Curl's entry into the rich desktop game with the release of Nitro. It appears to be positioned as a competitor to Adobe's AIR, the key differentiator they're claiming is security and performance, but this seems hard to prove at this stage.

Today, Adobe released the public beta version of LCDS 2.6 on labs. I see this as a pretty big release because we now have highly scalable streaming data available over port 80 using the HTTP protocol.

It was recently announced the the next 360|Flex will be held back in sunny San Jose, CA (8.18-8.20), where it all started. If you haven't checked out one of these conferences yet, you're missing out. Here's the low-down... Tom Ortega and John Wilker are the hosts of the 360 conferences. 360|Flex conferences are the only 3-day, community-focused, all Flex conferences I know about, and I'm pretty sure they're the only show in town when it comes to an all Flex conference. John and Tom are not in this for the money (because I don't think they make any), they're in it for what it does for the community... and it shows.

Adobe® Media Player software provides control and flexibility to view what you want, when you want — whether online or offline. You can queue up and download your favorite Internet TV content, track and download new episodes automatically, and manage your personal video library for viewing at your convenience.

The event in Paris was great. It was in the Palais Brongniart which is a really cool venue. I think we had up to 300 attendees at the event. So the Paris event had some kick ass demos that attendees were showing! There was MooFlair which was a beautiful looking video player, I'm definitely going to use this for viewing Blip from now on. The next app was the Elixir dashboard from iLog was really slick too, some very nice tree maps and dynamic maps. Christophe from iLog showed data from Adob'e Jira Bug Tracker and the CIA world fact book. Very cool to see a technology leader like iLog jumping on AIR and Flex. The most amazing thing I saw though was mutli-touch screen running with AIR.