O’Reilly: Inside RIA

37signals, producers of the popular Basecamp, Highrise and Backpack applications, have announced their intention to "phase out" support for IE 6 on August 15th of this year. Unfortunately this means they're going to lose a lot of their business also, as the rest of us can't stop supporting our IE 6 customers. In this entry we'll talk about why and discuss the future of 37signals products in the software development world.

In this entry, we discuss the Flex 4 Roadmap based on a presentation by Ely Greenfield currently up on Adobe TV.

ILOG has launched a preview program for version 2.0 of their popular Elixir toolset. Whether you've been a fan of Elixir or you're a flex n00b looking for some sweet charting components, this program is for you. Elixir also has some new lower price points for developers who don't work for big companies with big budgets.

Lovely Charts is an application built in Adobe Flex for diagramming wire frames, interaction diagrams, UML, and just about anything else you can think of. It's one of the best and most complete user experiences I've seen in Flex, a close second to Buzzword, and really show cases the power of Flex. I had the opportunity to exchange a few emails with Lovely Charts creator Jérôme Cordiez and learned some fascinating things about Lovely Charts. Jérôme shared with me a little more about the vision and process he followed to build Lovely Charts, and why Flex was a necessary technology in that process

Adobe announced this evening that they're working with Yahoo and Google to make Flash content more searchable. Both companies have been given a special version of the flash player that can crawl swfs and automatically perform every action a user might, from clicking buttons to entering text in text areas to dragging and moving interactive controls.

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 one of the developers about the decision to port the application to HTML.

Obsessing.org is a new online development site that lets you code and render Processing applications in the browser. The site is listed as "very alpha" right now, with new features being added every day. Most recently they added the ability to save and recall your sketches, making Obsessing a viable tool for anyone interested in Processing and not just us web-based dabblers.

Processing is a programming language invented, at least in part, to bring the power of programming to designers. It's a powerful visual oriented language focused on rendering animations and interactions. Several artists have been doing some really amazing work in Processing lately, giving it some well-earned noteriety in places like Wired magazine. On May 8th JavaScript guru John Resig changed released Processing.js - a port of Processing to JavaScript. In this entry we'll look at some of the things Processing.js does and discuss what it means for the future of web applications.

Silverlight 2 beta 2 released last week. The new beta is a huge improvement over beta 1 and makes Silverlight a much more practical development environment. Among other things, the new beta features a lot of new UI objects to play with and makes skinning much easier.

Ted Patrick announced the open-sourcing of his DARE Adobe AIR server last night both on his blog and in comments on our last DARE post here on InsideRIA. Ted's looking for some good Python developers to take the project over and move it to the next level. Interested? Download the source and get started.