Jesse Ezell Blog

CNET on Xamlon

CNET has a nice write-up on the upcoming Xamlon .NET->SWF compiler. CNET sees Xamlon being good for all parties (Macromedia, Microsoft, etc.). I agree to some degree, after all the more killer apps that are written on top of Flash the more legitimized the SWF approach becomes. However, unless the Flex team gets its act together, this could throw a significantly large wrench in their plans to integrate with VS.NET / .NET at some point. So good for Macromedia? Yes. Good for the Flex team or the Laszlo guys? We'll just have to wait and see.

http://news.com.com/Software+turns+.Net+to+Flash/2100-1032_3-5647420.html

Macromedia Redesigns Flash Download Page

I don't know if you caught wind of this, but Macromedia caused quite an uproar recently by bundling the Y! Toolbar with the Flash Player download. Macromedia did offer Y! free Flash player downloads, but they were opt-out, meaning that users could potentially just click the download button and unintentionally install the Y! toolbar inside their browser. Burak's blog has a good summary as well as links to the old and new designs.

My opinion, it is perfectly fine for Macromedia to bundle software with the Flash player if they want. Companies bundle software all the time. However, this decision is clearly not a decision that Macromedia made with consumers in mind. It is all about making agreements with Yahoo! so that Macromedia can increase the adoption rate of the Flash player. Sure, Macromedia has to do what Macromedia has to do, but just imagine the uproar if .NET installed some third party toolbar in your browser by default. I really don't see how installing the Y! Toolbar enhances someone's experience with Flash or adds something that the majority of the people downloading the player are going to want... especially in an age where it seems like every other spyware program wants to install its own toolbar in your browser.

Update: Really good explaination of Macromedia's viewpoint on this issue over at Mesh's blog http://www.markme.com/mesh/archives/007219.cfm along with feedback from the Flash community (a lot of people still seem to be unhappy with the redesign). Still, I think Mesh's post is very clear that this toolbar deal is all about building a relationship with Yahoo! that will further Flash adoption rates and get Macromedia some extra cash to fund Flash player development, not about making their customers happy (unless you count indirectly making their developers happy through upgrades that this thing is apparently funding). However, as much as I can understand people being kinda ticked off about this, in the long run Macromedia is probably coming out ahead.

Update on Why You Shouldn't By Flex or Lazslo

Robin gives an update on the state of their XAML/C# to Flash compiler. IMO, with something like this out on the market, buying Flex or Lazslo would be such a lame decision.

http://blog.debreuil.com/archive/2005/03/11/652.aspx

Microsoft Will Buy Groove

Cool stuff. Not only is Microsoft is going to buy Groove, but they are going to make Ray Ozzie their CTO.

http://news.zdnet.com/2100-3513_22-5608063.html

Apple

Remember this:

http://www.uriah.com/apple-qt/1984.html

If so, you might enjoy this:

http://www.rocketboom.com/vlog/archives/2005/03/rb_05_mar_03.html

Going to work for Google? Be Careful of Google Dumbass Syndrome

Has anyone else noticed that people tend to turn into dumbasses after being hired by google.

First we had the case of the infamous google blogger that got himself fired for badmouthing his company days after being hired by them.

Now we have the case of Mark Lucovsky who suddenly thinks that Microsoft can't ship software and Amazon is the almightly god of software shippage:

"I am not sure I believe anymore, that Microsoft "knows how to ship software". When a Microsoft engineer fixes a minor defect, makes something faster or better, makes an API more functional and complete, how do they "ship" that software to me? I know the answer and so do you... The software sits in a source code control system for a minimum of two years (significantly longer for some of the early Longhorn code). At some point, the product that the fix is a part of will "ship" meaning that CD's will be pressed and delivered to customers and OEM's. In best case scenarios, the software will reach end users a few months after the Release To Manufacturing (RTM) date. In many cases, particularly for users working in large corporations, they won't see the software for a year or more post RTM...

...When an Amazon engineer fixes a minor defect, makes something faster or better, makes an API more functional and complete, how do they "ship" that software to me? What is the lag time between the engineer completing the work, and the software reaching its intended customers? A good friend of mine investigated a performance problem one morning, he saw an obvious defect and fixed it. His code was trivial, it was tested during the day, and rolled out that evening. By the next morning millions of users had benefited from his work. Not a single customer had to download a bag of bits, answer any silly questions, prove that they are not software thieves, reboot their computers, etc. The software was shipped to them, and they didn't have to lift a finger. Now that's what I call shipping software." [2]

Wake up. Amazon is a web app. Microsoft has plenty of web apps as well, and I gaurentee that Microsoft can just as easily "ship" a new version of its web apps as Amazon can. But, in case you were living in a gopher hole in the middle of a field on the Microsoft campus, this ability to easily update web apps is something that everyone already knows. You aren't Einstien for noticing this. It is clear as day to anyone in the industry.

While we are on the subject, when Microsoft fixes a minor bug or makes something faster or better, it doesn't sit on the shelf for 2 years before getting shipped out on a CD. In fact, my little windows update icon flashes at least once a week telling me that Microsoft would like "ship" updates and fixes to me right now. But hey, maybe you don't have an internet connection over at Google. Maybe you've never seen that icon. Or maybe you are just suffering from Google Dumbass Syndrome and you've forgotten everything that has happened since Windows 3.1.

[1] http://99zeros.blogspot.com/
[2] http://mark-lucovsky.blogspot.com/2005/02/shipping-software.html

Brightcove: Son of Allaire

If you haven't heard the news, Jeremy Allaire has started up a new company:

"As noted on PaidContent, we're launching Brightcove, a company I started last summer and have been stealth until now.  While we're not getting into too much detail about what we're actually doing, we are starting to talk about the themes and ideas behind the company, which one can clearly use to deduce what we might be up to. 

The theme of the "democratization of media" is one that goes all the way back to my origin interests in the Internet, and to some of the important ideas that framed and drove ColdFusion, and Allaire's other software franchises.  We're onto the next phase of experiences on the Internet, and the much richer and expressive medium of video. 

There's a narrated animation on our website that gives a good view into what we see happening and how we hope to help producers and publishers of video take us into the emerging era of Internet Television.

We've also published a company blog that is a rollup of news, announcements, blogsphere references and suggested reading.  Keep it in your RSS readers!" [1]

It will be interesting to see what comes of this. The post that Jeremy refers to provides a bit of interesting information:

"Jeremy Allaire, one of the key people behind ColdFusion and a co-founder of Allaire Corp (later sold to Macromedia), is lifting the veil on his mysterious new venture: an IP video startup called Brightcove formed to encourage democratization of video production and distribution. The Cambridge-based company wants a hand in all facets of IP video or Internet TV -- creation, delivery and monetization.
Brightcove already has $5.5 million of first-round venture funding from General Catalyst Partners and Accel Partners. The management team includes executives from Allaire, ATG, BSkyB, Comcast, Macromedia and News Corp. The consumer service will be launched in the second half of this year...
Allaire spoke to me at length about the premise for his company, but not about the specifics of the still-under-wraps technology or mechanism. From what I saw, tons of cool stuff with Flash and Windows Media platforms...(He guest blogged for us last year, and wrote at length on IP video). My impression: think of it as RealNetworks done right with a consumer video service, a backend service, and other allied services needed for everyone from small publishers, like bloggers, to small-to-mid sized media companies and online VOD startups, develop and distribute video easily and cost-effectively. In essence, an open-publishing model.
Allaire explains: "The online service will operate with a consumer-facing service that provides access to programming and content published in the service, and will also provide a very rich service to publishers and rights-holders interested in a direct-to-consumer distribution path for video products. The service will also provide tools to website operators generally, who are interested in economically participating in the online video revolution." [2]

[1] http://radio.weblogs.com/0113297/2005/02/27.html#a297
[2] http://www.paidcontent.org/pc/arch/2005_02_27.shtml#012486

The Flex Killer

Jason Clark relates his recent Flex experience:

"We spent about a month with Flex, making mock-ups of various screens that the application had.   The user interfaces you can build are impressive, they look very “Mac’ish”, but can be fully customized via CSS to look however you want.  We figured that Flex would save about 2-3 months work on building a similar interface using straight ASP.NET/CSS interface.  Most of the UI components that Flex provides can be done using ASP.NET minus drag and drop, and some of the behaviors like minimizing panels etc.   Those we would have to write JS libraries for, and would probably not work on every single browser out there (although they would function on the major browsers we’d support). 

So, the decision of whether to use Flex or not came down to a few things for us.  One was the IDE.  The strength of a language is tightly coupled with it’s IDE, if the IDE isn’t strong then the language suffers.  I’d say this was probably one of the biggest reasons we decided to stay with the “old school” way of doing things for now.   The IDE that is shipped with Macromedia Flex is called “Flex Builder”, it’s essentially a re-skinned Dreamweaver with some Flex specific widgets and a debugger.    The debugging is a bit on the weak side, sometimes it wouldn’t stop at breakpoints, it was slow and if you wrote your own controls the debugger wouldn’t see them.  Overall the IDE seemed like an afterthought, “heck we built a language, let’s patch up Dreamweaver and use that”.    An IDE architected and coupled with the language is a necessity, having been used to Visual Studio my expectations were high.

 

Besides the IDE issues, the $12K price tag per server and lack of native .NET support also played into our decision to stick with an ASP.NET interface for the time being. Another factor was performance, particularly the Grid component.   If you moved the scroll bar on a grid up and down, you could watch your CPU usage spike at 30%+ depending on the machine." [1]

 

If Flex interests you, I highly recommend checking out what the Xamlon guys are doing. Robin Debreuil is over there now doing some really interesting .NET -> SWF projects. Looks like they will have a fully functional XAML+C#->SWF converter at some point. You can follow along with their progress on Robin's blog [2]. Very cool stuff which I am personally far more interested in than Flex.

[1] http://weblogs.asp.net/jclarknet/archive/2005/03/02/383921.aspx
[2] http://www.xamlon.com

[3] http://blog.debreuil.com/default.aspx