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Adobe Air – Finding its niche

Yes, it was called Apollo at one time. Considering how many people re-reference AIR as Apollo in conversation, Adobe should stick with their first marketing idea in the future.

Adobe AIR is the new runtime desktop environment that has the kids in Silicon Valley all excited. Here are some sample apps for reference. According to Mark Blair, Adobe’s Pacific technical director, the idea behind AIR is this: online apps offline, platform independent, everywhere

It makes some sense, since so much development effort is being put into online applications, that you be able to tap into those apps on the desktop. In this way, AIR applications become non-browser dependent interfaces to big online applications like eBay, Amazon and others. Google and Microsoft are both thinking along the same lines (though at entirely different levels) with Google Gears and Silverlight. Gears is a low level persistence layer that syncs your online gmail, Calender [As noted in the comments, I should have said Reader and Docs ~aaron] and others with offline surrogates. Silverlight is aiming more directly at Adobe Flash/Flex and has only recently made noise about a desktop controls component. This late game hesitation on the part of Microsoft is understandable given their already commanding position on the desktop with .Net Really, for my money AIR’s largest technological competitor is JavaFX. Both are platform independent, VM based technologies. Until Microsoft’s Silverlight 2.0 comes calling, this space is Adobe’s to loose. Adobe has both a head start over Sun and a laser beam focus on their product’s polish which Sun typically lacks. If you have a web application and your customers are demanding UI options beyond the browser, take a look at AIR

Interesting technology notes, AIR uses WebKit, SQLite and Tamarin for its web rendering, data storage and ActionScript Virtual Machine respectively. WebKit is the renderer used by Apple’s Safari and native to the iPhone. Tamarin is a very fast ECMAscript VM that supports full runtime error reporting, built-in debugging, and binary socket support. It was donated to Mozilla by Adobe and will be used in SpiderMonkey to speed up its JavaScript support.

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Types of Online Advertising

Advertising online can increase your brand awareness and promote a product/service. Online advertising has a major advantage over other types of advertising (tv, radio, print) because it is very easy to measure the effectiveness of online campaigns. In a series of posts, I’ll discuss the different types of advertising, their advantages and disadvantages, and how to measure their effectiveness.

There are 3 Main Types of Ads:

  • Rich Media: The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) has defined these as “advertisements with which users can interact” and can include video, sound, animation. Ads which just animate but don’t have any interaction are just display ads (see below). Ads should follow IAB guidelines to maximize impact without being overly annoying (which has the opposite effect from what you want). There are many types of rich media ads, including:
    • peel-back
    • floating
    • expanding
    • transitional (interstitial, introstitial, exterstitial)
    • video
    • popup/popunder
  • Display Ads: These ads combine text, images, and animation (but are not interactive – those are rich media – see above) to convey a message. Display ads mostly differ in sizes (see IAB for Ad Size Guidelines). Here are some of the most popular sizes:
    • leaderboard (728 x 90 pixels)
    • skyscraper (120 x 600 pixels or 160 x 600 pixels for wide skyscraper)
    • banner (468 x 60 pixels)
    • half-page (300 x 600 pixels)
    • square button (or tile) (125 x 125 pixels)
    • medium rectangle (300 x 250 pixels)
  • Text Ads: Text ads are typically just that, text. These ads typically are cheaper, but have the added bonus of usually being searchable by search engines and are less-ignored by readers than some other types of ads. Some of the more common types of text ads:
    • link ads
    • contextual ads
    • search engine marketing ads (pay per click – ex. Google Adwords)
    • online directories

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Adobe Flex over Flash – A programmer's perspective

So we talked last week about Adobe Flex, the Rich Internet Application (RIA) stack created by Macromedia and currently owned by Adobe. If you have ever watched a video online from a web 2.0 video site, you have used a Flex application. Sure, Flash and Flex are cousins and the common language they speak is ActionScript, so logically anything you create with Flex can also be created with Flash. But I stand by my assertion that big projects like video libraries are now written in Flex. I can say that with some confidence having worked with a Flex RIA team for over a year now. In doing so, I realized that Flash has some serious limitations that Flex had to overcome.

Testing:

  • Flash – Without automated testing, bugs are really very hard to find. Debugging Flash applications is something of an art form.
  • Flex – We can add unit testing with FlexUnit to any IDE and have one click testing of our appliations. We also have Stress Tests available

Refactoring:

  • Flash – Difficult to do. Flash code bases usually reverted through entropy to an unwieldy mess of bolted on functions that eventually degrades to an unrepairable state.
  • Flex – Quoting Adobe ‘Flex Builder 3 [the Eclipse based IDE sold by Adobe] will provide refactoring tools for MXML and ActionScript that are similar to those provide by Eclipse JDT, including Find All References, Move and Rename’.

AIR applications (desktop Flash):

  • Flash – You can build AIR applications using Flash CS3, but they will be completely different projects than similar applications for the web.
  • Flex – The promise is there for unified code base which can be deployed as a Flex or AIR application. I have not tested this, all though I have heard of some success in this area. Unified code base is difficult. Java has come close, though still there are problems making completely portable code unified. The benefits of having one code base are, however, great.

Multimedia

  • Flash – Clearly this is the place where Flash excels, mostly because of its head start. So many multimedia applications have been written in Flash that the ground is well worn.
  • Flex – Catching up fast. As I said above, most large multimedia apps today are being written in Flex, mainly because you can embed Flash into a Flex app to get the best of both worlds.

Skilled Help

  • Flash – There are many Flash developers out there. Since Flash has been around for a decade now, this is a well established category for consulting, services, and employment. The issue here isn’t the amount but the quality. For anything more than a Flash Banner Ad, I personally recommend a Flash programmer that can handle the complexity. Guru’s such as these are tough to find though. If you have one keep her happy.
  • Flex – Since Flex is relatively new, you will have a hard time finding a Flex expert. No matter, really, since what you want is a solid programmer that wants to get into a new area. Programming skills is the real need here since a language is a language. Once you have someone who wants to get their feet wet, exposing them to Flex is not much different than any other new and shiny programming language. We had an ex PHP programmer that became a wunderkind in Flex. All the MXML and ActionScript were just new variants of XML and ECMAscript. Documentation isn’t good yet, but books can be found and examples are aplenty Of course, a good internet consultant can also help you get on track quickly.

Advanced subjects in Flex would deal with the cool microframework Cairngorm which brings Design Patterns like MVC to the table.