Alex Barnett blog : Adobe, RIA

Joining Intuit

alexbarnett — Sun, 21 Sep 2008 22:02:00 GMT

Firstly - thanks to everyone who has reached out to me in the last three weeks via email, phone calls and comments since I shared the news of my pursuit for the next adventure - I have really appreciated everyone's support and interest in my next steps.

The great news is I'll be joining Intuit as a Group Manager working in a fast growing start-up team responsible for leading the Intuit Partner Platform. Below is a snippet and some links to blog posts and articles that should give you a fairly good idea about where my focus will be a week from now.

Although I'll be working from the Orem office (Utah) to start off with, the plan is to ultimately move to the greater Boston area - another new adventure. I've visited Boston three times in the last year or so and have loved it more and more with each visit, so watch out Boston!

This is a fantastic opportunity for me personally - the team has ambitious goals and an amazing set of existing assets to leverage (see some of the numbers below) in becoming a significant player in the cloud computing space. I look forward to sharing stories of my new journey with you.

Intuit Partner Platform Opens to Developers (Sept 15 2008)

"The Intuit Partner Platform not only gives developers the opportunity to build Web-based applications, but successful SaaS businesses by taking the complexity out of managing infrastructure, hosting, user management, integration and billing. Now developers can focus on developing innovative on-demand software solutions that solve unique and important problems for the four million small and mid-market businesses across the U.S. that use QuickBooks and the 25 million employees that work in those companies.

The platform-as-a-service offering allows developers to combine the powerful open source Flex framework and Adobe Flex Builder and the proven database of Intuit QuickBase to build rich Internet applications that work with QuickBooks data. They can also leverage Adobe AIR to provide additional desktop-like functionality in their applications, such as pop-up notifications, local file system access, local data storage, and the ability to create a fully branded user experience.

"We have now accepted more than 1,000 developers into the program and it is exciting to hear their ideas and energy about what they want to build," said Alex Chriss, business leader for the Intuit Partner Platform. "Customers will benefit greatly from the imagination and expertise that developers use to solve problems facing their specific industries." "

Web 2.0 Expo NYC - Intuit Connected Services (Sept 19 2008)
Intuit Makes SaaS Play Guns For Salesforce (Sept 18 2008)
Intuit’s flexy PaaS (Aug 14 2008)
Intuit enters the PaaS wars (April 28 2008)
Intuit’s Radical New Flex + QuickBase Cloud Platform (April 16 2008)

Social Clouds, XML 10 Years Old, and Honourable Mentions

alexbarnett — Tue, 12 Feb 2008 13:51:00 GMT

The Social Cloud

Kevin Marks is a software engineer at Google, was principal engineer for Technorati and one of the founders of Microformats. In this video Kevin talks about the big picture re: the phenomenon of online social networks in a presentation called The Social Cloud. Great backgrounder to the topic. More Lift videos here.

My Open ID?

Chris Brogen asked Question about OpenID:

"I’ve chosen to use the Wordpress.com installation of OpenID. I tied it to my Wordpress.com account and have so far used it in only two places. I’m thinking that every time I offer up an OpenID, I’ll point to that one. So far so good, right? ( To get up to speed on OpenID, go here).

What happens if Wordpress.com folds? What happens if they change their mind and start charging me, or I leave them for someone else, or whatever?"

Good question, to which you'll find multiple useful answers provided in the post's comments.

Semantic web enablement

The XML spec first public draft was November '96, the final release as a 1.0 was Feb 1998. XML was ten years old Feb 10, 2008. Tim Bray provides a history of the people involved and the events leading up to the birth of XML in his XML People.

Semantic news discovery

Silobreaker "provides relevance by looking at the data it finds like a person does. It recognises people, companies, topics, places and keywords; understands how they relate to each other in the news flow, and puts them in context for the user."

I need to play more to find out how useable / useful this service is, but I like the idea.

Honourable mention

RIA Weekly #06 - What’s Behind Code-Behind, JavaFX with Adobe tools, Microsoft/Yahoo!, and other acquisitions. The Redmonk podcast with Michael Coté and Ryan Stewart (Adobe). Topics include Kevin Lynch as new Adobe CTO, JavaFX vs. Silverlight vs. Air, code-behind annoyance, Google's Android, and the Oracle / BEA deal. I get an honourable mention on the show.

Random but good

Visual Music Instruments - via Kevin Kelly. No manual required, but it would probably help.

How to contradict yourself in two easy steps

alexbarnett — Thu, 24 May 2007 02:22:00 GMT

How to contradict yourself in two easy steps:

Step 1. Dare Obasajno (a PM at Microsoft) argues that anyone comparing Adobe's Apollo and Microsoft's Silverlight by mentioning them in "the same sentence as if they are similar products" is proof that ["popular technology blog pundits"] don't "do much research and in many cases aren't technical enough to do the research anyway."

Step 2. In the same post, Dare (remember- a PM at Microsoft) provides his own comparison of Adobe's Apollo and Microsoft's Silverlight by mentioning them in the same sentence as if they were similar products, arguably validating comparisons by the aforementioned, apparently unresearched, popular technology blog pundits that in his view are not technical enough to do the research anyway:

"Apollo is Adobe's Flash based ~~knock off~~ competitor to the .NET Framework while Silverlight is Microsoft's .NET Framework based ~~knock off~~ competitor to the Flash platform."

In this response to Dare's ~~nonsense~~ post, Harry Pierson (an architect at Microsoft) deftly avoids being labelled as an unresearched-popular-technology-blog-pundit-that-isn't-technical-enough-to-do-the-research-anyway by not comparing the products in the same sentence, but by instead comparing the companies Adobe and Microsoft:

"The upshot is that both companies are trying to deliver a unified "client" platform that spans desktop, devices and browser. That sounds like "platform competition" to me."

Congrats to 'Rich' Ryan

alexbarnett — Sat, 19 May 2007 20:07:00 GMT

Congratulations to Ryan Stewart on his new role at Adobe as a Rich Internet Application Evangelist on the Platform Team. Great catch for Adobe.

Actually stating how well you are paid, eh Ryan?...now that's transparency for you...does imply Adobe also has 'poor' Internet Application Evangelists too? ;-)

Adobe on Apollo Compeitors

alexbarnett — Sun, 25 Mar 2007 18:08:00 GMT

Very interesting post by Andrew Shebanow (senior computer scientist at Adobe), reflecting on some of the reactions and comments he's heard since Apollo went alpha, including comparisons made with other offerings (Microsoft's WPF, Dekoh, Joyent Slingshot + magnetk, Yahoo! Widgets and Firefox 3.

Highlights for me are:

On WPF:

"Apollo competes with WPF - this meme is attractive to journalists because its easy to write a sexy story about a war between two large companies....Apollo’s can succeed even if WPF proves to be extremely popular, and vice versa.

On comments that Apollo is closed source and proprietary:

"Its true that a number of the pieces that make up Apollo are closed source, but how important this is will vary from developer to developer, and the story around Apollo alternatives is generally even worse."

On Dekoh:

"one thing that they have revealed is that the product relies on a centralized “Dekoh Network Service” for identity, sharing, and so on. The bottom line is that with Dekoh, you are making your application dependent on a closed source, propietary Dekoh service that will own and leverage information about your users and their data."

On Joyent Slingshot + magnetk:

"Downsides are a lot of potential security issues (no sandbox?)...More disturbing, though, is that it sounds like Joyent will be charging a royalty for distributing applications based on their runtime unless you are a customer for their hosting service...much less open than the Apollo model where the SDK and runtime are both free of charge."

On Yahoo! Widgets:

"I don’t really get the comparison, but even if you do think they serve similar needs, the fact is that Yahoo! Widgets is just as closed source and proprietary as Apollo, if not moreso"

And Firefox 3:

"its still fundamentally a web browser and it is nothing but vaporware at the moment."

The comments conversation to Andrew's post make enlightening reading too - I'd also be interested in hearing his thoughts on the Dojo Toolkit / dojo.storage.

2007 to be a big year for 'Rich Internet Applications'

alexbarnett — Sat, 16 Dec 2006 14:39:00 GMT

The following is a short description of Adobe's play for 2007 - Apollo - big news in my opinion:

"Apollo, the code name for “a cross-operating system runtime” is a platform that will allow developers to create to desktop applications using existing web development skills such as Flash, Flex, HTML, JavaScript and Ajax."

A big play indeed.

Things I heard in this TalkCrunch podcast interview by Michael Arrington and Steve Gillmor with Adobe's Chief Architect, Kevin Lynch: Cross-platform client runtime (Windows, Mac, Linux), supports Occasionally Connected Computing (OCC) scenarios and local data storage. No 'direct' revenue model - devs can use Eclipse IDE, but the strategy seems to be to have Apollo drive sales for designers ' developer tools Flex, Blaze ('better tooling support for Apollo') and media server sales and to drive end user adoption of other Adobe products (runtime is free for end user - Flash, PDF authoring tool Acrobat). Currently in beta, Adobe might be v1.0 by July / August timeframe.

Apollo was touched on during Adobe's latest earnings conf call, Larry Dignan reports:

"Chizen told analysts to think about Apollo the same way they would characterize Adobe Reader or Flash Player, its a client that can be used to help others build unique applications and allow Adobe to sell more tools."

With the development of Adob'es Apollo and Microsoft's WPF/E and the continuing rise of Ajax, 2007 is destined to be a very interesting year for Rich Internet Applications (RIA).

Update: Amyloo found this recorded presentation by Adobe's product managers introducing Apollo.