Agile Ajax

FlashDevelop: Open Source Flash IDE

Despite my previous post, there is some activity around Open Source and Flash. For one, there is an Open Source Flash IDE, Flashdevelop. Right now it is tied to Windows, and it requires you to download the free debug Flash player and the Flex 3 SDK.

Adobe "Open Screen" is not "Open Source"

So Adobe is opening up their Flash platform via the Open Screen Project. Opening up in this case doesn't mean "Open Source," more like Open Spec. The spec for SWF has been published since 1998, but it came with onerous licensing restrictions. Adobe has now removed those licensing restrictions and promised to publish more API and protocol details.

Why is Adobe doing this? From their FAQ:

The Open Screen Project is working to enable a consistent runtime environment – taking advantage of Adobe® Flash® Player and, in the future, Adobe AIR™ – that will remove barriers for developers and designers as they publish content and applications across desktops and consumer devices, including phones, mobile Internet devices (MIDs), and set top boxes. The Open Screen Project will address potential technology fragmentation by enabling the runtime technology to be updated seamlessly over the air on mobile devices. The consistent runtime environment will provide optimal performance across a variety of operating systems and devices, and ultimately provide the best experience to consumers.

Some bloggers have speculated that this initiative is aimed at creating a Flash/AIR runtime on the iPhone. Maybe. But right now this thing looks more like an industry cooperative (not necessarily a bad thing) rather than a dynamic open source project.

The Desktop Application is Dead...Almost

The report of my death was an exaggeration.

  -- Mark Twain

Why is the desktop GUI dead? Is it dead? Tell it to Microsoft, which still ships enough copies of Office each year to exhaust the capacity of all of the world's toxic waste dumps. So maybe its not totally dead. But in one important respect the desktop GUI is disappearing: the custom app developed for and by small to midsize businesses (SMB's).

Now I have worked in the IT industry as an employee, a contractor, a freelance consultant, and, for last decade, as a partner in a outsourced software product development firm. In that last role, I've had to turn down an unusually large number of projects recently. Why is that?

In a phrase, opportunity cost. Clients come to us with products, existing or new, and we usually agree to work on them for a fee. Sometimes you have to turn down project A because project B is much sexier and you can't do both projects. That has happened a lot of late and mostly with prospective clients looking to develop purely desktop applications. Unless there is a compelling reason, we just can't get excited about a desktop GUI project.

So, by way of eulogy, let me present a numbered list of compelling reasons for developing desktop GUI's instead of Desktop RIA's.

1. It is unwise to expose the application to the outside world. Example: power plant management software.
2. The application calls for integration with custom hardware or mobile devices. Example: scientific software that integrates with custom measurement devices.
   
3. The application requires fine control of the underlying video/audio hardware. Example: first-person shooters.

That's a pretty short list. Note that there are a number of other applications you wouldn't do as a Desktop RIA, such as grep, but then you wouldn't do that as a Desktop GUI either (yes, yes, there are visual grep tools, but they don't function in quite the way that the easily piped command line grep does). Also, some of the examples above may have Internet integration (think XBox, etc.), but their architecture, runtime and user interface are pretty different from that of your typical Desktop GUI.

Note what isn't on that list: presentation software. I've argued in the past that Powerpoint was the one place in the office productivity universe where the Web 2.0 clones would fail. How many times have you been in a conference room without connectivity? No net? No presentation. But with the Desktop RIA runtimes, browser support and framework support coming out, online/off-line hybrids are becoming possible.

If you can add to the above list, great, but for the most part, I think the Desktop GUI is a vanishing breed.


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