RIAs: where the creativity is happening…
Rafe Needleman has written a great article about RIAs being the future of the internet. Couldn’t agree more: the Buzzword app is a perfect example of the kind of richness that you just can’t get in an HTML/AJAX web app, and it shows a degree of innovation that desktop products like Microsoft Office and Sun StarOffice can’t even begin to approach. I loved this quote:
I’m not seeing nearly the same creativity today in traditional software that I am seeing on Flash and in browser-based apps. Flash-based apps are finally beginning to compete head-on with standard software. Many new Flash apps aren’t just different. They’re better.
Of course, he then goes on to say that even “desktop media apps” like Photoshop aren’t safe from this trend. While I think that is true up to a point, its going to be a long time before web-based RIAs like Photoshop Express can really compete, since the files being manipulated get quite large and download/upload times become an issue on even the fastest broadband connections. That goes even more so for high definition video.
This is an incredibly exciting time to be working on Flash-based RIAs.
Shebanator 