I was busy last week and unable to make it to most of the show, but I did use my free expo pass on thursday morning to see the Keynotes, a mesh demo, and take a pass through the expo hall. Overall it was worth it. At the very least I now have a new t-shirt for every day of the month.
During the brief visit I sat in on a Mesh Demo. If you don’t know what Mesh is, its something between FolderShare, Groove, and .Mac with web services (if you dont’ understand what these things are then go here (mesh.com) for a better explanation. It has been awhile since Microsoft released something that made me feel itchy. You know the way you felt itchy when the iPhone first came out. That I got to have that itch. An itch that must be scratched.
In the beginning of the demo I was apprehensive. Would you be able to show me an open platform that could back up Meshs ability to run on anything? Or would you show me another FolderShare (which i love) that runs on windows and runs on mac if you don’t mind that its powerpc and hasn’t been updated in years. In the end I found myself pleased with Ori Amigas presentation of how the service level architecture works. In the presentation Microsoft had a list of other technologies that they would work with the community on getting libraries built for. One on the list was Flash, which immediately made me go hmm… After the show I asked Ori if when I got home I would find a crossdomain.xml file on the API server. To this he responded by saying it was something they were working out the details on. So no, but yes, I think. He also said that they are only allowing a limited amount of 3rd party developers in at the moment. In the demo Ori showed syncing between a Mac, Vista, Online desktop and to put it simply I liked it. After getting home, I signed up for Mesh and when going to add my mac as a device it just said “coming soon”. That being the case, I’m going to be on hold with this technology for a bit. Overall, I’m pleasently pleased with the potential (you know i’m happy when alliteration just comes out) and am looking forward to using Mesh. I even went over to the Microsoft booth and thanked them for giving me something to be excited about. They seemed slightly caught off guard by my complements and they tried to give me more shirts. I settled for just seeing genuine smiles all around. (they didn’t know that i already had 2 of those shirts :))
Next up: Curl
Curl Nitro is an emerging RIA technology that is trying to position itself as a competitor for AIR and Silverlight. I already feel like I’ve spent too much time on Curl for the moment so i’m just going to give you a link to a blog entry by Gary Gibert about Adobe vs Curl. It contains pretty much what you would expect including the required AIR vs Curl employee flame war in the comments. So here you go.
The comment I left at the end of the article:
Wow thats a lot of talking. I just wanted to chime in to say that i also wandered over to the Curl booth during 2.0 and spoke with Richard. First Richard is a nice guy, he’s a nice guy who happens to be a small fish in an ever growing pond (soon to be ocean).
Admittedly i have not read all of the comments here. Frankly i’d rather spend this beautiful day playing frisbee at the park. But I do feel like just stating basically what I told Richard after he gave me a product demo with the “performance” spiel.
If you’re going to make these performance comparisons then you should make two applications. One AIR and one CURL that do the same thing and show off performance in various scenarios (data load, 3d, etc…). Then provide the source code for both applications.
An after thought I had about it is make an awesome application that uses curl. Showing me a demo of a spinning DNA strand will get you no where when courting flash/flex developers. Its hot but I want something more substantial if we’re going to be in it for more than a one night stand.
Adobe and the dev community is constantly showing me hot and substantial AIR/Flex applications. To me the idea of taking on Silverlight and AIR head on like in your curl.com home page airplane animation analogy (btw done using flash) is comical in a very sad way. You know Ha Ha sad, not Ha Ha funny.
So pony up some applications done in CURL people want to use. Not because its CURL but because they’re cool and useful applications. And show some clear differences on why CURL is better because it fulfills some needs AIR developers have but are not getting. Then maybe we’ll consider putting it on our ever growing tool belts.
On the plus side I did mention that Adobe always buys the beer and they offered to take me out for one after the show. I wasn’t able to take them up on it but its a good first step in any developer relationship.
Off to the park. -s
On the other side of it, its been a long time since I’ve been this excited about a new technology (like a kid again) and for that I’m thankful. Without the flex team/flex community keeping me filled with cool new things almost daily, I think the anticipation of Apollo would have driven me crazy a long time ago.
