The Universal Desktop

Ryan Stewart
  • So long and thanks for all the fish

    By Ryan Stewart | March 30, 2009, 7:39pm PDT

    This will be my last post on ZDNet. Blogging here has been one of the most fun things I’ve been able to do in my career. In fact, basically everything started here. Almost all of the various connections I’ve made over the past couple of years are as a result of this blog. It’s given [...]

  • RIA technologies and the downturn

    By Ryan Stewart | March 5, 2009, 5:33pm PST

    The news is a pretty depressing place right now but there was a small article in the Economist about how the Fashion industry is responding to the downturn that caught my eye. Towards the end of the article the Economist mentioned how designers are looking for ways to leverage digital distribution:

    One firm, Halston, recently released [...]

  • The iPhone conference cometh: 360|iDev March 2-4

    By Ryan Stewart | February 11, 2009, 8:38am PST

    One of my favorite RIA events is 360|Flex. The organizers, Tom Ortega, and John Wilker, do a great job of getting the community excited and putting on an event with great technical content and great networking opportunities. The 360|Flex events end up feeling like a week hanging out with friends with some great sessions thrown [...]

  • The mulitouch future of RIAs

    By Ryan Stewart | February 9, 2009, 5:52am PST

    I’ve been really enjoying Richard Monson-Haefel’s blog on multi touch lately. Now that RIA technologies are able to do so much, it’s become apparent that the mouse and keyboard are simply too limiting as input devices. The maddening number of iPhone clones that do “gestures” but not true multi touch continues to leave me underwhelmed [...]

  • No more free Sprout Builder

    By Ryan Stewart | January 14, 2009, 4:53pm PST

    Marshall has the news up that Sprout Builder will no longer be offering free accounts. Sprout Builder is one of my favorite applications on the net and I always thought what they were doing for the Flash Platform was good. So while I share Marshall’s sadness at the loss of the free service, I think [...]

  • Brightcove adds some new leadership talent

    By Ryan Stewart | January 12, 2009, 11:22am PST

    This morning Brightcove made an announcement that they’re adding a few new faces. A couple of those faces will be familiar to anyone who has been involved in the RIA world for the past couple of years. Jeff Whatcott, who was vice president of marketing at Adobe, is joining as senior vice president of marketing [...]

  • Looking ahead to 2009

    By Ryan Stewart | January 7, 2009, 3:24pm PST

    2008 was a big year for rich Internet applications. We saw companies like Curl and Appcelerator make big pushes into the RIA mindshare. We saw a significant release of Silverlight - a release that most people excited about Silverlight were very happy with. We saw Adobe push more with Flex and Adobe AIR and watched [...]

  • Native Client: Google's (other) plugin play

    By Ryan Stewart | December 9, 2008, 6:10am PST

    Yesterday Google announced an early developer release of Native Client, a plugin for web browsers that lets you essentially run native code like C or C++ in the browser. In theory it could be extended to other languages. The main goal is to provide native-like performance and to let C/C++ developers start creating web applications. [...]

  • The widget conundrum

    By Ryan Stewart | December 1, 2008, 7:47am PST

    There’s a pretty good article in Advertising Age about the benefits of widgets and the fact that not a lot of people are using it. AdAge says that “entire segment” will amount to around $100 million. That sounds like a chunk of money, and especially one for an industry that I consider a subset of [...]

  • Google's video chat plugin - a big deal for RIA developers

    By Ryan Stewart | November 13, 2008, 11:36am PST

    A couple of days ago Google released a video chat plugin for Gmail. With Google, it’s always a little hard to figure out where all of the pieces fit - that’s why there are entire blogs dedicated to the company - but in this case, I think this seemingly innocuous Gmail feature hints at something [...]