When I first started the RIA Evangelism role in Microsoft, I had this nagging feeling that the term RIA was just all over the place. Depending on which technology you are backing and which stream of alliance you uphold, the truth is the term was destined to be abused before it really took off. I even...

A User Account Today. Typically when you set out to build a RIA, you look at what data you're about to keep about a persons account. In that obviously "Username, Password and Email" are three key pieces of information you need to begin.  The rest is the other metadata associated to an...

Inspiration comes from Games. I was at MIX ON CAMPUS (Brisbane) today and I was listening to one of our guest speakers ( Ross Brown ) talk about about some of the projects / research his students are doing with regards to games. One part of this session that really caught my interest was the metrics...

I've been enjoying the overall experience of what Silverlight has to offer since I started with Microsoft back in January 07. That being said, I've often been an internal "goto" person at times for some Flash advice on behalf of Microsoft customers around the world. In light of this, recently...

When you sit down one night and decide to road-test a theory or an idea you have, then a Proof of Concept (POC) is something you should consider. That being said, when you do decide to write a POC knowing the difference between when you are writing a POC vs Application is something you can easily fool...

I have an Icon fetish that is disturbingly wrong. In that I collect them, horde them and will happily spend Microsoft's good hard earned money on as many of them as I can find - if allowed. Yet, what makes Icon's so special? in that why do they enhance an applications user interface to the point where...

There are many things that make up a RIA today. I posted last week about Interactive vs Internet, and I think it's played out enough. Personally my conclusion is to let the "I" be silent, and it could be "Information, Interactive, Internet, Interface, Idiocy" etc. "I" of...

I just finished a blog post by James Ward (by far the best Evangelist Adobe have today) and it was a bloody good post, so much so, it helped me formulate this post (inspiration can come from many things I guess). “I was a young man with uninformed ideas. I threw out queries, suggestions, wondering...

I got an email the other day, by Netikatech.com in which they announced a "Powerpoint Like Demo". "...The interface of this demo is very close to the well known MS PowerPoint application. It is possible to move the pictures, edit the text areas and almost all the items of the View menu...

I was wondering on why I got a sudden wave of hot winded comments around "Microsoft is evil, empire must fall blah blah" style comments and noticed Adobe's Ryan Stewart jumped into the mix. Focus on the man, not the point. Ryan's built a career on ranting about Rich Internet Application(s), in fact...

I get this a lot, and most think I'm just annoying Adobe by using the word "Interactive" instead of "Internet". I think I've already covered this discussion in fragments but thought I'd do it one last time to cement my reasons once and for all. Internet for me isn't the right word, it's semantically...

Nectarine have put up Part #2 of the infamous RIA saga, " Barely Out of Beta ". I think it's fitting given after reading about Adobe staffer's latest nit picking over definitions that Microsoft use. "...(I was really tempted to have a ragged little voice at the end, coming out of the fight...

Context is when you look at a situation from a perspective and generally fall into a predefined segment. In that, if I look at say Microsoft Word, my context of use is to read a document - yet others may use word to construct a document. So different roles play different parts, thus the segments of the...