[thelist] Macromedia & "Rich Internet Applications"

Fri Mar 14 08:52:17 CST 2003

Speaking purely from the perspective of someone from the TV realm - 
Rich media is great provided it's targeted correctly.
We've done a few little bits and pieces getting out toes in the water to
see what it's really like.
I personally hate what Macromedia is forcing developers to do - rich
content is great, but development efforts take much longer, repurposing
existing material is near impossible - and getting management buy-in to
your efforts is pretty much a waste of time.

All prior devlopment was entirely in flash - but the biggest complaint
from clients and journos has been download times of rich media content.
What's the point of having streaming video, encoded beautifully and
available at multiple bitrates if your bandwidth is tied up pulling down
a sexy flash animation which ultimately doesn't do anything.

We recently completed our most ambitious project to date - using only 5
small flash animations and the rest in php/javascript.  Our web
developer was most upset as he was pretty much redundant for the entire
process.
Fine flash can do sexy things, and vector based animation is killer.
Ultimately it's bandwidth wasting fluff.
You can't NOT use flash in an exciting, sexy new media company - or else
you're accused to being old fashioned - but honestly - the amount of
extra work to just add a single sodding press release just isn't
justified.

BTW - we did the e-trade UK pilot "how to trade" microsite - driven by
video, html and flash.
The flash component took us more time than the scripting, shooting and
encoding of the clips.

Just my 2p rant.

Scott

-----Original Message-----
From: Tom Dell'Aringa [mailto:pixelmech at yahoo.com] 
Sent: 14 March 2003 13:45
To: evolt.org mailing list devoted to the web
Subject: Re: [thelist] Macromedia & "Rich Internet Applications"

--- John Dowdell <jdowdell at macromedia.com> wrote:
> Hi, there was quite a bit of discussion here about the Macromedia site

> this past week, so I figured you'd want to know that we've got the 
> first round of changes in, as well as an interim progress report on 
> feedback and changes. Here's info: 
> http://www.macromedia.com/special/progress_report/

NOTE: This is a bit long, but I think its a worthwhile discussion. I
really want to hear what developers thing about this technology. Is this
something that we want to spend our time becoming a part of? Will it
benefit my career? I don't know...

John and All,

One thing that has struck me throughout this whole thing has been MM's
"Rich Internet Applications" theory and their touting of it. 

I can't help but think back to 1999-2000 in the dot.com heyday, where
buzzwords for products where being thrown around like crazy and this
sounds so much like that.

I've read through a bit of MM site explaining the idea. I've looked at
the examples they built, read about emerils.com and e-trade. In the end,
I'm failing to see what the big benefits here are vs. other approaches -
other than you use a MM suite of products so they get the money intead.

MM states the benefits are (business managers):
- Increasing the Number of Successful End-User Transactions. As if you
couldn't do this otherwise with good design and architecture.

- Helping Your Online Business Get to Market Faster. I wan't to vomit
when I hear this nonsense. Wasn't this a lesson learned during the bomb?
Getting to market faster is not a competitive advantage.

- Keeping Your Application Development and Deployment Expenses Down
"Macromedia MX solutions easily integrate into your IT environment,
allowing you to leverage existing software assets. Macromedia MX
applications also help maximize your IT infrastructure investment by
reducing bandwidth usage and server load."

This is tech marketing speak. They don't easily integrate into my
environment if I have a staff of hand coders who don't want to use MM
products, and we have J2EE backend folks using WebSphere or some other
product.

 "Using the Macromedia MX family of products, deployment time at
Emerils.com has been reduced from 15-18 days to just five days,"
enthuses the Emerils developer team. See how Emerils.com took advantage
of Rich Internet Applications to reduce developer costs while improving
user experience.

"for IT organizations by:"

- Reducing IT Infrastructure Costs
Macromedia MX reduces your bandwidth usage and server load by moving
processing to the client-resulting in fewer server requests and
compressed data transfers.

Sure, this might be true - don't know how much money you would really
save. But you are transferring that one time (so they say) minimum load
to the user. Do they want to wait? Maybe..maybe not. Based on what I saw
with version 1 of Macromedia.com the answer is a resounding NO, and it
*wasn't* one load, it was over and over and over...

- Streamlining Development
Macromedia MX helps you maximize the productivity of all your
developers-from novice to expert-through approachable tools, pre-built
templates and components, and rapid server- and client-side scripting
languages.

Blah blah blah my tools are better than yours blah blah blah. Marketing
not quantifiable.

- Supporting Industry Standards
Macromedia MX solutions provide native support for leading Internet
industry standards, reducing your business and development risks.

They must be joking... Sure they are trying and succeeding to a point.
But based on what we saw with the beta and what problems still exist...
this is hardly true.

"For users"

- Reducing Frustration Through an Interactive and Real-Time User
Experience Macromedia MX rich-client applications reduce user
dissatisfaction by offering both increased interactivity and instant
feedback.

Again based on their beta this seemed to be the opposite. There was lots
of user dissatifcation, and they removed much of that functionality for
beta2.

- Shortening the Learning Curve for New and Novice Users Macromedia MX
solutions offer a desktop-software level of interactivity that
translates complex data and business processes into accessible
applications for a wide range of users.

I really don't know about this. All I know was beta1 had a steep curve
and was difficult for even web developers to use.

-Saving Time With a Single Screen Interface
Rich Internet Applications reduce multiple steps into a single screen
interface, eliminating multiple page loads while offering users a single
application view.

But it loaded every time! It didn't always work right. It too *too
long*.

Then on the case study for Emerils they give us the solution as:

Solution 
Macromedia Dreamweaver MX
Macromedia Flash MX 

So my "Rich Internet Application" solution is to use DW and Falsh. Be
serious. Looking at the Emerils site, I don't see anything impressive.

This seems to me a lot of marketing speak, a lot of "buy our product"
type thing and a lot of hype. Where is the REAL benefit to me the
developer? Why should I push for this at my company? I don't see much
reason.

If this were such a great technology, wouldn't it be in use all over the
web? Or at least in some new significant places? The "pet store" example
was somewhat interesting, but nothing like that really exists on the web
- which seems to me so true of all these pitches. Nice demos, no real
reality.

Interested to hear all your thoughts...

Tom

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[Making A Commercial Case for Adopting Web Standards]

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