I'm just back from Adobe's partner conference in Amsterdam, where George Neill, Lead Experience Architect at Adobe Consulting, shows us this great slide depicting a woman processing mortgage applications. She has a PC on her desk which is running her organisation's app for managing mortgage applications. However, around here desk are multiple signs of usability failure. On her left, a paper calendar with names and phone numbers handwritten onto deadline days. On her right, an old-fashioned paper roll calculator. In front of her, a pile of paper forms colour coded with post-it notes. The app, Neill notes, should be handling all these tasks, but one glance at the user's working process is sufficient to expose its poor design.
All good stuff. The next thing we see is a nice application built with an Adobe Flex front-end and an Adobe LiveCycle back-end, with the not-so-subtle implication that these user-experience (UX) focused tools will help us create applications that fix this kind of design failure. There's also talk here at Adobe's partner conference of a new era in software built on customer experience, and how consumer technology from iPhone to Facebook and Twitter is raising expectations when it comes to business applications. There are even a few digs at developers, the people who, it is alleged, hate it when requirements change and who develop software geared towards the IT system which which it integrates, rather than towards users.
There is truth in all of this, but I'm cautious. It is easy to find a poor application and poke fun at it, but the idea of observing users and creating applications that improve their productivity is not a new one, and it is not necessary to use Adobe's stuff in order to do good software design. There are even times when it gets in the way. I recall spending time looking for a campsite on the web, for a holiday, and how it was in general the simple HTML sites rather than the "rich" Flash-driven ones that were easier to navigate. Admittedly the average campsite does not create web applications to Enterprise standard, but the underlying point is that there is a case for simple as well as a case for rich. Never forget "skip the intro".
The key question here: how do we define excellence in user experience? Let me state the obvious for the moment.
Applications that have functional deficiencies will not be rescued by any amount of eye candy or beautiful state transitions; and if the user is surrounded by post-it notes and antique calculators I'd suggest that this is not primarily a UX issue, unless we strip all meaning from the term and use it for every aspect of software design, features and performance.
Second, software can deliver a good UX without necessarily having gorgeous graphics and multimedia. As a business software user, I value applications that let me accomplish tasks quickly and easily. Question: think of a web application that changed the world, partly thanks to superb UX? Answer: Google search. Question: how much PhotoShop and Flash was used in designing the fantastic Google home page?
The case for user-centric software design is irrefutable; but we need rigour when it comes to working out what that means and how to achieve it. I like this comment which I found in an 2004 paper by Larry Constantine:
User-centered design is a good idea in need of improvement. The needed improvement is found in practices that put uses rather than users at the center of design and in changing the prime objective from enhancing user experience to enhancing user performance.
UP rather than UX resonates with me. It also reminds me of Kathy Sierra's mantra: creating passionate users. If the current rush towards UX puts the focus there, I am all in favour. If it means newly empowered designers imposing some sort of visual or multimedia experience on us whether we like it or not, count me out.
The iPad has just launched in the UK, queues are long, stock is short, and it is yet another successful new product from Apple. The iPad has frustrations, like no Adobe Flash support for web browsing, no Java, no printing, and the general sense that you do things the Apple way or not at all. Still, users love it and are willing to pay for it, and in the end that is what matters.
Does this shiny gadget have any relevance to the more humdrum world of business IT? I think it does, especially when taken together with other factors. Here's a remark from Apple CEO Steve Jobs from an informal email conversation with Ryan Tate:
The times they are a changin', and some traditional PC folks feel like their world is slipping away. It is.
Yes, it's a Bob Dylan reference; read the entire thread to see why. Jobs is marketing his company's stuff, of course, but a few days later the stock market put some solid evidence behind his claim. Apple's market capitalisation surpassed that of Microsoft for the first time since 1989. Microsoft remains more profitable; but the figures reflect the market's judgment that Apple has better prospects for growth.
Another sign of change comes from one of Microsoft's most important partners, HP. At the end of April it acquired Palm, and with it the WebOS operating system for mobile devices. Whether HP can make a success of WebOS is uncertain; it will not be easy going up against Apple and Google Android. What is more significant is the implication that HP has finally lost faith in Microsoft's ability to get it right in mobile.
Despite some positive buzz around Windows Phone 7, Microsoft did not help its case when it announced a major reshuffle in its Entertainment and Devices division on May 25th. This follows the bewildering launch of the Kin phone - bewildering because it seems right out on its own in terms of strategy - complete with typical Microsoft flaws according to this thoughtful review:
But the obtuseness of this user experience doesn't stop with the Spot -- it permeates the entire interface as though decisions about how things should work were made almost arbitrarily, without anyone stopping to test them in the real world. The Twitter implementation is a great example of that. You can add your Twitter account to the phone and see updates from people you follow, and you can update your status from the top of the Loop... but that's all you can do. You can't retweet something, you can't send a direct message, you can't go to single person's feed to see all their updates, and you can't even open a link in a Twitter message from the Loop!
Windows Phone 7 will have to be much, much better if Microsoft is to claw back any ground in mobile.
I digress. All that matters is that the world is changing, and looking less Microsoft-shaped with each passing day.
In saying that, I don't mean to diminish the excellent work which I see coming out of some parts of Microsoft - Visual Studio 2010, for example - or to ignore the continuing dominance of the company in many areas of business IT. Many companies still standardise on Windows, and Microsoft Office remains the only productivity suite I come across in work.
All true, but the two great IT trends of today are not centred on Windows and Office. One is mobile, the other is cloud computing; and of course there is synergy between them. Apple's iPad is a further advance for mobile, and will drive increasing mobile data usage and increasing demand both for iPad/iPhone applications and for web applications that work well on those devices.
Tech media pundits talk incessantly about migration to the cloud, but it is always interesting to get reports from the trenches. Two recents ones interested me. The first is from Patrick McKenzie, who sells a niche Java application. He's just posted a detailed and entertaining blog entitled Why I'm Done making Desktop Applications. His application exists in both desktop and online versions, and he says he was a staunch defender of the advantages of desktop apps - "You can keep your Google Docs, Excel is superior in almost every way." Then he made an online version of his app with if anything fewer features, and tracked the statistics. He discovered the following:
His conclusion:
The next major release will almost certainly be its last. The webapp, and my future webapps, seem to be much better investments.
Does any of this apply to corporate development? It's true that life is easier in some ways if you do not have to make a sale; and there are still some things that desktop applications do better, like integrating with Microsoft Office through COM automation, or continuing to work offline on the train or plane - though see Rails creator David Heinemeier Hansson's You're not on a plane for a contrary view.
Still, many of the other factors do apply. Lower support requests, zero installation, accurate usage monitoring - all these things have immediate financial benefit.
It is no longer web application developers who have to justify their case, but rather those who still advocate desktop development.
If you need any further persuading, take a look at this survey of 1400 Microsoft's small business customers by Accredited Supplier. Apparently 62% prefer business applications that work through a browser, and only 18% prefer desktop applications. The more chilling news for Microsoft is that 13% actively intend to switch to Google Apps - with all that implies for sales of Windows server, Exchange, and Office - while only 36% are sure that they are not switching.
All that cloud talk is translating rapidly into business decisions. I'm not sure whether the future of the business application client lies more with AJAX and HTML 5, Microsoft Silverlight, Adobe Flex, or something else; but for sure it is not a desktop technology.
Eclipse Galileo is out now. It is remarkable: 33 projects and 24 million lines of code, according to the press release. Perhaps the two biggest features in this release are support for Mac Cocoa - in order words, proper Mac support - and PHP development tools. All open source, all free.
Unsurprisingly, Eclipse appears to be the most popular Java development tool, and if you extend that to IDEs based on Eclipse, its dominance is overwhelming. Its obvious rival, Netbeans, has improved greatly in the last few years and may be better for some purposes; but it looks unlikely to catch Eclipse, and the impact of Oracle's impending acquisition of Sun is unknown.
Eclipse has also influenced other development tools, forcing vendors to offer more for free and to improve their extensibility. You can see this effect in Visual Studio, for example, with its Express editions and both technical and licensing enhancements to its extensibility in recent times. Microsoft may say that this would have happened anyway, but I am doubtful. Eclipse changed the game.
Still, there is something that I've always found intriguing about Eclipse, which may be a weakness in its business model (if a free platform can have such a thing). I put this to Executive Director Mike Milinkovich and he responded robustly, which I like because it usually means I've asked a good question.
Eclipse is a a tools platform, not an IDE, and member companies build their own products based on the shared platform. Examples are Adobe with Flex Builder, IBM with Rational Application Developer, Zend with Zend Studio, and Embarcadero with JBuilder. Each of these companies has a dilemma. The more they invest in the shared platform, the more they collectively benefit by getting features that they do not have to build on their own; but the better the shared platform gets, the more difficult it is to differentiate and sell their commercial products. I asked Milinkovich about this tension and he interrupted me:
That's not a tension, that's exactly the way Eclipse is designed to work. That is the Eclipse business model. Our licensing model and our business model are geared around the notion that we're building an open source platform which then people build products on top and differentiate in the marketplace based on what they do on the proprietary side.
Although Milinkovich says it is "not a tension", Embarcadero CEO Wayne Williams complained about this very thing, telling me that IBM is now pulling back from investment in Eclipse and reserving the best new features for its own products - which, whatever the truth of the matter, IBM has every right to do.
An additional factor is the difference between vendors like Google, which has an Eclipse plug-in for App Engine, but is only concerned to promote its platform; and those like Embarcadero whose business is selling tools. Vendors like Google can improve Eclipse without any threat to their business.
Eclipse is wildly popular, but came last in a recent Software Development Platform survey of developer satisfaction by Evans Data. To be fair, all the products won a reasonably good rating, so we should not infer that Eclipse is poor; it is not. I can understand, though, why some member companies may be happy to see Eclipse rated as good, but not too good, giving them space for their Eclipse-based products; and if this is the case, it may limit the extent to which Eclipse is likely to improve.
Recently I have been working with Microsoft Silverlight, looking at how to put together a simple database application. I am no designer; my interest in Silverlight is to do with cross-platform deployment, a consistent runtime, and an alternative to HTML and Javascript. It seems I am not alone in this respect; the Silverlight forums are dominated by programming rather than design queries. Here are the message counts at the time of writing:
The Silverlight 3 wish list is also illuminating. You soon get a feel for what developers are most frustrated about, such as: no printing support, no easy way to save documents to the user's hard drive, ugly fonts, no clipboard support, no access to devices like web cams and microphones, and no support for WSHttpBinding which adds transactions and reliable messaging to web services.
Only a few of these things are fixed in the Silverlight 3.0 beta. There is a file save dialog, and text rendering is improved though Microsoft is a long way behind Adobe Flash in this respect.
That said, Silverlight 3 does offer substantial improvements for business applications. For example, in Silverlight 2.0 you have to handle client-side validation manually, whereas Silverlight 3.0 adds validation support similar to what is in ASP.NET. There is also a new server-side piece called .NET RIA Services, which wraps key areas like authentication and transactions. Although Silverlight cannot do real transactions, .NET RIA Services introduces changesets, which let you bundle a set of database updates into a single web service call. You can also include arbitrary custom operations, such as approving a purchase order. On the server side, where you do have transaction support, this is processed and can succeed or fail as an entire unit.
Despite the snags, there is a lot to like in Silverlight. As a GUI framework it works really well, and it is good to know that special effects and transitions are available are available if you need them. Microsoft appears to have executed well on the challenge of creating a smaller, cross-platform build of the .NET Framework, which is really Silverlight's key advantage.
Another plus is the ability to work in Visual Studio with the server and client projects side by side, integrated for debugging. You can set a breakpoint in the Silverlight client, and another in the ASP.NET web service implementation, and it just works.
Presuming that Microsoft's continues its rapid pace of Silverlight development, my guess it that it will evolve into an excellent client for .NET applications, since this is what the community is demanding. As yet though, Silverlight has made little impact on the wider world of web design, which remains dominated by Flash, and it is hard to see that changing.
I'm at Microsoft's Mix09 conference in Las Vegas, where the big news (aside from small matters like the final release of Internet Explorer 8) is the beta release of Silverlight 3.0, Microsoft's browser plug-in that competes with Flash as a platform for rich internet applications.
Silverlight 3.0 is stuffed with new features, one of which is the ability to run outside the browser. Right-click an applet, choose Install onto this computer, and suddenly you have a desktop application complete with a shortcut in the Start menu, or on the Mac desktop. This has triggered a debate over how SLOOB (that's Silverlight Out Of Browser) compares to Adobe's existing AIR (Adobe Integrated Runtime), which supports Flash applications running on the desktop.
Understandably, Adobe folk like Ryan Stewart are emphasising the differences:
"I think AIR and the Silverlight OOB (Out of Browser) are two very different technologies for two very different scenarios...AIR is about letting you take your web application skills to build desktop applications and Silverlight OOB is more about letting you take your Silverlight applications to the desktop. The different models will be different for everyone, but right now AIR gives you a lot more flexibility and more API hooks into the operating system."
The big issue is how much these desktop/web hybrids interact with the local machine. Microsoft makes a point of how SLOOBs run in the same sandbox as they would in the browser, which means the user can install without a security prompt, but also that the application has very access to the user's desktop. The only access to the file system is to a protected area called isolated storage, or via a file dialog that the user controls. Microsoft says there might (or might not) be a way of displaying notifications but that is about it.
AIR applications by contrast run with the same permissions as the user. Installation involves the user consenting to a dialog which usually threatens unrestricted access to the system. Your AIR app can read and write any files that the user can read or write. There is also a notification API, and support for drag-and-drop.
That said, AIR applications are also restricted by design. They cannot be extended with native code, or execute other applications. Adobe has always presented AIR as a way of delivering web applications on the desktop, rather than as an alternative to C++ or .NET for traditional desktop applications. So is it really so different from SLOOB?
Well, some of the AIR features do give it an edge. One is the ability to fire notifications (annoying though this can be). It's something that Microsoft definitely intends to add to SLOOBs, though I get a different answer every time I ask about it; it might not come until Silverlight 4.0. Another difference is that AIR can host HTML as well as Flash content, which is an advantage for applications that depend on both. AIR also includes an embedded relational database engine, SQLite, whereas SLOOB developers will have to roll their own or use XML, though I doubt this is really a big deal. One other thing: Silverlight knows nothing about printing, which is unfortunate when running outside the browser.
Nice features; but I still feel that AIR and SLOOB are close competitors. Both take a cross-platform, rich internet application runtime and make it available from a desktop shortcut and with offline support. That makes a huge difference to users, even if the technical differences between running in or outside the browser are not so great. SLOOBs are going to be attractive to .NET developers because they include the .NET runtime and can be developed in the familiar Visual Studio IDE.
Personally I'd like to see an option to run AIR applications sandboxed, as full file access is more than most of them need. I'd also like an option to run SLOOBs with greater local system access when needed. Why not have the best of both worlds?
In the meantime, I'm expecting both to succeed. For applications that will work as a SLOOB, it makes a great user-friendly, cross-platform alternative to Windows Forms; and we've already seen effective user of AIR for cloud-centric utilities like Twitter clients. Both platforms are also highly effective for visualizing data. Who knows, this approach could become the norm for a wide range of business applications.
Adobe's MAX conference in San Francisco this week was focused on what it calls the "Flash Platform", a technology stack oriented round the Flash multimedia runtime. The "platform" word highlights the fact that you can code for Flash and have your application run everywhere that Flash runs, including Windows, Mac, Linux, and some mobile devices as long as they are not from Apple. It is not a complete platform, being essentially an Internet client, though there are some server-side pieces such as LiveCycle Data Services, to simplify and optimize communication between Flash clients and Java middleware. You can also blur the distinction between browser and desktop with AIR, which runs Flash outside the browser and adds a local database engine.
So what's new? There was the usual set of announcements. The key ones are as follows:
AIR 1.5: an update to the desktop runtime which adds support for Flash Player 10 features such as Pixel Bender, for runtime graphical effects, and an option to encrypt local databases. There is also the SquirrelFish JavaScript interpreter - though this only comes into play if you are running JavaScript within HTML, rendered by WebKit, rather than ActionScript without the Flash runtime, which has its own just-in-time compiler. AIR 1.5 is available now.
A new version of Flex and the Eclipse-based Flex Builder IDE, code-named Gumbo. This has a new skinning and component architecture, more advanced text rendering, easier two-way data binding and a new Client Data Management (CDM) feature which from early descriptions looks reminiscent of a .NET dataset. You work with data on the client, storing updates locally, then zap the updates back across the wire in a single update operation. One thing that is not yet clear to me is the extent to which CDM requires LiveCycle on the server; I'll be sure to clarify this in a couple of weeks at MAX Europe (I was not present at the US event). The database aspect is significant, because so many enterprise applications boil down to CRUD (Create, Retrieve, Update, Delete) in one form or another.
Catalyst, formerly code-named Thermo, was previewed. This is a fascinating product which converts Photoshop artwork into Flex code; it also allows designers to create and preview a degree of interaction in their designs. Catalyst shares the same project format as Flex Builder. Again, I will be taking a closer look at MAX Europe. Here's a preview screen grab:
Cocomo (yet another codename) is a cloud effort from Adobe, focused on conferencing. Adobe hosts the services and provides Flex components to enable file sharing, text and VOIP (Voice over IP) chat, whiteboards, and data messaging; there is also user management built in.
Alchemy is a tool that converts C/C++ code to ActionScript, for execution within the Flash player. It's intended for re-use of existing libraries, not for general development.
Third-party announcements that caught my eye included Ensemble's Flex add-in for Visual Studio (though I was underwhelmed by the preview), and Zend's addition of AMF (Action Message Format) into its PHP Framework. AMF is a binary format that optimizes data transfer between servers and Flash clients.
Although none of these announcements is spectacular in itself, taken together they show the momentum behind Flash as a client for applications as well as video and multimedia, as I have mentioned here before. A good thing? Designers love Flash because of the freedom it gives them, along with the excellence of Adobe's design tools - Creative Suite 4 really is spectacular. Nevertheless, I have a nagging concern that if we adopt Flash rather than AJAX - interactivity in HTML and Javascript - for our next-generation clients, we are giving away the openness of the Web, because Flash is proprietary technology. I recommend this thoughtful post from Google's Brad Neuberg, which recommends not only open-sourcing the Flash runtime, but also integrating it more deeply with the browser and embracing web standards. There's little chance of Adobe adopting Neuberg's proposals, but he does a good job of spelling out the issues. Flash is compelling, as is Microsoft's Silverlight, but each is controlled by a single vendor. Do you think that matters? I'd be interested to hear your opinions.
