GUYA.NET

Recently Adobe has been needing to deal with a massive force attacking its main domain of dominance, we can call this domain - the highly interactive web or RIA. I don’t refer to Microsoft SilverLight which is supposed to compete with Adobe Flash on the same ground, but to the brutal MS marketing machine. This machine can make every boy and girl blindly recite fallacious facts and numbly say things like “Yeah, but, SilverLight is search engine optimized”.

It took Adobe some time to understand what it is dealing with, and I think I’ve noticed a change in their PR brutality lately, generating big PR out of small things.

This last SEO announcement from Adobe, which claim that Flash will be more searchable by search engines, might have some substance in it, as opposed to the similar one from Microsoft, but, it’s still mainly a marketing battle. I just hope it doesn’t take too many resources out of the real development of the products.

Google were probably working on their own humanoid crawler that has a broader vision then just the Flash Player and can work with any RIA applications even if its written in AJAX or SilverLight. Apparently searching and indexing RIA is not an easy thing to achieve, and it doesn’t seem that even google has managed to do it yet.

The main problem of indexing Flash websites or any other RIA website, is to understand the context of the data and then link to it directly, aka deep linking. The fact that google can now read the text from within Flash even better then it did before, don’t yet solve that problem.

Even so, it doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t be optimistic, and there is a possibility that this will improved the indexing of Flash content. We’ll have to wait and see.

Flash, SilverLight, Android, JavaFX, QT and the iPhone. Seems that everyone wants to redefine our mobile phone, the ultimate device/gadget of all time. I’ve written a summary of the latest advancement in the area of rich mobile applications.

Read it here.

The promise of google to have a human like understanding of the Internet it crawls has yet to reach reality. My point is that, we should start to expect Optimized Search Engines (OSE) instead of painfully optimizing our content for them (SEO). Currently search engines can’t understand RIA (Rich Internet Application), websites written in Ajax Flash and SilverLight, and the authors of these websites need to invest a lot of resources to make it SEO. As RIA become bigger and more significant part or the Internet daily, what use is a search engine that can’t understand it? It’s the age of obscurity all over again, the age before google.

This clip (02:22) has reminded me of the old promise that google will see and understand the web the same as we humans do, a promise which wasn’t really fulfilled. I know there is a big technological challenge in that, hey google can’t do it yet, but the one that will do it the best might be the next google.

The search engine game might be open again since the late 90th.

I’ve been to a few SilverLight events and read about it on the web, I’ve even played with it a little, and I think it’s very interesting. But, one thing I’ve learned from all of these experiences, beside the fact that the average dot.net developer feels awed when he sees how to create a rectangle with a gradient fill, is that Microsoft is pumping the fallacious fact that SilverLight is SEO (Search Engine Optimized) because it uses external XAML files, which are basically plain XML files. In the last event I were at, the presenter repeated this "fact" with such determination, which made me jump out of my seat with rage, well not really rage :), I’ve just explained it to him nicely why it’s not true. He was more modest with he’s determinations, afterwards.

Even though it’s a known fact that SilverLight isn’t just SEO out of the box, I still see this being repeated all over the web. You should question authority, and shouldn’t believe everything you’re being told, even if it’s Microsoft.

Currently, search engines don’t even bother looking at XAML files, IMHO they won’t start parsing it any time soon. The same way google don’t parse dynamically loaded XML files, since it can’t do much with it, you can’t get much out of a parsed XAML unless your looking for a Rectangle that is positioned at x=0.1232 and y=33.4355.

I’ve been thinking lately, will I leave my beloved Flash and jump to the newer SilverLight?! After all that Flash did for me, made me the man I am today, got me this cool job I’m happily manage to wake up (almost) every morning to go to. Will I just leave that all behind? I know SilverLight is still underage but it might become very sexy eventually. What if it’ll become the better technology, can I just dismiss all of our past together, me and Flash, that is? I might also have an easier time pushing SilverLight then Flash, in my area. I’m defiantly gonna play with the real SilverLight (ver 2.0) when it’ll come out, that might be fun.

I believe a lot of us Flashers share the same feeling. Lately this has been recognized even by our native Adobe branch (Israel) which was ignoring us, flashers, completely till now. They have set a Flex3 / Air conference for tomorrow (25.2.2008), which is the exact same day that Microsoft is doing her local Silverlight conference. As for myself, I’m gonna jump between conferences, have the best of both worlds, eat the cakes and have it too, they’ll probably be a lot of cakes

Again, I would like to give Microsoft credit for it’s SilverLight showoffs, even though it’s funded with lots of MS money. The latest is the Microsoft Virtual Events. For me, it didn’t worked in FireFox, gave me some error. Tried in IE7, although it was a lengthy load again (more then 8 mega), the experience was not that good, with lots of too long delays and un-intuitive behaviors and eventually some Javascript errors. maybe it’s mainly a matter of design and not the technology to blame, but this is a Microsoft website, if they don’t know how to use their own technology, then who will.

Compare it with one of the latest Flex showoff, funded with developers passion.

What I would really don’t like to see is that MS will win this fight even though it’ll provide the inferior technology. We’ve all seen it happen in the past, but, I still believe, this time the game is different. If they can really excel Flash then they should be the winners, but, as objective as I can possibly be, I believe they’re still far from it.

I would like to see both of these technologies nurturing each other with the competition. I’m not sure that Flash/Flex would have received such frantic amount of updates in such a short time if it wasn’t for MS upcoming competition. So, so far it’s been great and it’s gonna be even more interesting.

P.S. Maybe this guy can already convince you to make the move to SilverLight

Microsoft recently released the SilverLight version of their Download Center. Its a nice demonstration of the SilverLight technology. But, looking under the hood reveals the huge amount of Javascript used to run this website. I can’t see the benefit this has over DHTML if all the logic is anyway implemented by Javascript. The only thing that was maybe more natural doing using SL is the small rotating arrows on the right floating menu. Obviously that won’t make it as a good argument for selecting the right technology for a project.

It reminds me of when SilverLight was getting solidified into the final 1.0 version still named WPF/E. The only thing that came to my mind was WTF/E is this cr*p?! After all we were promised, all this buildup, this is what we’re getting?! A stupid rendering layer with no logic?! Neitherless to say that it was very disappointing.

MS hurry to release SL bigger brother "SilverLight 1.1 Alpha" that is now going to be named SilverLight 2.0. This version will have a subset of the .NET CLR, logic written in C# and all king of goodies. Hopefully MS can keep up to some of it’s promises with this release.

No, not another conspiracy theory about Microsoft, and not another rant about Silverlight, just my latest, somewhat delirious, job search. Few months back I’ve sent my resume to only one HR company. In my resume I’ve clearly stated Flash as my top skill, and oddly enough my first call was from Microsoft. It’s not exactly Redmond but Microsoft Israel also has it’s standards, I guess. I surprisedly asked the person on the other side. - Microsoft is interested in Flash ?! - You’ll be surprised… he replayed. Microsoft, as expected looks like a very nice place to work in, with extremely nice people, there were also some open XBox and joystick boxes that were probably being plugged somewhere. Though there were many motivations, I had to move on, since this was my first offer I had to check some others.

I was overwhelmed by the amount of offers I got, but really got surprised when I’ve asked for a salary which wasn’t that modest at all and got offered more then I’ve asked for. After that I’ve continued to raise the numbers with every job interview and was still getting the flattering OK. It reached to the point when I was uncomfortable to name a figure and felt the need to deeply apologize before doing so.

Another interesting aspect is that even if the company currently isn’t using Flash at all, they seem interested in this “new” cool technology that no “serious” developer seem to know much about. It goes something like “we’re also interested in doing some stuff in flash” or “do you know, what is it called, Flex… ?” and then I start babbling about Flex 2 and Flash 9. Just give me a chance and I wont stop :D.

Obviously it seems like the most interesting places to work in are these risky startups. You can sometimes get to these by using something like jobs@companyname.com. At the young companies there is probably no HR department and this email address is routed to the CTO or even the founders. See an interesting startup on techcrunch in your area? just send ‘em your resume to the jobs address.

At the end it become too stressful to handle, with too many good options and my ex-employer pushing all of my sentimental buttons in order for me to stay. I’m glad I’ve made the right decision and signed up with JAJAH, an exciting Austrian-Israeli-American VOIP 2.0 / Web 2.0 startup. While my original role is an AJAX developer, we’re already looking at ways we can leverage the Flash technology to our needs.

You may call this Bubble 2.0 and you’ll be somewhat right, but theres a big difference this time it is much more realistic. For once, we now have a deadpool.