Tag Archives: RIA

RIAs take Christmas shopping to a whole new level

by Serge Jespers on 23. Dec, 2008 in Industry, RIA

Around Christmas time, shopping malls and streets are crazy. Everyone seems to want to buy their Christmas gifts at the very last moment which usually turns this task in to a an absolute nightmare. Why not get your Christmas gifts online? I know some people will say that you can’t really browse through an online store and they are right. Well… They used to be right. There are a couple of really good examples online that let you browse an online store just as you would browse a physical store.

windowshop

Amazon’s Windowshop is still in beta but is already very promising and it actually works! While preparing for this blog post, I was browsing through the Windowshop and found a book about the Obama campaign. When I clicked on it to get more information, a female voice started reading the synopsys of this book. Right after that, I bought the book.

windowshop2

When you click on a DVD or video game, you get a trailer to get an idea on how it looks. When you click on an album or audiobook, you hear an excerpt from it. When you like something, you just add it to your shopping cart and continue browsing. No need to wait in line to pay for your gifts, no need to wait in line to get giftwrapping. You can just do it from the comfort of your home.

The Magic Shelf on the homepage of Borders.com is another great example.

borders

The Magic Shelf is the first thing you’ll see when you point your browser to Borders.com. It’s like the first shelves you see when you walk in to an actual Borders store. It displays all the new releases and staff picks. The Magic Shelf gives you detailed product information and customer reviews while making it easy to add the products to your wish list or shopping cart.

This is what rich internet applications (RIAs) are all about. Using the best of the web to make tasks like this easy to use and fun. And it also pays off for the retailer. First of all, they can quickly and easily update these RIAs so that their homepage is constantly changing, creating reasons for shoppers to return regularly. It also allows them to quickly respond to events (e.g. the election of a new president). By putting The Magic Shelf RIA on their homepage, Borders.com already dramatically improved their key metrics.

11% of all users are likely to recommend a product using The Magic Shelf. 41% more products are viewed and they also saw a 62% higher conversion after putting this RIA on their homepage (Source: Allurent).

I absolutely love these RIAs and wish that European e-tailers would soon follow their example. With numbers like these, they would be stupid not to…

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Demand for RIA-jobs on the rise

by Serge Jespers on 28. Jun, 2008 in Jobs

I’ve been meaning to blog about this for quite some time but for some reason never got around to it.

I remember someone asked me about Flex jobs in Europe when I showed this graph at the Flex pre-release tour last February. This graphs shows the increase in demand for Flex coders but is based on data from the US. I remember responding to the question saying that everywhere I go, people ask if I don’t know anyone that knows Flex or ActionScript. So I did a quick check with a few companies in Belgium and the demand is definitely there.
Boulevart is currently looking for Flash developers and Flex/AIR developers. LBi is looking for Flash/AS3 developers. iDa/MediaFoundry is looking for RIA developers. These Days is looking for Flashers/Flexers.

And I’m pretty sure there are more jobs out there if you look for them. And that seems to be the big problem right now. You’ll have to do a little bit of extra effort to actually find these jobs. You usually won’t find them in the newspapers…

Peter Elst is trying to make that a lot easier. He just launched RIAjobs.org, a job board targeted at Rich Internet Application developers from various backgrounds be it Flash, Flex, AJAX or Silverlight. As it only launched a few days ago, there aren’t that many jobs yet but I’m sure that will change soon. Usergroup meetings and conferences are also a great way of meeting companies who are hiring and obviously keeping an eye on your favorite company’s website is also a good way of finding out about job opportunities.

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Weekly Roundup: May 4th – May 10th

by Serge Jespers on 10. May, 2008 in Roundup, Weekly blend

As last week, this is just a collection of blog posts and sites that caught my attention this week.

  • Send your name to the moon: NASA is sending an unmanned mission to the moon and you can be part of it… well… Your name can be part of it but that’s still cool [link]
  • Spam 30 years old: The first spam message was sent on Arpanet on May 3rd, 1978 [link]
  • Giant solar powered LED screen in Bejing [link]
  • A celebration of Pixel Art: Smashing Magazine has a great collection of Pixel Art which includes the AIR launch poster by Eboy [link]
  • MXNA is back [link]
  • Hydra is now Pixel Bender [link]
  • Interactive demos of ILOG Elixir charting components for Flex: If you’re looking for sophisticated data visualization for Flex, don’t look any further [link]
  • FedEx Desktop released: Now you can follow your FedEx shipments with an AIR app [link]
  • Living in The Netherlands? Take the bus to Multi-Mania. The Dutch Adobe UserGroup is organizing a bustrip to Multi-Mania. [link]
  • The User Interface Resource Center: The User Interface Resource Center (UIRC) provides free articles and White Papers written by industry leaders about user interface design and rich Internet applications (RIAs) [link]
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Flex RIA Photoshop Express launched today

by Serge Jespers on 27. Mar, 2008 in Flex, Industry, RIA

photoshop express logoAdobe Photoshop Express is now in public beta. Photoshop Express is a free Rich Internet Application (RIA) built with Flex that allows you to store, sort and show off digital photos with eye-catching effects. It’s a perfect example of how powerful Flex and ActionScript have become.

As with every public beta period, Adobe is looking for your feedback on product features and functionality, which will continue to evolve over time. I have already added one feature request. There’s currently no support for Flickr. I know Flickr already uses Picnik but it would be great to have as much options as possible in Photoshop Express. (Update: Ryan Stewart heard that Flickr support is coming soon) Then again, I’m wondering if I could just switch to Photoshop Express as my main online photo app… It has taken much of Adobe’s best image editing technology and made it simple and accessible to a new online audience. Photoshop Express allows users to store up to 2 gigabytes of images online for free, make edits to their photos, and share them online in creative ways, including downloading and uploading photos from popular social networking sites like Facebook.
Update: John Nack is saying that an AIR-version is coming soon which will enable offline image editing and printing services. (more…)

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