Introducing The Universal Desktop Daily

I was reading the Sports Guy over the weekend and caught number 7 on his approved list which gave me something of an epiphany: people like summaries. As bloggers, I think a lot of us get caught up in the constant stream of news. Something is always happening on the blogosphere (even when really, nothing at all is happening) and bloggers always want to comment on every news story, big or small. But for the most part, I think people can appreciate a quick summary of things they might find interesting. First thing I do in the morning is check what's on Techmeme and MXNA's most popular. Millions of other people read the newspaper for their snapshot of the news.

It's with that spirit that I'm creating The Universal Desktop Daily. It is just going to be a few interesting Rich Internet Application links that I found interesting for the day before. They will be things that I enjoyed, but didn't want to write a full post on (again, sometimes people like simplicity). Because I'm usually up really late the night before, this is a great way for me to think about the RIA news that day, and give it to people bright and early the next morning. As always, feedback is welcome.

• I reported on the availability of Windows Presentation Foundation Release Candidate 1, but Tim Sneath, the WPF evangelist, took it one step further and had a good read on the road to RC1.
• What is Web 2.0? Andy Gutmans of Zend describes Rich Internet Applications as a part of Web 2.0 over on the ZDNet Whiteboard. I'm always loathe to link RIAs and Web 2.0, because I think RIAs are more broad. You can definitely implement Web 2.0 applications as an RIA, but not all RIAs are going to fall into the Web 2.0 umbrella.
• Speaking of Web 2.0, Dion Hinchliffe has a post responding to Tim Berners-Lee laying the smackdown on Web 2.0. What I like about Dion's post is that it does a good job of putting Web 2.0 into perspective. One of his points is that many of the billion internet users are becoming web-fluent. That is partly a result of demographics, as the younger, web-centric generation grows up. But it is also because Rich Internet Applications have made the web a better experience. I think the more RIAs grow, the more people we will see become web-fluent. RIAs take the techie out of the web, and that's important.
• Matt Voerman has an interesting post on Cynergy Systems' LookFirst™ development methodology. We're so used to building our applications from the back-end. Once that's complete, we work on putting a good user interface on it. But with RIAs, it should be the other way around. First, design your experience, then build the back end to go along with it.