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The Universal Desktop

The technology and business implications of the next generation of software, rich Internet applications.

Ryan Stewart

Ryan Stewart holds an economics degree from the University of Pennsylvania and is now a Rich Internet Application developer and industry analyst. After graduating from Penn, he spent two years developing applications for the Wharton School and pushing the idea of the web as a platform for learning. Ryan now lives in Seattle with his wife and works as a developer for WorldClass Strategy while running his own consulting company, helping clients build and architect Rich Internet Applications. </p>

Latest Posts

Microsoft's Rich Internet Application strategy

I had a phone call Monday with Parimal Deshpande, senior product manager for Windows Presentation Foundation and Microsoft User Experience to talk about Microsoft's overall user experience (UX) strategy and also a little bit about WPF XAML Browser Application (XBAP), a technology I labeled as a competitor to Adobe's Flex. After talking with Parimal, I feel like I have a good idea about where all of Microsoft's products fit into their overall UX/RIA strategy.

August 10, 2006 by Ryan Stewart in Windows

Changing the web development paradigm with FXT and Flex

Ted Patrick, the Flex Evangelist at Adobe, showed me FXT, an independent project he's been working on that I think could make some big waves in web development. FXT is an open source solution that uses templating and Flex to give web developers the ability to create feature rich websites. This is a distinctly different market from the rich internet application space that Flex is targeting, but I think web developers of all stripes will be interested in FXT.

August 10, 2006 by Ryan Stewart in Developer

A hypothetical partnership - Sony and Adobe

Increasingly, as people integrate RIAs into their daily lives, the living room will be a fertile ground for deploying those applications. Right now, Microsoft seems to have the living room locked up. Xbox is the only next generation console out right now, and Xbox Live is a fantastic service. Flash can run on phones, and even the Play Station Portable, but their living room penetration is lacking.

August 9, 2006 by Ryan Stewart in Developer

Happy birthday Flash

Flash is celebrating 10 years. At times, those years have been great, other times, they've been abysmal. Flash has been given every label from shatteringly innovative to painfully annoying. It has given us Flash video, some fantastically branded websites, but also annoying ads and browser crippling animations. Flash is a technology of contrast, but as Adobe looks at the history of Flash, they have to be very happy with what they've acquired.

August 9, 2006 by Ryan Stewart in Developer

The perfect Ajax application - Joe's Goals

People who read this blog know that I'm not big on building full web applications in Ajax. While the new Yahoo Mail looks really awesome, I think development time would have been much faster using Flash or OpenLaszlo, and would make for a much better experience as Yahoo incorporates multimedia and other content into the mail reader. But sometimes, Ajax makes for a great user experience, as it does with Joe's Goals.

August 7, 2006 by Ryan Stewart in Developer

Analyzing the business future of Rich Internet Applications

I had a chance to dig into the ZapThink report which predicted spending on RIAs would exceed $500 million dollars by 2011. The rest of the report is absolutely fantastic and I suggest that any company currently developing RIAs or thinking about doing so in the future get a copy of this report. It gives a great foundation for how RIAs came to be, the value they provide, and the direction they are going to head in the future.

August 4, 2006 by Ryan Stewart in Developer

Microsoft and Ajax

I had an interesting conversation today with Keith Smith from the Atlas project at Microsoft and I recently talked to Andre Charland and Dave Johnson of eBusiness Applications (they are doing some amazing things with Ajax) . If you've read my posts, you know that I'm not really big on using Ajax to build applications. I think it's a good technology and that it adds a lot to the experience, but building applications with it limits that application to the confines and rules of the browser. In this day and age, those are simply too limiting for the kinds of experiences that we can deliver.

August 3, 2006 by Ryan Stewart in Developer

Implications of a Vista delay on RIAs

Through fellow ZDNet blogger Marc Orchant, I caught a post by Robert McLaws imploring Microsoft to delay Vista and make sure it's ready. Seems like sensible advice, but Vista has become an almost uncontrollable beast, and everything depends on it, including their RIA strategy with Windows Presentation Foundation.

July 31, 2006 by Ryan Stewart in Windows

OpenLaszlo tests SVG waters

Over on the OpenLaszlo Weblog, Henry Minsky blogged about testing out a new OpenLaszlo kernal based on Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG). Right now it looks to be a very rough cut, but according to Henry, he is going to see about cleaning it up and adding it to the Legals release which I blogged about earlier.

July 31, 2006 by Ryan Stewart in Developer

Enterprise spending on Rich Internet Applications to surpass $500 million by 2011

On Thursday, research firm ZapThink announced their findings that enterprise spending on RIAs will exceed the $500 million mark in the next 5 years.

July 31, 2006 by Ryan Stewart in Developer

Microsoft, Google and control of the web

Richard McManus has a great post covering Ray Ozzie's speech which I wrote about last week. He does a very good job of putting both Ray's comments in perspective as well as the general landscape of the web. I wanted to make a few comments, because I don't know that I was as clear as I could have been in my previous post.

July 31, 2006 by Ryan Stewart in Microsoft

Digg Labs - Tracking the web in real-time with Rich Internet Applications

I'm a bit late to this, but it wasn't until last night, when I received an email from Kendall Whitehouse of The Wharton School that I stopped to take a long look at the new services on Digg Labs. In the email, Kendall described them as offering "a glimpse at the possibilities of RIAs to deliver a real-time experience to the web." As I look at both stack and swarm I think he's right.

July 28, 2006 by Ryan Stewart in Enterprise Software

Ray Ozzie Trips On the Web

I had a lot of faith in Ray Ozzie and when he was announced as the successor to Bill Gates, I anticipated good things for Microsoft. Today I downgraded my faith level in Ray after reading some Joe Wilcox's analysis on Ray's presentation at Microsoft's annual financial analysts meeting. I'm not sure if Ray was just too afraid to stray far from the mothership, or if he really believes what he's saying, but either way I get the feeling it's "Meet the new Microsoft, same as the old Microsoft." Joe notes that Ray dismissed the web saying "I do not believe the Web is the be-all and end-all of experience delivery. I believe that mobile devices are an amazingly important thing." This sounds pretty reasonable to me, except that I think those mobile devices are best used as tools to leverage the web. This is where the picture of Microsoft's vision gets a little clearer.

July 27, 2006 by Ryan Stewart in Microsoft

Hints of support for WPF/E on Mac

On Tuesday, Nathan Herring blogged that he was leaving the CoreCLR team to work on the Mac version of the MiniCLR that will make up a part of WPF/E. While the announcement is relatively small, Bruce McLeod noted that this essentially confirms some of the .NET runtime will be ported to Mac OSX.

July 27, 2006 by Ryan Stewart in Apple

The Economics of Cross Platform

If you've read my bio, you know that I have an Economics degree from Penn. That pretty much entitles me to take your order at Starbucks. Essentially, it means that I wasn't quite good enough to get into Wharton and didn't want to work as hard as the Engineering kids. Despite my lackluster showing as a student, sitting through a bunch of economic classes did teach me to look at things a little differently, which has been an asset when evaluating technology. It is also one of the reasons I struggle so much with the issue of cross platform.

July 26, 2006 by Ryan Stewart in Developer