Sarah Forst, a developer at Roundarch, is featured in the RIA Rockstars blog.

I am delighted to present the first in a series of “Developer Profile” conversations with women developers. As a way to support, encourage, and promote women in our community, I am inviting pioneers in the field to share their experiences, observations, and advice.

To start, I chatted with my lovely and talented former coworker Sarah Forst, with whom I coded at Schematic in NYC. Sarah blogs about “making things pretty” at styleanderror.net, and tweets as @quoo.

What’s your name? Where are you, geographically, and where do you work?

Sarah Forst, although I got married in 2009 and changed my name from Sarah Plowright, which I think really confused a lot of people. I live in Brooklyn, NY, and work in Manhattan at Roundarch.

What work do you do currently? What types of problems do you solve, and what skills/technologies do you use on a daily basis?

I work as a UI Developer. I work primarily in HTML & Flex (and javascript / css, all that good stuff). I think my skill set really lies in implementing pixel perfect designs and always pushing the boundaries of what you can do visually with a technology.

Read the entire post here.

There are two main factors that act as inhibitors as companies work toward the consumerization of the enterprise. Commoditization of IT and Offshoring and Existing Process/structure.

Commoditization of IT and Offshoring

Although the enterprise may be moving toward consumerization, certain factors act as inhibitors as companies attempt to evolve as well. Chief among them is the commoditization of IT and offshoring.

What we hear from analysts and see in our experiences is that corporate IT organizations are not structured in ways that are highly conducive to the idea of being user-centric and consumer-oriented.  Many organizations have embraced the concept that IT is a commodity, and therefore, the focus should be on lowest cost offshore bodies.  There may be a role for offshore development at low cost, but it is not likely to be focused on building the user experience that is going to re-invigorate the business service provider-customer relationship.  It is unrealistic to expect that sending a 100-page MS Word document to the other side of the planet will result in an engaging experience after several months.  Creating a meaningful user experience is a collaborative and iterative process.

Stagnation of IT Procurement

There is an important point on which to set the record straight.  IT procurement organizations remain stuck in the early 2000s, after the dot-com bubble burst, when the market faced a glut of IT resources.  This oversupply resulted in a flight from IT-oriented careers.  The number of IT majors was cut almost in half between 2002 and 2006, from 23,000 to 13,000 in just four years.  As the market demand for IT resources has increased over the past few years the supply has not kept pace.

As evidence of this supply-demand imbalance, the number of H1B Work Visa applicants for IT workers in 2007 was double the quota the first day that applications could be submitted.  From April 2007 until October 2008 there were no H1B Visas available, and this dearth has continued to be the case over the past couple of years as Congress has been unwilling to relax immigration restrictions.  “Exacerbating the situation is the looming retirement of a generation of baby boomers. All this is occurring when the government projects that the IT workforce will grow nearly 25 percent, more than twice as fast as the overall workforce, between 2006 and 2016.” *

*Sources:

http://www.cioinsight.com/article2/0,1540,2248193,00.asp?sp=0&kc=HOTTOPICS012208STR2

http://www.thelibertypapers.org/2007/04/05/us-reaches-h1-b-visa-limit-on-first-day/

http://techcrunch.com/2008/04/21/house-republicans-move-to-increase-h1b-visa-quota/

A Mindset of Quantity over Quality

In addition, there is a phenomenon that is all too prevalent in IT procurement organizations.  The commodity mindset of IT resources has caused procurement to focus on buying IT services as if they were buying toilet paper.  The problem is all IT resources are not the same.  Numerous studies have shown that in a typical development project  most of the work gets done by about 20-30% of the team.  In one project with 30 developers, data collected showed that six developers were doing over 90% of the work on the project.  In addition, only one of those six was doing 40% of the project’s work on her own.  The other 80% of the developers were net distractors slowing down the 20% who were doing the work.* (For more on this topic, see Grady Booche’s Managing The Object Orient Project, p. 189. See also PeopleWare by Tom DeMarco and Timothy Lister, p. 48).

* John Miano, “The Myth of the Interchangeable Programmer: Can’t We Just Offshore Him?”, Datamation, July 2008

This phenomenon is exacerbated by the fact that when organizations go offshore they think that since labor is low cost and perhaps not the highest quality, they will compensate by hiring more workers to get the job done.   Now, however, a large group requires a good deal of additional management, and the two or three stars probably have their hands full keeping  the rest of the workforce from driving the project into the ground.  Add to that the high turnover with offshore development firms, the language barriers, and the inherent difficulties of working with people on the opposite side of the planet—such as time zones and team building—and this is a model that has its challenges when it comes to creating a compelling user experience.

The offshore model can be a recipe for disaster for organizations trying to collaboratively reinvent the customer experience and engagement model for what could be the most-used channel for interactions.

Insufficient Processes and Structure

Many enterprises don’t have processes or structure built around a user-centric IT delivery approach.  A basic understanding of the user experience and its delivery tends to be the furthest most enterprises have gone, and  many have no capability at all.  This new and evolving area has really grown up significantly in the Web era.  This space has rapidly evolved in the past few years and even a solid Web 1.0 experience design process is not quite adequate anymore.

This young field went through a significant evolution with the advent of rich Internet applications (RIA).  Prior to RIA, it was reasonable to leverage a fairly serial process of creating page schematics (wireframes) and then applying visual design to them; then the project would be handed off to an HTML resource, who would then bring it to life and provide this light front end to the J2EE or .Net development team.  With RIA, this serial approach is antiquated and significantly less effective.   As interactions become more cinematic, the motion of page elements communicates information and guides the user to the next action.  These interactions blur the line between the role of an information architect—who lays out the page and page flow—with the visual designer—who, instead of just coloring the page, is now integrally involved with leveraging the creative page elements to communicate action and flow (see Figure 6).

Figure 6: Integration Leads to Greater Effectiveness, Efficiency

As RIA technologies continue to mature and evolve, there is a powerful give and take between the technologist and the design team. The technologies don’t just bound the design by what is technically feasible, but also push the design further by introducing capabilities that the design team never dreamed possible.   This process has been reinforced by the emergence of Agile Design and Development methodologies.  It is not necessary to fully embrace the Agile nirvana to gain the benefits of key Agile ideas, such as multiple spirals throughout a development cycle. In such an instance, incremental capabilities emerge early in the process, providing business users an opportunity to interact with the solution and provide feedback along the way.

New Emphasis on Conceptual Design

A key shift has been the importance of conceptual designs to communicate the direction early in a project’s life cycle.  These concepts help to crystallize business intent, provide something tangible to test with users, and as importantly, can be utilized to help secure buy-in and project funding.  These are frequently manifested in a Flash prototype but can also exist in a series of design comps and accompanying documentation.

Many organizations lack an understanding of the new design and development processes necessary to producing rich and engaging experiences. They also lack the specialized skill sets and resources to deliver on these methodologies.   We have seen the emergence of whole new roles that did not previously exist, but are keys to project success, such as the Flex Styler.  This is a role similar to an HTML/CSS resource but requires additional skills with graphics modifications, animation and Action Script (the language of Flash/Flex).   These resources are key to bridging the gap between a user experience design and the object-oriented development team that makes an enterprise application come to life (see Figure 7).

Figure 7: New Skills Bridge the Gap

In the next post I will explore the future of the enterprise.

Consumerization of the Enterprise Part 1:  A Call To Action

On September 15th, Roundarch participated in the launch of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 9 Beta. As most of the industry is now aware, IE9 has been designed from the ground up by Microsoft to be the most compliant HTML 5 browser available, with a lot of additional features including a new, simplified user interface (sans browser chrome), and hefty performance improvements thanks to real hardware-backed graphics acceleration and a fully rebuilt JavaScript engine.

Because of our experience with Rich Internet Application design and development and our existing expertise with HTML5, Roundarch was approached by Microsoft to design and develop a demo application that would leverage the new features of IE9. Microsoft suggested that our team partner with OneRiot, a realtime advertising service, which archives and makes searchable news, videos and blogs being discussed on the social web, all ordered to reflect current social relevance.

Working with Microsoft and OneRiot, we decided to develop a purely conceptual trending news viewer application with the goal of demonstrating both form and function, leveraging a variety of technologies to make a rather complex experience seem deceptively simple, fast and useful.

The Demo Concept

The concept of the application is quite simple, and I’ve included videos below to help you visualize things.

The application allows a user to view current and historical trending news topics (and associated links), as these topics are made popular on social networks and across other Web sites. Not only can users view trending content, but do so in a manner that provides a way for users to visualize changes in the trending topics over time.

Because of IE9′s strict adherence to specifications, the application is 100% standards-compliant HTML5, but still demonstrate user experience patterns that have historically only been possible by leveraging a multimedia-enabling plugin.

The OneRiot “AdBubbles” demo represents trending topics as translucent, physics-driven bubbles – for which color represents whether or not a trend is heating up or cooling off, and which with their size represents the total number of online articles/posts that referenced that trending topic.

To help the user visualize the change in trending topics, the “bubble tank” refreshes itself once each minute, loading the most current trending topic data which causes a visual transformation of the size and color of the currently displayed “bubbles”.

Rather than trying to explain the full application in writing, let’s just take a look at the video clips:

Application Loading

When the application loads, the bubbles fall in from the top. The color of the bubbles represent whether or not the trending topic is cooling down or heating up (cool = blue / hot = red). The size of the bubbles represents the amount of online chatter.

Digging Into a Trending Topic

The bubbles in the user interface all represent trending topics from the RealTime Web. Double clicking a bubble will load a modal window with the latest article results from OneRiot’s partners.

Ignoring and Following Trending Topics

Since trending topics will refresh over time, and a user might want to view a topic in the future that is no longer part of the trends, we’ve allowed the user to drag or toss bubbles at either the “following” or “ignore” containers that are present on the screen. Should a user choose to follow a subject, it will remain available for them to recall the latest OneRiot partner articles. If a user doesn’t care about a particular trending topic, they can toss it towards the “ignore” container, which will prevent this topic from refreshing within the user interface.

The Timeline Viewing Trending Topics and Changes Over Time

To make the most out of the trending topics visualization, we thought it important to be able to view the changes in popularity for topics over time.
The 24-hour timeline allows a user to navigate across time to view how the trends have changed. When a user clicks on a new point in time, the application will compare the current trends with the historical data, and the bubbles on screen will transform accordingly.
Should the topics not exist in both data sets, they will simply dissolve and disappear from the interface and new topics will drop in from above to fill the gap. Should topics exist in both data sets, the bubbles will change size and color, based on their popularity and trending meta data.

“Auto Play” Mode

If the user does not actively use the interface for a set period of time, the software will go into “autoplay” mode. When this happens, the application will randomly cycle through the trending topic bubbles, and display an associated article headline and short description in large typographic text. This is displayed behind the canvas control / physics engine bubble chamber.

The Technology Behind the Experience

I am not going to get too far into the technology here, as Jeff Karova, the lead interactive developer on the project has broken things down in this recent post that discusses the technology behind the demo application.

I will, however, summarize our approach: To drive the user experience, we created an Azure application, hosted on Microsoft’s Azure cloud infrastructure. This application regularly connects to, parses and archives data in Azure SQL from the OneRiot API, which is later accessed by the
HTML5 demo via Web service requests.

There are really two types of data: Trending topics and articles/posts related to them. Each time the application requests a new set of trending topics and/or articles, they are stored in the Web browser’s local database, allowing for an experience that remembers your previous sessions, and gives users the ability to navigate between current and historical sets of data.

The user interface, which relies most heavily on the HTML5 canvas tag, features both a physics simulation to help render the bubbles / trending topics and a timeline component to that gives users the ability to explore trending topics as they change over the course of the last 24 hours.

Introducing the Concept of Time-Release Design

The application also has a very purposeful design feature, that will most likely be taken for granted by users until they’ve had the opportunity to use the application over the course of time. The interface was designed and developed with the concept of “time release” experience in mind.

What in the world does that mean?

Just like it sounds, a “time release” experience is one that becomes more valuable to a user that uses the application over a longer time period. We sometimes use this as a way to introduce novice users to more advanced features within a software application, revealing functionality as the user becomes more familiar with how the software they are using works.

Clearly, this isn’t applicable to all types of software. But for a casual news discovery application… why not?!

The concept works quite well, and the more that you interact with the OneRiot “Adbubbles” demo, the more interesting and valuable the experience becomes.

The application provides a new, unique and experimental way to discover interesting news items. Time and again, we’ve heard feedback from users about how they’ve found interesting content using OneRiot that they probably wouldn’t have found any other way, based on their browser habits.

Some Thoughts on HTML5 and Impact on RIA Design & Development

Working with the great people at OneRiot, as well as with the IE9 team at Microsoft was a great experience. The Microsoft IE9 beta is the most robust and HTML5 compatible browser available for Windows computers, and it’s performance is extraordinary, especially when compared to Microsoft’s previous incarnations of their hugely popular Web browser.

At Roundarch, we’ve gained a lot of experience related to HTML5, as many of the current and recently launched projects that our teams are working on take advantage of the new HTML specification, as well as what is now available using CSS. HTML5 shows great promise, and plays an role as another important tool in the developer toolbox.

There is a lot of talk about HTML5 being the end of other RIA technologies. With our experiences, that doesn’t seem to be the case, as there are many examples where HTML5 just can’t do what other technologies can. In time, as browsers incorporate WebGL and relative technologies as well as the ability to run applications that allow for native/compiled code execution, HTML and Javascript have their place, as do more robust technologies like Adobe Flash and Microsoft Silverlight.

Another consideration for HTML5 for complex RIAs right now must be that developers must still rely on users viewing their applications and content using one of many different browsers. It seems that the competing browser technologies and companies behind them simply can’t seem to align across the board on how features are implemented, and what priorities are in their overall product-feature roadmap. This means the potential for a repeat of 1996 and the original browser wars. This means that the amount of testing and tweaking required for HTML5 RIAs should not be underestimated when planning projects.

HTML5 shows great promise, and the next year or two should be quite interesting as more feature-rich browsers are offered up to consumers and as the HTML5/CSS3 specification continues to mature.

Do you want to know more about HTML5 and how it can be leveraged to create standards-based, desktop-like applications that run solely in the browser? Drop me an email, or reach out to our team at Roundarch.

For more information on Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 9, and to see how it’s helping make a more beautiful Web, check out beautyoftheweb.com.

To learn more about OneRiot, and their perspective on the HTML5 Demo application developed by Roundarch, see their blog post on the topic.

If you want to experience the OneRiot HTML5 Application, it’s online at http://adbubbles.oneriot.com .

Despite 30 years spent automating financial transactions, financial institutions offer customers no more financial insight than when people used passbooks and accordion files.  The first institution to buck this trend will redefine the industry.  And there is no guarantee that it will be a bank…or credit card company.

Read the full American Banker article here.

Bringing Style to Flash Camp Chicago

Just last week I had the distinct honor of speaking at Flash Camp Chicago, the annual conference hosted by the Illinois Technology Association. Adobe Flash Camp events are great because they are a single day where the community brings together denizens of the Adobe world such as James Ward, Jeff Tapper, Kevin Schmidt, Michael Labriola, and fledgling member Ben Schmidtke. The opportunity to network with the top contenders in the world of Rich Internet Applications (RIAs) makes this style of conference one of my absolute favorites.

Flash Camp Chicago served as the maiden voyage for my talk entitled “Building RIAs with Style,” which I’ll continue to present and refine throughout 2010. I started out the talk by introducing lower level concepts about web graphics for developers, continued by exploring how some popular RIA frameworks handle styling, and wrapped up by comparing two important workflow tools—Adobe Flash Catalyst and Microsoft Expression Blend—to demonstrate how the different platforms operate.

My goal with this talk was to provide rookies with a basis for understanding graphic assets, how to apply styles in RIA development, and the importance of styling as well as provide more advanced tricks of the trade for senior developers.

I always enjoy my trips to Chicago and would like to thank Roundarch for sponsoring my talk and the Flash Camp Chicago organizers for inviting me back to speak this year.

Adam Flater is a Technical Architect and Evangelist at Roundarch and is also the founder of the Merapi Project. For more information on Adam Flater, follow @adamflater on Twitter or visit http://adamflater.net.

Roundarch Technical Architect and Evangelist Adam Flater will be speaking at Flash Camp on February 26, 2010 at the Illinois Technology Association (200 S. Wacker Drive, 15th Floor) in Chicago. He will be presenting “Building RIAs with Style” at 2:00pm which will provide a primer to developers on graphic assets, workflow, and applying styles in RIA development. He will compare and contrast some of the popular RIA platforms and tools for styling applications.

For tickets and more information visit http://flashcampchicago2010.eventbrite.com/

It has traditionally been assumed that enterprise users are very transactional in focus and not interested in fluffy experience stuff.  There are a few key ideas that no longer hold in this assumption.  First of all, the fluffy experience stuff isn’t just fluff.  Enterprise users, even more than consumers, don’t have time to waste.  Forcing an enterprise customer to porpoise in and out of multiple systems through various interfaces and different logins to accomplish a simple, logical task flow is bad for them and your relationship with them.

In the early days of the Web, people were happy to have the ability to get at information and perform self-service.  Enterprise systems exploded with Web offerings and experimentation in the early 2000’s only to have money pulled back after the dot com bubble burst.  These systems continued to creep along and organically evolve into cobbled together sets of offerings.  Meanwhile, this channel moved from being experimental to a core business channel and in many industries, such as financial services, it is now the primary interface to customers.

These customers don’t just interact with the tortured experiences they have with their business partners. In their personal lives they have experiences on Amazon.com, Facebook, iGoogle, and iTunes.  These users come into work and legitimately ask themselves why the business partners they spend millions of dollars on subject them to an experience so far below what they get from the above consumer offerings for free.  It’s this paradox that is fundamentally the forcing function behind the consumerization of the enterprise.

In this series of blog posts I am going to examine the factors a company must consider as the enterprise evolves.  First, I will examine the factors that are driving the consumerization of the enterprise key amongst these: The Shift-consumer digital experiences are driving the demand for a richer experience in the enterprise, The Arrival of the Digital Native in the Workforce-the impact of Digital Natives entering and moving up the workforce dramatically changes the talent pool.  Second, I will examine the factors that directly affect the capabilities of a company to proactively evolve the enterprise: Commoditization of IT and Offshoring-IT organizations are not structured in ways that are highly conducive to the idea of being user centric and consumer oriented, Existing Process/Structure-a basic understanding of User Experience and deliver capability tends to be the furthest most enterprises have gone and many have no capability at all.  Finally, I will provide a very compelling case study that exemplifies the success that can be obtained by reinventing a company’s digital offerings and experience.

Let’s start with examining why the consumerization of the enterprise is not just a luxury, but an essential next step for businesses.

The Shift
In the traditional enterprise model, organizations dictated the tools and technologies employees could use in an inside-out push model.  During this time, enterprise level investment from industry and government (military) fueled both the demand and profit for cutting-edge technological innovations.  New developments trickled down into consumer usage.

Source: Forrester, February 2008.  Embrace The Risks And Rewards Of Technology Populism

However, key forces have shifted the balance of influence, with employees and individuals voicing greater expectations on the tools and technologies they work with, creating a strong outside-in movement.  Users in turn bring their consumer expectations into their work environments.

This trend continues to gain momentum from a combination of:
1.    Vast consumer market growth and rate of tech innovation in consumer products.  Innovation is no longer concentrated at the enterprise level.
2.    Shifting social demographics of the workforce as the boomer generation shifts into retirement or other activities and a growing population of digital natives/millenials/generation Y enter the workforce bringing their native tech skills and expectations (more on this topic below).
3.    Blending work boundaries with employees expecting mobile access to information anytime, anywhere.  Workers are exercising greater flexibility with telecommuting/mobile computing accessing both work and personal information in a location agnostic way.

The enterprise 2.0 user is not attached to a desk in an office. Sixty-four percent telecommute at least part-time, compared with just 34% of non-enterprise 2.0 users.  And more enterprise 2.0 users spend time working at locations other than their desk around the office and at client sites than their nonuser counterparts.  As such, large numbers of enterprise 2.0 users have laptops (55%) and smartphones (27%) — the tools that allow for flexibility in working location.

Source: Forrester’s Workforce Technographics US, Canada, and UK Survey, Q3 2009.

Source: Forrester,  February 2008.  Embrace The Risks And Rewards of Technology Populism

The enormous volume of the consumer market and fast adoption cycles draws new tech innovation efforts.  Users in turn bring their consumer expectations into their work environments.

Source: Forrester, November 2008.  The Hour Of The Vendor Strategist: Three Mega Business Trends Will Reshape The Tech Sector”

Users enjoy rich interactions online and via a growing range of networked devices.  Similarly Social Media has permeated the fabric of life.  As people adapt to and embrace new technologies, the gap between consumer and enterprise experiences creates pressure on organizations to leverage the best tools to enhance worker productivity rather than hinder.

Smart phones/mobile is definitely a huge part of this phenomenon and will be explored further in a separate set of blog posts as it is worthy of its own focus.  Smart Mobile devices are not just valuable to hip consumers but also to sales and services resources in the field and to all workers on the go.  Likewise Social Media is worthy of extended discussion in its own post and is becoming an increasingly important part of the enterprise landscape.

Here Come the Digital Natives
The impact of Gen Y, also known as Millennials or Digital Natives, entering and moving up the workforce dramatically changes the talent pool.  As this generation has entered the workforce their expectations of being able to network and interact on-line has met with woefully poor intranet and extranet capabilities and experiences.  Having not grown up in a disconnected world they are intolerant of this lack of capability and not easily impressed by merely being able to get by with basic functionality  Often missed is that this group is far larger than the generation that proceeded it and depending on how they’re counted, larger than the famous Baby Boomer generation.  They are becoming recognized as an echo of the Boomers.  Much attention has been paid to the impact of the Baby Boom generation and their impending retirement but the impact of the Digital Natives is just beginning to be felt.

The key thing to remember is that increasingly users don’t view there to be a major distinction between the technologies they interact with in their personal lives and in their business lives.  Business in the consumer market emphasizes usability, personalization, and customer intimacy.  In contrast business service providers emphasize security, central control, compliance, cost efficiency, and standards.  When designing new or updated services, companies can leverage the benefits of consumer technology usability and personalization.  People who understand consumer behavior can translate best practices into the enterprise environment.  Total cost of ownership should take into account improvements in productivity and speed of response.

In the next post I will examine the organizational inhibitors that create setbacks as companies work toward the consumerization of the enterprise.

At a recent defense industry conference, Roundarch unveiled a prototype designed to help soldiers collaborate to defeat IEDs.  We set out to feature rich web and mobile applications and apply user-centered design methodologies to solve a very real, very large problem.

Considering the goals of the business and needs of its users, we imagined how technology could support both.  The Joint Forces community is building capabilities that integrate multiple services and agencies.  Meanwhile, video games, iPhones, and the Internet have become second nature to soldiers who have come to expect edgy, simple, and sophisticated digital experiences.  These resulting designs work in a service oriented architecture (SOA), accessing and updating data across multiple existing systems while providing a seamless, world-class experience:
A squad on patrol in Iraq comes across a suspicious device.  A mobile application aids them in reporting rich details about the situation while executing quickly and without diverting attention from their surroundings.  The Operations Center, explosives team, and other subject matter experts operate in different contexts.  They are geographically dispersed and have different hardware yet collaborate in real-time.  Tools support situational awareness, decision-making, communication, and task completion.  IED lexicons baked into the system drive classification of data and algorithms for predictive analysis.  Robust visualizations turn data into knowledge for novice users, decision-makers, and technical experts.
Given that the data and technologies driving this vision all exist today, the end result is both forward-thinking and completely realistic.

The goal was not to prove the technologies themselves.  We are already delivering rich Web applications to thousands of Air Force and Army users.  Our goal was to explore new concepts for delivering information to users where and when they need it, showing what is possible with these technologies.  Prototypes are an ideal tool for exploring new concepts.  They can be very practical used early on in a project to drive out requirements, identify issues, adjust course, and iterate quickly. Prototypes can also be visionary, allowing the team to explore the “art of the possible” and releasing us from the constraints of everyday to see what could be.

Most importantly – as we learned with a similar demo based on an Air Force scenario – prototypes facilitate communication.  You can talk on and on about delivering a rich application to a browser or mobile device.  You can wax poetic about the ability of web services to unleash data to do great things, or you can show people what you mean. If a picture is worth a thousand words, an interactive prototype is invaluable.   They inspire discussion and find solutions to real human problems that get lost in information technology rhetoric.

On Thursday June 18th, a Chicago RIA community including the Chicago Flex Users Group and the Chicago Adobe Users Group welcomed the Adobe User Group World Tour that came to demo the latest version of Flex 4. Adobe Platform Evangelist Kevin Hoyt presented Flash Catalyst, Adobe’s new interaction design tool geared towards rapid creation of rich internet applications, Flex 4, the latest version of Flex, and Flash Builder, Adobe’s new offering for creating RIAs. Flash Catalyst was presented at Ascend training in the afternoon while Flex 4 and Flash builder were demoed at the Roundarch Chicago office in the evening.

Here’s a video of the Flex 4 Flash Builder presentation at Roundarch.

Last month Chicago had our very own gathering of great minds in the Rich Internet Application (RIA) space. Riapalooza, as it’s called, is a yearly one day conference meant to foster the RIA community in the midwest region. This year’s event was held Friday, May 8th at the Illinois Technology Association (200 S Wacker Drive 15th Floor Chicago, IL) and is the second one of its kind. Riapalooza aims to be technology agnostic and as such we had representatives from many players in the space including a contingency of Microsoft evangelists and few Adobe evangelists.

Adobe has been in the RIA space a long time with its Flash runtime being ubiquitous in over 98% of all desktops. Flash Lite, Adobe’s mobile Flash runtime is forecasted to be in over 1 BILLION mobile devices by 2009. Adobe’s AIR runtime, a cross platform runtime that brings RIAs to the desktop, already has over 100 million installs.

Microsoft on the other hand is a relative new player in the RIA space. Although they’ve been on the web with their .NET platform for a while, it wasn’t as rich an experience as some of the stuff people are used to seeing today. Even though Microsoft was a pioneer in the RIA space with their XmlHttpRequest, a cornerstone in rich AJAX enabled websites today, their early RIA offerings were met with limited success. Lately Microsoft has been pushing Silverlight, a cross platform RIA runtime meant to compete head on with Flash.

The event itself had a very good turnout. The conference room was packed with developers in the industry. The sessions covered a variety of topics from real world RIA problems, consuming 3rd party APIs in Flex, case studies, to RIAs controlled by alternative user interfaces. The six sessions were jam packed with material. I really enjoyed Corey Miller’s Building Interactive Applications Using UX Principles. His presentation can be found on his blog.

The “unconference” also had panel discussions during lunch which was great because it really engaged the audience through participation. Larry Clarkin did a great job of moderating and seeding questions and getting the conversation going. Topics included RIAs and the emerging mobile platform, the definition of RIA, what an evangelist is and what do they do, to how the various companies are approaching RIAs as well. It was great to see Adobe and Microsoft representatives butt heads in a friendly rivalry. What was also great was that user experience (UX) with respect to RIAs was probably given as much face time as RIA technologies. There were discussions of emerging computing areas that will be affected by RIAs such as mobile and touch screens.

Riapalooza is a definite must for developers in the industry interested in learning more about RIAs, meeting new people, connecting with experts and thought leaders in the industry, and keeping up with RIA news and technology. And at $20 a pop, $10 for early registration, it’s a no brainer.

A recap of the talk that Adam Flater and I gave on RIAs beyond the Mouse and Keyboard can be found here.

Follow the speakers and Riapalooza orgainizers on Twitter

• Michael Schaffner, Adobe Certified Instructor http://twitter.com/schaffner
• Anthony Handley, Microsoft Expression MVP http://twitter.com/anthony808
• Kevin Hoyt, Adobe Sr Product Specialist http://twitter.com/parkerkrhoyt
• Steve Holstad, Development Consultant @ Clarity Consulting http://twitter.com/steveholstad
• Josh Holmes, Microsoft UX Architect Evangelist http://twitter.com/joshholmes
• Mike Labriola, Adobe Community Expert at Digital Primates http://twitter.com/mlabriola
• Corey Miller, Magenicon & Microsoft MVP http://twitter.com/xamlmammal
• Chad Udell, Designer/Developer http://twitter.com/visualrinse
• Adam Flater, Technical Architect and Evangelist @ Roundarch http://twitter.com/adamflater
• Dave Meeker, Director of Emerging Technologies @ Roundarch http://twitter.com/dmeeker
• Pek Pongpaet, Lead Interactive Developer @ Roundarch http://twitter.com/pekpongpaet