OpenLaszlo

OpenLaszlo has some of the most striking examples of cinematic UIs on the web today with some of the most promising technological premises I have seen. I just wanted to put out what I see as the most significant differentiators for OpenLaszlo from other RIA technologies...

Unlike its most potent competitor Flex, OpenLaszlo is not strictly tied down to Flash. The important thing to realize about OpenLaszlo is that it is an XML based UI description language with a dynamic rendering engine that is plug-able. This means that while currently there is mature and capable Flash based engine and a slighty less capable HTML+DHTML aka AJAX engine, these are not the only ones possible(Silverlight?). This, together with its fairly mature data manipulation capabilities, very complete widget library, good documentation and user community size - makes it one of the best candidates for developing attractive UIs quickly.

A problem that I saw though was that there seemed to be some significant problems around seemingly crucial areas - e.g. with SOAP based interactions, debugging in Javascript mode, file uploading, authentication etc for which there seemed to be no authoritative solutions. These are important for any serious real-world applications and OpenLaszlo needs to put out firm recommendations, solutions etc that will keep developers from bouncing around the internet.

All-in-all, this is a really neat open-source alternative to an Adobe based platform leading to the advantages of Flash and AJAX - I look forward to positive changes in this area...

Wink for Flash Tutorials

There are a huge number of video presentation tools available on the commercial market, but once you consider something as easy to use and feature complete as Wink - you might be tempted to go the free software route. With the ability to:

• Do live screen captures (as movies)
• Edit the captures frame by frame
• Add interactive scripting
• Add voice-overs
• Generate the final output as easily distributable Flash movies
• And do all of above through a simple, easy-to-use GUI
  

Wink really meets most of the requirements for people looking to create video tutorials for their applications, or interactive video based demonstrations etc. The best part is that with a high quality, free tool like this people will find innovative ways to put video to work for them.

Incidentally Satish, the creator and maintainor of the tool, seems to have other software credits to his name as well, all hosted at debugmode.com