Flog: The Official Fluid Blog

It’s with great pride that I announce two Fluid designed and developed projects have been nominated for Flashforward Film Festival Awards.

Both nominations were for RIAs we created. Under Best Application is the Build Your Own Boot application we created for Timberland. We were also nominated under Technical Merit for the RbkCustom RIA we created for Reebok. The Rbkcustom app has an extra cool feature. Even though the entire thing is Flash-based, we generate bit-for-bit perfect JPEG of the shoe you create that can be shared either via email or SMS.

Congrats to Ameet, Andrew x 3, Daniel, Darren, Debbie, Jules, Marty, Nathan, Paul and anyone else on the team I might have forgotten.

So as RIA developers, Windows Presentation Foundation/Everywhere (WPF/E) is of keen interest to us. It’s purpose is to ostensibly make some of the capabilities within the WPF runtime available to other platforms from the Mac to mobile devices. While Microsoft has loudly proclaimed that WPF was never intended to be a Flash-Killer, I wonder if the same can be claimed for WPF/E. From the limited information available, it appears like it _technically_ could be, but it’s obviously a long, long way from that. First, WPF/E would need to be bit for bit compatible between the various platforms. We’re talking pixel-level perfection, which is what we largely have with Flash today. Second, and far more daunting a task, they need to get market penetration on the level Flash has. How Microsoft would go about that is a big mystery to me. Short of getting Apple to build or bundle a runtime, I don’t know how they’d do it.

Here’s a brief video demoing a small WPF/E on a mobile phone that one of our engineers managed to track down:

http://channel9.msdn.com/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=126729&pvrid=107

If anyone has more details about WPF/E, we for one, would love to hear about it.

We’ve been doing some proof of concept work for Avalon (now Windows Presentation Foundation aka WPF) showcasing our client The North Face’s great expedition video content, imagery and products. Microsoft loved it and asked us to demo it during Jim Allchin’s keynote. We were pretty blown away to find out we were the only non-Microsoft people presenting in it. I’ve presented before in front of big crowds at Flashforward and MAX, but the 7,000 for this event was the topper. I learned I’m not very good at speaking and mousing simultaneously…

That night, Andrew, Darren and I were invited to dinner as a thank you. Imagine our surprise when we discovered it was for about 15 people including Jim. For a man who is probably one of the wealthiest people on the planet, he’s totally unassuming and just a nice human being. Apparently, he still codes too. On that earlier note, almost all the people we met were as nice as could be. Very open and thoughtful even about criticism about Microsoft.

We saw some pretty amazing stuff going on. We’ll be posting more about their platform in the coming days. Right now, after three straight 15 hour days, I just want to crack a beer and veg on the couch.