Laszlo has been working on this thing for a while now, and I’ve seen demos of it a number of times. But for it to be actually in production is a big deal. Earthlink and Laszlo should both be proud. Initial reviews seem positive.
The interesting thing, notwithstanding this excellent work by Lazslo, is that Flash RIA development has lagged JavaScript RIA development in this important segment. both oddpost and gmail beat flash technology to the punch, with remarkable JavaScript RIA email clients.
What are the other “obvious” niches that RIA technology will prove itself in? I’ve heard rumors that the oddpost boys are working on a spreadsheet app (their initial idea before they did the email client). None of the javascript text editors are any good at all, so that’s an obvious candidate for some enterprising RIA developer to tackle. Photo-editing is also a pretty obvious one (given that people already are storing their images on sites like Flickr). The interesting thing is that all of these things are re-implementations of software that was first implemented on the client. Look in your “Programs” directory on your PC and you’ll probably get a good idea for an RIA.
5 thoughts on “Laszlo premiers their email client on earthlink”
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jonathanboutelle.com 
You’re right. Some folks like myself are already going for the RIA re-implementation of desktop software.
The key differentiator for web-based software, other than data accessibility from any computer and zero sys-admin, is that the artifacts are naturally sharable with a worldwide audience. And that can lead to interesting communities (Flickr, delicious).
My current project is with spreadsheets, with a Flickr’icious web-based spreadsheet just gone into (indefinite?) beta at Num Sum http://numsum.com
fwiw, I recall people making SWFs as email displays years ago, although I’m having difficulty getting the right search terms to excavate these examples right now.
jd/mm
Steve,
Nice! I did a little spreadsheet thing myself…not a general-purpose one, just a flash data grid that you could paste data into. Make sure you support cut-copy-paste from the desktop to the web app, as it will save your users hours of data entry work!
Initial reactions: it would be great if you could enter text directly into the cells: doing it through that text entry widget feels a little artificial. I like the way you can resize the columns though! V. interactive.
John,
I’m sure swf email clients were done before this (though like you, I can’t find them: is google broken ;->). But implementing something is very different from refining it to the point where it can be sold to a major customer like yahoo or earthlink.
-J
Speak of the devil! Flashloaded has just released a flash text editor that looks like it has potential.
I took it for a test drive and identified some immediate problems.
The big reason that you use an RIA text editor if for online communities, which often have participants who want to post links, but don’t know html. So the first thing I checked out was the popup for making links.
1) it’s not smart enough to understand urls that don’t begin with “http://” (something a novice user might not type in).
2)The popup that for adding a URL doesn’t close on hitting the “enter” key.
3)The popup mentons the target (_self, _parent, _blank, etc), something that is only likely to confuse users.
Anyway, these are all design problems, not technical problems, so I’m sure that the good folks at .flashloaded will refine this component over time. It has the potential to be a useful widget if they can address some of these issues.