Friday, May 02, 2008

Welcome to your digital life!

Adobe announced the "Open Screen Project" a few days ago and Microsoft had earlier announced the "Live Mesh". I've come across posts that compare the two..uhh.. three (Don't forget Google Gears!). But, I guess the three of them are different types of platforms. I haven't used the three of them. Still in the waiting list for the Tech Preview of "Live Mesh".

As I understand it, Adobe's Open Screen project creates a common Flash/AIR platform to deliver rich experiences over a variety of devices - PCs, Television, Mobile devices etc. For the developer, it makes it a whole lot easier to build and deploy applications over a wide variety of devices. Hopefully, it should be "Build once and deploy on all" (remember iPhone! - http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/03/05/adobes-flash-not-good-enough-for-steve-jobs/). For the user, he gets a rich experience with the added benefits of portability. Which is really kewl!

The Live Mesh is a synchroization platform, wherein, users get to synchronize data across usually disconnected devices. So, now you can synchronize between your personal laptop, your home PC, work PC, Mobile devices and the Mac that sits in your room. Oh! ok, doesnt that sound like the "now in beta" Windows Live FolderShare? Naaah! what sets the two apart is the word "platform". Mesh combines several web services that sync data over a "Cloud". So, you need to install some sort of a client software that enables the synch. Ok, so we have been talking "users" till now. For the developer, we get to build applications that synch data over a wide variety of devices using the web services

Its "Synch" Vs "delivery" here. It will be interesting to see what happens next. Being a developer, I would certainly love to play with both platforms (APIs..slurppp!), but, I guess its early days to really build an opinion on things. Do I smell a Flash VS Silverlight thing here..somewhere?

Happy coding!

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