Adobe CS4 : RIA Premium ?

This post is a consequence of a number of things I have been thinking about since Adobe Refresh last week. It came together while I was posting about using Illustrator to create Flex symbols. I was thinking about how little use I have for the Flash IDE at the moment. I had been using it to create an assets.swf with static skin elements. But I realise now that it is easier to use Illustrator for this.

At the moment Flex developers are disadvantaged by Adobe's packaging options. If we buy CS3 Web Premium we still need to go out and buy Flex Builder. What would be better is if one of the collections contained Flex Builder. In fact, what if there was a collection focussed on RIA development.

I had been thinking about this a little since seeing some demos of Thermo. Thermo is essentially a Flex for Designers that will integrate with Flex Builder (Flex for Developers). So lets imagine a studio with a designer and developer working on Flex based projects. Ideally we could have a CS4 RIA Designer Collection and a CS4 RIA Developer Collection and they could look a little like this:

CS4 RIA Designer Collection

• Adobe Photoshop
• Adobe Illustrator
• Adobe Thermo
• Adobe Dreamweaver

CS4 RIA Developer Collection

• Adobe Flex Builder
• Adobe Flash
  
• Adobe Dreamweaver
• Adobe Fireworks

Finally, for the developer/designer we have the Premium collection:

CS4 RIA Premium Collection

• Adobe Photoshop
• Adobe Illustrator
• Adobe Fireworks
• Adobe Flex Builder
• Adobe Thermo
• Adobe Flash
  
• Adobe Dreamweaver

Web 2.0 in decline

A graph over at Buzzmeter showing a decline in the use of buzzword "Web 2.0" during December has been seized upon as evidence of the coming messiah:

The dip could be seasonal, but I prefer to hope that commentators are finally tiring of a hackneyed phrase. (read)

No doubt the real reason for the dip is that everyone was more focussed on Christamas gadgets than they were on Web 2.0 widgets. Either way when the terms use finally wanes it is more likely to indicate that it has moved from buzzword to everyday jargon and that the time has come for a more reasoned assessment of the usefulness of Web 2.0 RIA's. When the dust settles it seems fairly clear that we will be left with some very useful tools and that the web will be littered with enumerable oddly named corpses.

technorati tags:Web 2.0, RIA's