Partially not mobile related, but something I love to keep a track of is this new world of rich internet applications. How we experience the internet in the next 5 years is something I love to think about and try to consume as much information about said topic as I can. First off we have Adobe who makes fantastic designer tools and just now launched a platform called AIR. It is still in beta. Microsoft has a designer tool out there called Expression and they just launched 1.0 of their Silverlight framework. Sun, who is still a major player, announced Java FX this year and one of their bloggers just revealed an interesting tidbit:
We are working on a suite of tools for content creators & creative professionals. This will not be just a set of NetBeans plugins but instead tools written expressly for the designers. Think of something closer to Flash Designer than NetBeans. I can’t tell you any more at this time, but stay tuned. It’s going to be great.
This is certainly an interesting turn of events. Here is what Joshua Marinacci had to say about Java FX Mobile, something that we will be experiencing in the next few years:
It’s an entire mobile stack written in Java (almost everything except the OS kernel itself). It is derived from JavaSE and features support for FX Script as well as Swing. This is a mobile stack for the next generation of devices. Think iPhone, not the typical 120×80 px phone of today. The goal here is really convergence between the desktop and mobile spaces with a single set of APIs you can use everywhere.
Imagine the same scripting language used to create experiences on the desktop, television and now a hand held. This is why I sometimes question how long the success of Symbian can last. If you throw Linux on the right kind of hardware and let Java be your platform then you have something like the upcoming Google phone.