The Gold Hold

There’s always plenty of debate around RIA plugin penetration and new version adoption. Friend and fellow Flex junkie Travis Collins has whipped up some javascript and Flex charting to track plugin versions for Flex and Silverlight. You can even sign up on his site to get the Javascript to embed on your own pages and track visitors to your site, really useful for internal IT debates or even just to make sure your apps are targeting an audience who stays up to date!

Check it out here

Flash Lite has been around for a while, so Adobe is definitely present in the mobile market, but what about the next generation of mobile applications? At 360Flex I attended the “What’s coming up in Flex 4″ session where Deepa Subramaniam spoke about their plans to support Flex on mobile devices in a future version of the Flash Player. Adobe is obviously still in the brainstorming stage trying to figure out how to attack that problem, so it seems like Microsoft thinks they might have found an opening to get some Silverlight adoption.

Doug McCune has a discussion on his blog about Silverlight apps this week, so seems to be a hot topic.

It’ll be interesting to see how this plays out with the growing number of new mobile technologies. When I had a Motorola Q smartphone there were a ton of great 3rd party apps written in the .NET Compact Framework. Google’s now entered the market with their Android platform, and of course J2ME has some serious market share.