Ebay Dev Con and Project San Dimas

The EffectiveUI project San Dimas team is at the eBay Developers Conference this week (June 11-13). We're having a great time here, but what we're really excited about is the unveiling of our desktop application for eBay, named project San Dimas. San Dimas is now in an invite-only beta. Luckily, requesting an invite is open to anyone (but limited numbers), so if you haven't already you should definitely sign up for an invite today. This is a true beta in the sense that the official launch of this project and its final features are dependent on the feedback we get from users during this beta period. So please, sign up for the beta, check it out, and tell us (through the feedback form on the San Dimas "Home" tab) about anything you'd like to see added or any bugs you find.

Project San Dimas is written in Flex on the Adobe AIR (formerly Apollo) platform (both Flex 3 and AIR are now in beta and can be downloaded from Adobe labs). This is one of our first major excursions -- and one of the first significant commercial projects -- into desktop development with Flex and AIR. One of the best things about AIR is that we can write apps for it in Flex almost identically to the way we write our web-based RIAs. So development is fast and we didn't have to learn almost anything new to do it. One of the coolest features in AIR is access to the local filesystem. The AIR API includes file access that is incredibly simple -- you can create a file object and read and write other objects to disk with a single call and AIR does all the work of reading/writing the data correctly, so its just like accessing any other data in Flex.

There are many instances where there is not a significant benefit in moving from the browser to the desktop. But there are several applications for which running on the desktop is highly beneficial. Discretion is necessary, but where applicable, moving an RIA to the desktop can have very exciting results.