Ask YC: Do you think Rich Internet Applications (Adobe FLEX, MS Silverlight) are going to take off?

Nope. What will be successful is RMA: Rich Mobile Applications.

I've been pondering this question for a while and I'm beginning to believe that they will not become particularly widespread, and that it is foolish to solely rely on their success for any venture.

What these "RIA" toolkits lack is two things:

* a common, unified, pleasant look and feel. The web already has this, largely forced by the own limitations and the fact that developers now know what's sane and sensible, whereas these ugly RIAs have neither of those things and seem to be a haven for poorly thought-out applications and ideas. I've seen Microsoft showing muddled pseudo-MDI interfaces, flashy visual effects all over the place and all sorts, but none of these things actually stood out as something I'd /like/ to use. They remind me more of artist portfolio and promotional sites in Flash that no-one actually likes in the first place.

* a killer app. I've thought long and hard, but I can't actually think of anything significant (and positive) that these applications allow that the current combination of technologies (HTML, CSS, JavaScript and Flash) don't already. Yes, Silverlight provides for easier development, but were any revolutions single-handedly brought forward solely through having a more pleasant development environment rather than anything actually better for the end-user? Perhaps if Silverlight provided 3D acceleration for in-browser games it'd be a different story, as it is I'm struggling.

Adobe Flex is likely to just continue the success that Flash already has but will not make any great strides forward beyond Flash's current popularity (which I personally expect to wane as computer speeds and browsers continue to improve). Silverlight, despite all the resources that Microsoft are pushing into it, I can't see becoming widespread anytime soon, but equally it's unlikely to be abandoned by MS, so may just be left in limbo.

Of course, I probably regret these remarks in 12 months when Silverlight is the next big thing, but only time will tell but for now I remain unconvinced.

I think there is a chance they will gain momentum. As long as there are multiple browser vendors with significant market share interpreting/implementing specifications, web development is going to continue to be painful. As evil as a single-vendor proprietary platform sounds (is?)...it sure would make a lot of things easier.

I've started looking into moving an application to flex for two main reasons: #1 to support no javascript. As more and more ajax features creep in, it gets harder to always provide a noscript fall-back. #2 to do away with cross browser compatibility issues.

Some concerns that I have with Flex so far are #1 no html rendering built in...so there is no way to leverage existing static html/css resources without converting to flex ui (I've read that AIR comes with Webkit, but flash in the browser does not.) #2 there doesn't seem to be good support for printing, especially compared to simple print stylesheets. Oh, and the other huge concern is how prohibitively expensive flex developer is.

Huh? You write CLR code, and much of the library you expect in those languages is available. I think that's what he means.

My killer app idea for Flex. Mail-order catalogs are wildly successful. Online shopping is boring. Bring the catalog experience and add friend/social networking. Think beautifully-rendered catalog pages that turn, catalog pages that have embedded video, allow scribbled comments, tear-offs...

If anyone is serious about this, maybe we can do a prototype. Land one major niche-catalog retailer and the rest will follow...