1 / Rich Interfaces – Cross Experience

When developing for the main three platforms, Web, Desktop, and Mobile its necessary to maintain homogenous user interface design and experience, so that the user perception (mental-model) doesn’t change while using same app on different platform. And to deliver this its important for designers to achieve zero-sum solution for cross design and experience. And with development platforms today, promising Rich experience has been easy. And delivering mono-design-multi platform has become possible. In yesteryears, except for color scheme and assets, the experience of an app on web and mobile was quite different. Now designers and developers, are delivering same experience, and the only platform that has been able to do is Adobe Flash. You can argue with me saying stuff about Mac, Web, and iPhone, but what fails to connect them in terms of UX homogenuity and their runtime platforms.

2 / Homogenous Runtime – Cross Platform

In recent years, with scripting languages like ActionScript, it has become possible to a large extent to write a single piece of code and deploy it on web and desktop. Off course the wrappers need to be changed, otherwise its pretty much the same code. In terms of cost, I can now develop and deploy my collaborative apps across various digital ecosystems, without investing money on developing code from scratch for each device platform. And the same again is possible with Microsoft based C# scripting, but getting the same code executed across different platforms hasn’t yet unified. If I wish to deploy the same across various platforms, and ready to take efforts to change wrappers, even then its not possible with C#, because their SDK models which are quite platform dependent. Now its a disgrace or an advantage which I am not aware of. On large to get mono-code-multi-platform scenario (in other words cross-platform), the script execution runtimes need to be same across all platforms. Adobe Flash Player has achieved it, started with Web, made an effort in mobile space with Flash Lite, and reached desktop. For mobile devices, I said made an effort, because Flash Lite is not in line with Flash offerings for web and desktop, with OpenScreen Project initiative I believe this gap can be reduced and the homogeneity of the Flash Player can be achieved for all the three platforms. Also with the Adobe Flash Collaboration Service and Stratus, Adobe has created the center communication platform, where the web, desktop and probably the mobile can connect and work with each other.

Above we just looked at scripting platforms, for which to execute runtimes like Flash Player and Silverlight are required, but delivering RUA is just not about these two, JavaScript can too be considered. With browser capabilities extending to new breed of mobile and UMD devices, distributing same app for all three platforms with same code is pretty much possible here. For instance the jQuery web based application can be deployed on desktop using the Titanium Desktop runtime, and also on the mobile devices with Titanium Mobile (not yet released for open developer community). JavaScript, getting cross platform has been a major advantage, as the developer community for this scripting language subset is very large, which would mean more number of developer, the more community initiatives can be introduced around the platforms.

3 / Human Communication Model – Cross Social Networks

Its very important on how different aspects of an individual, Personal, Social, and Professional are considered. With services like Facebook and LinkedIn, which has clearly segregated the aspects, and at time also connected individuals with each other on certain model. Connecting users through various services over single interest, is now possible, which means mono-interest-mulitservices model is realistic. For instance if I wish to socialize online, I have Orkut, MySpace, Facebook etc, so for a single interest I got multiple options. What interest lies for developers is how can the information exchange be possible across various services. Again this is pretty much possible now, for instance Google has the OpenSocial platform where in using a single API, the developer would be able to consolidate information exchange with services like Orkut, MySpace, LinkedIn and the list goes on, into their cross-platform applications.

I am not sure if I have justified enough, but we as designers and developers are developing for the Rich Unified Applications (also was this term coined earlier ?) age. Where the above three considerations are mandatory and unconsciously we are developing a new breed of applications. Given a chance on a new application development, what I would convey to the team is, that the application got to have sustainable design, extensible code and should grow along with user mental progression.

So at the end the definition for Rich Unified Application according to me would be

“Applications developed with sustainable design, rich experience, extensible code,single homogenous runtime, deployed across one-to-many networks and available over major computing hardware ( i.e from PC to intelligent coffee makers)”.