Sunburst's Website Is Awful
I just visited the Sunburst web site. It's really hard to find things. And I thought our site needed an update! At least you can find the pages for our products.
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August 21, 2007
Adobe's AIR and Educational Technology
Today I attended the Adobe AIR bus tour. AIR is a new thing from Adobe that lets you build regular old desktop applications using Web technologies like HTML, JavaScript, Flash, and ActionScript.
It seems to me this technology will become a very common way of developing educational software. One big advantage of developing with AIR is is inherently cross platform. The exact same code will work on Windows, Mac, and Linux. This is huge for educational software developers who either sacrifice the Mac market or spend money porting their software or jumping through hoops to make it cross platform.
Another big benefit is that there is a huge talent pool of people skilled at developing for the web, and now those people can work on desktop apps. Educational software publishers have been very hard hit by the rising cost of software developers (among other things) and this should help even things out. Flash is definitely a workable development platform for kids software, for example Leapfrog uses it for the Leapster device.
Unfortunately the platform is still limited. Things like hardware accelerated 3D graphics or running collaborative applications without a central server are not possible on the platform yet, and may never be suitable. These are definitely things I have in mind for future applications. But I'd wager that anything in the Sunburst catalog that's ready for an update could do it with AIR and be set for the next five years of desktop computing.
August 12, 2007
Dinner Conversation
"Tinky-Winky, what do you say to the Tubby Custard Machine when you've finished your Tubby Toast and want to leave the table?"
"Tubby Custard Machine, may I please be excused?"
"Yes, you may."