Widget appetizers

Apr 26, 2007

In any business or economics course I took while attending university a fictitious widget was almost always used as the 'product' when the professor need to explain a concept or idea. I find it ironic now that 'widgets' seem to be one of the hottest products on the internet. Everywhere you look you see them, for music, for videos, for pictures, for what you're up to, you name it. Windows Vista and Mac OSX support them. Google and Yahoo offer them. Mainstream media is covering them, Om Malik has written a few articles about them for Business 2.0, here and here. So what does this mean for Flash and Flex developers? A lot.

The Flash player is the perfect platform for widgets, light weight, highly visual, easy to use, across the board browser support. The only knock against using the Flash player for desktop widgets was that you could not easily access the local machine for reading and writing data. With the release of Apollo that argument went down the tubes. The market for widgets is hot and Flash developers are likely the most coveted group of developers to meet the demand for widget development, whether it's browser based or desktop based.

Currently most of the demand for widgets seems to be consumer driven. People want widgets for their desktop to track the news, weather, stocks, etc. or to dress up their web pages and blogs. Based on how quickly they are getting adopted and how useful they can be I think it is only a matter of time before the business world widely adopts them for business use. All businesses have metrics, key performance indicators (kpi's), they need to track and monitor, widgets are a perfect solution. That will open up a whole new world of opportunities for Flash developers. That's the wedge into the business world's door. Once businesses see how quickly these 'widgets' can be rolled out and how useful they can be, I do not think it would be a huge leap to expect wider adoption of Flash based applications in general within the business community.

Companies of all sizes have a huge appetite for custom applications. Widgets are the perfect snack to whet their appetites. Get them comfortable with morsels of Flash based widgets, and then roll out the main course of Apollo and Flex based enterprise level applications. The future for Flash and Flex developers certainly looks bright.