1. Streaming Support: Silverlight changes and adapts the video quality of a media file based on available bandwidth and CPU conditions in order to deliver an optimized viewing experience. This provides support for live and on-demand true HD (720p+) streaming. Video giant Netflix first employed the platform in 2007 to power its instant viewing service. With the new streaming support, the only thing holding back HD video sites is their own limited catalogues.

2. Sketchflow: Expression Studio's SketchFlow allows for rapid user interface prototyping. This means that concepts and projects can evolve seamlessly without the need for lengthy redesigns. Developers are also able to apply their sketches to a 3D plane and add animation and annotations to them. Designers and developers are reporting that Sketchflow cuts down mock up times significantly.

3. Out-of-browser Capabilities: Similar to Adobe's AIR and Mozilla's Prism, Silverlight enables applications to be placed in a restricted store on a users machine. Users are then provided a direct link to the application from their desktop or start menu. Silverlight also tests for a network connection and automatically syncs and stores files depending on that connection. This ensures point back up.

One of Silverlight 3's early projects is French-based Eeple's Board. The project was started by a 19-year-old computer science student and is a virtual cork board with pictures, posters and articles. As with a real cork board, messages and notes can be layered to produce a media collage. In this case, the media includes videos, blog posts and music files.

A year ago, Silverlight's penetration was 17%, today it's at a third of all users. Compared to the 99% market penetration of Flash 9 and 86% penetration of Flash 10, this is extremely low. It will be interesting to see if Silverlight 3's features will increase the rate of adoption. Partnerships will certainly play a key role in how the market is carved out in the years to come.

If you read our coverage of the awesome drag and drop widget building tool SproutBuilder, think of PlayCrafter as the same kind of tool but for game creation. Read on for one example game and a demo video.

Below is one of the games the site offers as an example of what you can build. It's fun to play. If you create a cool game in PlayCrafter, embed it someplace and leave a link in the comments below.

While some of the press pack that was delivered to us along with CokeTag is a little over the top (i.e., "The Coca-Cola Company aligns itself with delivering the promise of a cross-platform Web experience, consistent with Coke's brand value of bringing people together for social connections across cultures."), launching a social media application is a smart move. If there's one thing that Coca-Cola understands, it's branding -- they didn't become Millward Brown's #4 brand in the world by accident. And CokeTag is all a about branding.

Though the branding on CokeTag is subtle -- "We made a distinct decision not to overly brand this application," according to Michael Donnelly, Director of Worldwide Interactive Marketing, at Coca-Cola -- this is an exercise in smart branding. Coca-Cola has created something that is useful, simple, and easily spread. Even though it has nothing to do with Coke's core beverage business, all roads lead back to the brand.

CokeTag currently only works on Facebook, but an OpenSocial version is planned, to be followed by standalone versions for bloggers and other web publishers. The beauty of building a social networking application for branding purposes is that if it fails to catch on, you're very likely only out a minimal sum. There is nothing about CokeTag that suggests that it cost very much to create (in fact, it was built on top of an already existing Flash advertising format from Linkstorms). Coke is also smart to create an widget that users should actually find useful, and not something that feels like advertising.

There's an application for Windows Mobile users called Zumobi. Finally out of beta, this app offers a unique way to browse the mobile web - it loads up a widgetized interface displaying tiles that represent your favorite web sites. You "browse" the sites by zooming in and out - a process that's much easier than typing in a URL using the small buttons of your mobile device. You can pick and choose which tiles you want on your page from the Zumobi gallery or you can create your own from any RSS feed. The only drawback to Zumobi, of course, is that it's currently limited to Windows Mobile. A Blackberry version is in the works, but it hasn't arrived yet.

Goojet

For everyone else, there is a new application called Goojet which brings the concept behind Zumobi to anyone with a mobile phone. With this app, the tiles are called by the rather silly name of "goojet," and there are also many to choose from in their online gallery. There are goojets for Gmail, YouTube, Twitter, News, Shopping, Weather, and more. And as with Zumobi, you can create your own personal goojet from any web site that has an RSS feed. You can even create a personalized goojet with one click to make a mobilized version of your favorite web site. With Goojet, there's a social element, too - any goojet you create can be shared with yours friends via the mobile app.

The Goojet web site was annoyingly difficult to use - requesting plugins in Firefox and not displaying at all in IE - a pop-up appeared saying "operation aborted". (This could be some misconfiguration on my part, but I did not delve into it to determine what that may be. I have no other issues with IE.)

Despite these problems, it may be worth it to put up with Googjet's site since the end result is a mobile app that lets you browse the web in a way that's very similar to Zumobi, but without needing a Windows Mobile device to do so.

For the iPhone-less, widgetized browsing such as that provided by these two applications makes the mobile web more personal and usable...which should at least tide us over until we can all afford to get our iPhones, too.

Adobe is also releasing an updated alpha version of the Flex Builder 3 for Linux to include support for AIR applications.

In addition to AIR and Flex releases for Linux, Adobe announced that it had joined the Linux Foundation in an effort to help "accelerate the growth of RIA technologies on the Linux platform."

AIR for Linux has been promised by Adobe "in upcoming releases" for a few months, and though Linux support won't provide AIR with a huge bump in users, it does help Adobe to demonstrate their commitment to the open source community. Google's Gears is probably the chief competitor to AIR -- though it's not a one-to-one comparison since Gears apps still live in the browser -- and already supports Firefox on Linux.

The SlideRocket editor in action.

SlideRocket has everything you'd expect from a presentation app -- powerful slide and presentation authoring tools, pretty transitions and image and video manipulations and animations, charting and table creation, and the ability to import PowerPoint files (export is coming soon). It also has some features you wouldn't necessarily expect in an online application, like the ability to import your own fonts, a plugin architecture that will allow third-parties to create their own transitions and effects, and an offline Adobe AIR-based player (a full AIR-based version of the editor is also planned).

But where SlideRocket really shines it in its approach to community, sharing, and collaboration. Already active in the application is the concept of an asset library, where you can pull in assets (images, video, etc.) from any source, as well as directly from the web. Right now, SlideRocket searches Flickr and Yahoo! Images from inside the app and can add images it finds to the user's asset library.

Users can pull images from Flickr directly from within SlideRocket.

According to Grasso, the company plans to create a repository of assets from third party partners that users can draw from or purchase. SlideRocket intends their asset marketplace to include more than just stock photos and videos, but other types of data as well. What's more interesting, that is that this data could potentially be dynamically updated. So, for example, if you create a chart using statistics from an outside source, for example a Google Docs spreadsheet, if the stats are updated later in the spreadsheet, the changes are made dynamically and automatically on whatever slide they are included.

SlideRocket also sports great collaboration and versioning features. All presentations and slides can be shared with permissions set by the user, and slides can be updated and have updates pushed live to any presentation they're included in. So, for example, if marketing creates a presentation for the sales department and some key piece of collateral changes, the sales team can go in later and update the presentation and have it pushed directly to the marketing guys.

SlideRocket's stats let you see who has been looking at your presentations and how long they've been viewing each slide.

On the community end, SlideRocket hopes to create an ecosystem around presentations where assets, templates, and plugins can be shared both globally, as well as privately within a single company.

SlideRocket intends to hold a public beta in the next couple of months and officially launch sometime in June, at which time the company will offer a free version as well as a couple of paid versions of the software. SlideRocket is already being used by the Weather Channel for some of their internal presentations.

Until the June launch, the best way to get into the private beta is via one of the 500 invites for ReadWriteWeb readers. Grasso told me that there are about 19,500 people on the waiting list to get in, and so far only about 2,200 have actually used the app. So your best bet is to snag one of these invites while you still can.

German ISP T-Online demonstrated a big multi-touch screen right out of Minority Report at the CeBIT conference in Hannover this week (see this and other videos below). Many other designers are working on variations on that theme. Other designers still are aiming to bring game-like interfaces to other data-centric experiences. What would you like to see in interface design?

Video via a post at the wonderful design blog FreshCreation, the inspiration for this post.

The expectation that something like this will be the interface of the future is pretty widespread, but let's look at some alternatives.

Shadow Play

While that touchscreen looks very cool, it's got its issues too. The video below is from the University of British Columbia and points out some of those issues. I'm not sure if the shadow pointing option is going to work in very many circumstances outside of a classroom.

Via one of the researchers' comments at FreshCreation. See also this version at a home computer.

Just Like Your Real Life Mess

That last video might seem a bit dorky but at least you can imagine some good uses of such an approach. The other end of the spectrum, stunning but a challenge to imagine really using, is BumpTop - a prelaunched, much hyped 3D desktop thing.

Via Metafluence on Twitter

Thought Control

The keyboard and mouse may end up looking like sad relics from a time in history when only a fraction of human capacity to manipulate information was leveraged. Hopefully that won't mean internet brain implants, but for some people it probably will. The following video goes in the "no thanks" column for me. It's called Brainloop and it's from Austria.

Via FreshCreation again.

How About Something More Familiar

One of the reasons we're excited about the launch of Adobe's AIR platform and in Rich Internet Applications in general is their potential for powerful, beautiful new interfaces. It's a lot more accessible for larger numbers of developers than any of the above ever will be. Innovation on AIR in new Twitter clients alone is a fun field to watch.

AIR, Flex and the forthcoming Thermo join Photoshop to make up the newest suite of Adobe tools for interface design. Check out the following video demonstration of the AIR and Flex at work on a Sony Ericsson website. The demo is from Raghunath Rao of Adobe in Bangalore, India.

Throw that onto a touchscreen interface, make it all bigger, and then we're really talking.

2D/3D Gaming

You know what I really want? I want a web experience like the soon-to-launch game Fez. Check out this video, it gets particularly interesting at :30.

Via gaming megablog Kotaku

I want my RSS reader to work like that. Combine some hand motion/touchscreen with some AIR/Flex/Thermo action with some 2D/3D viewing of related documents and I'm going to be in heaven. Make that song in the Fez demo play all the time, too.

Conclusion

Always-on access, the proliferation of publishers, content syndication and an inevitable shift in advertising dollars are all forces contributing to a growing demand for better interfaces. The iPhone's multi-touch interface is also moving things heavily in that direction, which may or may not be good for the web at large.

Other efforts to tackle the same problems include better filtering systems or recommendation engines. Those will make some sense in some cases but day in and day out, we need new interfaces to deal with the explosion of information underway. How do you want to interact with a world drowning in data?

(Maybe all of this is silly and the image below is all we need to know!)

via >> via >> via >> via

Along with AIR, Adobe is also announcing the final release of Flex 3 and the Flex Builder. Flex is an open source framework for building applications on the Adobe Flash and AIR platforms, while Flex Builder is an IDE for Flex. The Flex 3 SDK comes out of beta today and is released under the Mozilla Public License on the Flex web site.

Flex, Flash, and AIR form the cornerstone of Adobe's "Platform for Rich Internet Apps," a complete end-to-end solution for creating and deploying RIAs to the web and desktop. This has been a big year for the RIA platform at Adobe, according to Adrian Ludwig, the group manager in the company's platform and development unit.

Ludwig told us that 2007 was a "real turning point for the industry" and that Adobe saw broad based adoption of their RIA platform. Oracle, for example, is using Flex to create interface elements for applications, while Adobe has worked with BEA to comarket Flex Builder along with BEA's own developer tools. The wide adoption of Adobe's RIA technologies "was confirmation of the value that these types of applications have," said Ludwig.

At DEMO this year, Ludwig told us, there were three companies whose entire business was built on Adobe AIR. Considering AIR debuted just over a year ago itself at DEMO (as Apollo), that is fairly amazing. In just a year, Adobe's runtime has matured enough that entrepreneurs are willing to build entire businesses around it -- even when AIR has been in beta until today. "That, combined with our commitment not just to innovation, but to open source technologies where it makes sense," said Ludwig, "I think that's going to really further innovation and advancements in the RIA space."

Along with the new releases of Flex and AIR, a number of companies are announcing public releases of AIR applications, including Nickelodeon, eBay, AOL, Nasdaq, and the New York Times Company.

Adobe is also releasing the final first version of Blaze DS under the GPL license. Blaze DS was announced two months ago and is a server side remoting and messaging technology that was previously only available as part of the LifeCycle suite of products. We wrote about Blaze DS in December.

The attraction to Adobe's platform makes a lot of sense. They offer an end-to-end solution, and Flex and AIR makes the question of desktop vs. online a deployment decision, and not a development decision. Write the application once in Flex, and deploy to the web or to the desktop with AIR with very few code changes. That sort of flexibility is very attractive to many developers.

The product is a drag-and-drop Flash authoring tool built on Adobe's Flex. SproutBuilder lets you build very sophisticated, multi-page widgets with media, analytics and more. In minutes. With ease.

There's all kinds of things that you can include in a Sprout now and features marked "coming soon" include Meebo chat, Ribbit VOIP and PollDaddy polls.

I asked Ryan Stewart, Rich Internet Application Evangelist at Adobe, if he had every seen anything like Sprout. He told me, "Sproutbuilder is one of the absolute coolest use cases I've seen for Flex. I think it lowers the barrier to entry to Flash and I hope it's going to spark a lot of creativity among people who aren't creating Flash content today."

I think that almost any individual or organization publishing online would find great value in using SproutBuilder to put together a nice looking, highly functional widget to distribute their content around the web.

The other widget I built was this one for PulseOfPDX, a site that aggregates Twitter messages from people in Portland, Oregon. I put this together in 2 minutes. Imagine what someone with some graphic design skills could do.

All of this said, Sprout isn't perfect. It's got a few bugs in it still. Thus the very limited beta. I think the potential here is fantastic though. The team behind Sprout originally built the ChipIn fund-raising widget for nonprofit campaigns. They found that there were so many requests for customization and white-labeling that it motivated them to build a builder that anyone can use.

Just before Sprout another, similar tool called FlyPaper (Freshbrew.com) presented. It's slick and well packaged. Sprout though has been build with geekery in mind, it's API friendly, you can get the .swf file itself if you want to and given the orientation of the team this is a tool you can feel good about using.

Hurry over and get an account while they are still available in the closed beta.