Alan Lewis

eBay Desktop 1.0 is out. Whew.

I just pushed the 1.0 version of eBay Desktop live. You really should go get it. It is free, and it is the coolest thing since, well, ebay.com. And as if that weren't enough, I've started a new blog (because, you know, I'm so good at keeping my own blog up to date) over at http://desktop.ebay.com/blog. Subscribe to that in order to keep up to date with eBay Desktop related stuff. I promise to keep it to a minimum here from now on. Maybe.

I have been working on this along with my peeps at Effective UI since July of 2006, making this by far the longest project I've ever worked on.

FYI - I find my IT setup right now quite ridiculous. I'm in a hotel in San Francisco for the night so that I don't have to commute up at rush hour to get to the Adobe Engage event where I'm speaking. In order to push the files live to the server I'm connected over VPN to the eBay network, then I have to remote desktop into a server that is physically located within the eBay network and then from that server I connect to the file server in order to push the release live. All to send some 1s and 0s around.

-Alan

I'm Supporting Barack Obama

Wow.

And of course, this is my personal opinion, not that of my employer.

Adobe - Go All In on Open Source!

Earlier this week I was on a panel at the Adobe Sales Conference, an internal event attended by 1,000+ Adobe sales and marketing people. The panel was to discuss "marketing to developers", and the discussion was, I heard after its conclusion, helpful to those who attended.

During the panel I was asked by the moderator, "what advice do you have for Adobe?" My reply was that Adobe should stop sitting on the fence regarding open source. I followed up my answer with an acknowledgement that I didn't think that those in the audience were necessarily the ones who had the ability to make that decision, but that they could perhaps influence those within Adobe who do have that responsibility.

I was glad to see the announcement that Adobe is open sourcing part of LifeCycle as BlazeDS and even more importantly is publishing the specification for the Flash binary data format, AMF. These are important steps, and along with the recent moves to open source Flex and standardize the PDF format, they show an increased acceptance of open source within Adobe.

But it's not enough. To gain the trust of the open source community, Adobe needs to open source the Flash Player and publish specifications for the SWF format. Only then will it have a chance of winning over this key constituency as the battle against Microsoft heats up. Sun waited much too long to open source Java (with a real open source license, that is). If it had done so in 2001 instead of 2006 it may blunted the rise of PHP as the web environment of choice.

So, Adobe, buddy, good work. You're almost there.

Note: These opinions are mine and not necessarily those of my employer.

Interview on eBay Desktop

I did an interview with a website usability blog last week. It is pretty lengthy, and I go into depth on a number of topics. If you are interested in learning more about how eBay Desktop was created, you may find it interesting: http://www.usablemarkets.com/?p=152

OpenSocial - It's Just a Widget Container

I had a big, grand post planned out - I was going to dig into both the strategy and technical issues behind OpenSocial. Unlike those who proclaimed "Checkmate" based off of nothing but the PR hype, I was going to astound the blogging world with my insights and biting criticism. I even had a clever Saturday Night Live inspired title picked out: "OpenSocial is Neither Open Nor Social: Discuss"

Then I found that Dare Obasanjo and Tim O'Reilly had already done it for me.

Basically, there are two problems that I'll summarize here:

• OpenSocial doesn't give most developers what they want, which is the ability to mash up data from multiple social networks in order to create something greater than the sum of its parts.
• The APIs exposed are woefully inadequate. So you get access to a friend list, and the friend object contains a name, updated date, link to profile, and link to picture. Umm... Thanks? Anything beyond that needs to be specified as a custom extension to the schema. This is going to make it really hard on developers to create applications that work in more than one OpenSocial container. Translation: a MySpace app isn't going to work out of the box in LinkedIn, unless it only loosely integrated into the social network.

With these limitations, most OpenSocial apps are destined to be nothing more than glorified widgets - widgets that have the ability to spam your friends. Is that what we all want?

Note: these opinions are my own, and not necessarily those of my employer.

eBay Desktop Public Beta Now Available

The project formerly known as "San Dimas" is now available in public beta: eBay Desktop launches in public beta today. Anyone can download eBay Desktop for free.

eBay Desktop is, well, eBay on your desktop. You can use eBay Desktop instead of the website to search, browse, bid, watch items, read and write messages -- most everything that you use the eBay website for to buy stuff. eBay Desktop also goes beyond the web experience through features like desktop alerts (for when items are ending or when you get outbid) and favorite search feeds, which let you spot when items are listed that match one of your searches.

We've made a number of improvements since the private beta (besides changing the name, of course). The number one piece of feedback from users was "make it more about me." We took this to heart and have completely revamped the home screen to put more information about your eBay activity up front. We've made significant performance and memory-usage improvements, and more will be coming soon. The alerts feature now works even when the application window is closed -- eBay Desktop will optionally keep running in the background so that you can get notified when you are outbid.

Remember when it used to be possible to browse on eBay? Well we wanted to leverage the power of the desktop to make browsing on eBay workable again. On the home screen you can drill-down into the categories, all without refreshing.

My favorite new feature is search feeds. eBay has offered favorite searches for a long time, but unless you enjoy getting emails containing your favorite searches, they have been of limited use. Now in eBay Desktop you can access your existing favorite searches or create new ones, and view those lists of items as "feeds" just like you would in an RSS reader. In this view you can see if an item is new, and you can delete items that you aren't interested in.

Download eBay Desktop, and let me know what you think. Feel free to contact me directly (see link in the sidebar) and the application has a built in feature request and bug report widget.

5 Lessons Learned from Working with AIR

This morning I presented a talk at the Adobe On Air Los Angeles tour stop. My presentation was called "Lessons Learned from Developing on AIR." Although Adobe AIR has only been publicly available in beta for a short time, Project San Dimas, which is built on AIR, of course, has been in development for over a year, and both San Dimas and AIR have come a long way. Here is a summary of the talk:

Overview

San Dimas started out as a prototype, intended to show off eBay's web services and Adobe's client technology. Since web services are difficult to demonstrate visually, we often like to show applications that use our web services, to show some of the possibilities. At the same time as we were exploring this demo opportunity with Adobe, they told us about an exciting new client platform they were developing called "Apollo." Given that the plan was to show the first demos of Apollo at Adobe MAX '06, we jumped at the opportunity to develop "something cool" on Apollo, although we didn't know at the time what we would end up building.

We didn't have much time, and we hastily assembled a team from eBay and EffectiveUI (a development and design company highly recommended to us by Adobe) to work on the project. The initial team size was very small - just 3 people, and even now we have kept the team very small, expanding so far only to 7. We presented the first prototype at MAX, which was very well received. Since the team has been continually developing and designing the prototype into a full eBay desktop application, with features including search, bidding, My eBay, history, and alerts; and with a design fully customized to take advantage of the artistic freedom made possible by AIR.

Here are 5 lessons I've learned in the process of working with AIR:

Lesson 1: Start with a good foundation

While San Dimas has a radically different UI from the eBay website, it is not something that has been built totally from scratch. eBay's web services platform has been in development since 1999, and San Dimas uses those web services exclusively to connect to eBay's backend systems. We've had to make zero changes to our web services thusfar to support San Dimas. If we had, it would have put the project schedule at serious risk (and believe me, there was enough risk already as it was).

If you are starting out developing an AIR application, I recommend that you consider an SOA or web services architecture - this will ensure you don't tie yourself too closely to one type of client, whether that be browser-based, desktop, or something else.

Lesson 2: Design takes a long time

We spent 3 months developing the prototype that was shown at MAX, and of that time, 6 weeks was spent on design, before we started coding. AIR offers lots of freedom, and because of this you may find yourself having a hard time deciding on a design for your application. You could apply existing web design paradigms, but this may not lead to an optimal user experience.

Lesson 3: Betas are really useful

San Dimas has been in beta for just over a month, and in that short time we've had thousands of users sign up for the beta, and hundreds give us feedback on feature requests or bugs. Launching "beta" web sites or applications to generate early buzz is in vogue, but I've learned already through our beta that they are well worth the time and effort, assuming that you intend on actually listening to your beta users, and are prepared to change your plans if what they are telling you is a surprise. If you are planning to develop an application on AIR, I'd encourage you to get early feedback from users through a beta program.

Lesson 4: The most important AIR feature is: freedom from the design constraints of the browser

Although AIR provides lots of useful features for developing desktop applications, such as file APIs, windowing support, and a complete HTML renderer, I have found that the most important feature of AIR is that it is not a web browser. Standard browser user experience metaphors like the back button and location bar impose a set of assumptions about how web applications should work - assumptions that might work well for certain kinds of applications, but not for all. For all the magic shown by some leading AJAX-powered web applications, they still have a long way to go in terms of performance, features, and user experience.

Lesson 5: Users don't care about AIR

And that's a good thing! AIR does a very good job of getting out of the way. It has an excellent installation experience -- applications can bundle the runtime with the application, and installation can be triggered from a Flash movie in the browser, which has worked very well with San Dimas. AIR provides a very useful application update framework. And AIR applications behave like any other desktop application. These "little" things really matter, and I'm glad that Adobe has paid attention to them in AIR. One of the measure of AIR's success will if users don't realize it is even there.

Thanks to Adobe for the opportunity to share what I've learned, and thank you for creating such a great platform!

You can sign up for the San Dimas beta so you can try it out for yourself.

Speaking at OnAIR in Seattle

I'll be at the OnAIR tour stop in Seattle on Tuesday, July 10th, speaking about San Dimas. If you are a developer/programmer/web technology enthusiast type person, you may want to attend the event. Why? Its free, you'll learn lots of great stuff about AIR, there will be food and video games.

If you want to attend, be sure to register on the site (required, even though the event is free).

eBay's San Dimas Project - Big in France

I've been very pleased by the positive reaction to San Dimas. We have beta testers from all over the world -- the US leads the way in terms of number of beta testers, no surprise there. However, I was surprised to find out that the number 2 country is... France! This is despite both Germany and the UK having bigger eBay usage. Also, there is no translated version of the interface yet, and we have done zero press about San Dimas in France up until now.

As if it weren't enough to be number 2 in beta testers, French bloggers and media have written up a storm about it. Here are some of the stories:

Nouvelle version d'eBay en préparation

This was the first French article, and was published back in April. After this was published we saw a big spike in beta user registrations from .fr email addresses.

Premiers pas dans le projet San Dimas - AccessOweb, le blog

What appears to be an in-depth review of the San Dimas features. I say "appears to be" because I can't actually be sure, since I was an abject failure in learning French, this despite my four years of French class in junior high and high school.

One of the commenters on the blog post says this:

"Pour en revenir au graphisme, moi je le trouve au contraire très bien foutu : plus classe que du html avec de légers dégradés, et surtout un écran pas surchargé du tout où l'on pourrait se perdre, comme sur la homepage d'ebay. On ne peut pas non plus le constater sur des screenshots mais la navigation est très agréable également. Bref joli test pour une jolie application !"

Which Google translates into this:

"To return from there to graphics, me I find it very well on the contrary foutu: more class that HTML with light ranges, and especially a screen not overloaded of the whole where one could lose oneself, as on the homepage of ebay. One cannot either note it on screenshots but navigation is very pleasant also. In short pretty test for a pretty application!"

Umm... thanks?

Application riche #13 : eBay San Dimas - Fabien Deshayes - Du client riche à un Internet riche

Another in-depth review, I think. My favorite quote is the following:

"La grande force de San Dimas est à mon avis cette navigation complètement nouvelle qui casse les codes d'une page web, ou même d'une application de bureau plus classique : fini les pop-up, les rechargement : ici tout se fait par onglets ou par panneaux, profitant à merveille des technologies Flex et Air pour donner un style à part entière à San Dimas."

Which translates as:

"The great force of San Dimas is in my opinion this navigation completely new which breaks the codes of a Web page, or even of an application of more traditional office: finished the popones, recharging: here all is done by mitres or panels, benefitting wonder from technologies Flex and Air to give a style to whole share in San Dimas."

I'm calling pop-ups "popones" from now on.

Que sont les applications riches (RIA) ? - Partie 3 - Quel futur pour l'Internet riche ?

There is a small San Dimas mention in this article, which is a three part magnum opus on Rich Internet Applications. (3 part blog post! Take that, Twitter!).

What I like about this one is that it refers to San Dimas as "projet San Dimas d'eBay".

Premiers regards Vidéo : Project San Dimas : Ebay en Apollo

I've saved the best for last. Somebody made a 17 minute (17!) video of a San Dimas walkthrough. In French. I have no idea what the narrator is saying. Can anyone help translate this?

Bravo, French San Dimasers, Bravo

San Dimas Beta Invitations Going Out... Now!

I'm pleased to announce that the beta program for the eBay "San Dimas" project has begun! If you signed up for eBay San Dimas in the first couple days after we opened sign-ups (in April), you should have an invitation sitting in your inbox. I'm also knee-deep trying to figure out how to get invitations out to everyone who was at eBay DevCon - I know that there are some users who have got them and some who have, but it is a manual task that I haven't yet figured out how to automate. Poor me :-) Here is a screenshot of the build we are sending out:

I got to show San Dimas in the keynote on Monday, and thankfully it went off without a hitch. Doing live demos on real production data with a beta product running on a beta platform is a recipe for disaster, but I wanted to risk it and show everyone the product. Thanks to everyone for the compliments, and thank you to everyone who came to my "Desktop 2.0" session later on. Also thank you to the beta users (including beta user number 1 -- you know who you are) who have sent in lots of great suggestions (and plenty of bug reports) already. We are working hard on fixing the highest priority bugs, and will push out a new build by the end of the week.

One of the points I made in my session, and that I want to re-emphasize here, is that I would love for San Dimas to become a platform that third-party developers can "plug-in" to. I'll stress that this may not happen - and if it does it is a long way off. Having said that, I had great conversations with developers in Boston about things that they would like to do with an eBay desktop application, if they had the ability to extend it or integrate with it.

We are busy enough working on the first version of the product, so we haven't sat down to think through what we need in the technology for allowing third parties to extend San Dimas, but now is the right time to talk to developers, so that anything we do allows developers to create things they have told us would be useful, not just what we think they should do with it. I want to continue that conversation on this blog and elsewhere. During the day 3 keynote, Pierre said that third party developers are a crucial engine of innovation, and I agree with him 100%.

So, developers, if San Dimas were a platform, what would you do with it?

Want to Be the First to Try San Dimas?

I'm auctioning off the first San Dimas beta invitation. Whoever wins the auction will get their invitation at least 6 hours before everyone else. All of the auction proceeds will go to charity, so you really should bid on it. Also, while you are at it, do me a favor and spread this eBay togo widget far and wide, k? (click the "Copy this widget" link on the bottom and follow the instructions)

The team is working hard on the San Dimas beta - we are feature-complete, and are in bug-fixing and tweaking mode. I can't tell when we plan to start sending out invitations, but I will say that there is a dependency on something that I'm not allowed to talk about. And whenever that dependency is cleared up and that other thing is finished it will be just about the right time to start the limited beta. Is that all clear now?

Joost Rules - AppleTV Drools

I've been playing around with the "Friends Edition" of Joost, and I'm really impressed. The focus on the full-screen viewing experience is what I noticed first, and it really sets it apart from in-browser based video. When I launched it, I felt myself relaxing -- which is what I want to do when I'm watching TV. I don't want to see all the other crap on my computer that is trying to get my attention. Thus the overall tone the application sets is one of entertainment. Overall it is very Tivo-esque, even thought the interface looks nothing like Tivo. (FYI - drop me an email if you want an invite to Joost - you can find my email address in the sidebar.)

It is built on the Mozilla platform ("heavily-modified", according to NewTeeVee). From my own experience developing an eBay toolbar for Firefox, I know that the Mozilla platform is really powerful, but I ran into problems because I don't have C++ experience, and many of the things I wanted to do required that I build XPCOM code. I read this morning that Silverlight is based on SVG technology, and apparently Joost is too. Seems like I should get familiar with it, and if you are reading this, you probably should as well.

My only complaint is that when I tested with an earlier version (0.8), it wouldn't work from within my companies firewall (unlike Skype, which works perfectly). Not that I wanted to watch TV at work, I was just, um, testing it... Not sure if this is still a problem in the new version.

The video quality is excellent, which leads me to my point about AppleTV. Apple has completely dropped the ball with the video quality in AppleTV. I was in the Valley Fair Apple Store the other day, where they have 3 42 inch plasmas set up demoing the AppleTV. I overheard two different couples who, after looking at the demo of "The Incredibles" said almost exactly the same thing: "It looks really pixelated." Of course it is not the AppleTV itself that is really at fault - it can display much higher quality content, it is just that the movies and shows available from the iTunes Music Store aren't available in a high-quality format. Apple's strategy is that providing an integrated solution, but the quality of the solution is only as good as the weakest link, and that link is, for now, pretty darn bad.

eBay ToGo Launched

eBay has launched eBay ToGo - Flash-based widgets you can embed anywhere that allows Flash content. Here is mine:

I consulted on this project, which means that I was asked to some of the meetings and got to spout of my opinions without having to do any of the actual work. I think the best part about these widgets is that they really push the boundaries of offering up useful functionality without forcing you back to the website. Try the search box - it lets you search eBay from within the widget itself.

eBay ToGo (not eBay Togo - thats an island in the South Pacific) is of course built on eBay Web Services - specifically our REST API. As I point out in the Techcrunch article announcing the launch, we have some great new services that we are working on that we will be showing off at our Developers Conference in June.

Want Open Source Flash Player? Contribute to Open Source Flex!

It is awesome news that Adobe is Open Sourcing Flex. To me, this is a significant announcement, and I am encouraged that Adobe is moving in the right direction. I hope that they choose to eventually open source all of their core technology and standardize all significant data formats. With the standardization of PDF and the open sourcing of the Actionscript 3 virtual machine (Tamarin) not that long ago, they are much of the way there.

As others have noted, this is not a half-assed open sourcing effort as other companies have tried. That they are using a well-understood open source license (Mozilla) is the most important thing to note. When we (eBay) open sourced our SDKs last year we made sure to only well-understood licenses (CDDL and MIT) so that other companies or developers didn't have to figure out the ins and outs of a brand new license. This was a bit of a pain to educate our legal department on why this was important, although they eventually got it, and now are totally on board.

So what is left to open source? The big thing is clearly the Flash Player. I would guess that their intention is to eventually open source Flash Player. But I'd also guess that they main hang-up may be a litany of patent and intellectual property issues (especially with licensed code). Flex itself was (as I understand it) developed completely by Adobe/Macromedia, and does not incorporate any third party code (that I'm aware of) so it was "easier" to open source. However, I'd also guess (third guess this paragraph) that the open sourcing of Flex is a bit of a trial run for the eventual open sourcing of Flash Player. What issues will come up? How will the community respond? How will this move financially impact us? Will it be a net positive, or a net negative? These are all questions that I can imagine are on the minds of the folks at Adobe.

So, if you want Adobe to open source Flash, contribute to and support the open source Flex project!

Disclaimer: I am an eBay employee and these opinions are mine alone. I should note very clearly that although I am under multiple layers of NDA with Adobe, I have never discussed open sourcing their technology with them, not do I have any inside information on this topic -- I'll tell them the same thing in private that I am on this blog! 

Slides from my Desktop 2.0 talk at Web 2.0

Here is the presentation from my talk at Web 2.0: "The Future of the Desktop". I hope to blog about the material I pulled together for the talk, but it can be summed up as: web services enable rich desktop applications, users like desktop apps, and there is life beyond the browser. The Q & A session was really great, and unfortunately the awesome questions aren't captured in the slides. Thanks to everyone who attended!

I don't know what to think of the whole conference. Moscone sucks - way too big to have a community feel. The show floor was interesting, and some of the vendors like Effective UI and Bungee Labs seemed to really get good value from it, which is great for them. Kevin Lynch's demo was awesome - I love the rapid fire demo style that he has, and it was awesome to see San Dimas demoed in front of such a large audience.

I won't say who it was, but lots of people were peeved at one of the keynote presentations from the CEO of a large Internet company who basically gave a 15 minute vendor pitch. Of course many of the sessions were nothing but vendor pitches. I tried to keep that to a minimum in my talk, and I hope that folks got some useful information out of it that wasn't eBay-specific. There was great buzz about Rolf's "Web 2.0++" talk (my co-worker) (Birdz, OMG!). 500 slides in 45 minutes, and none of it was a vendor pitch. You have to see this talk... and you can at the eBay Developers Conference in Boston - June 11th - 13th! Hey, I know its a pitch, but everyone is doing it...