Friday, February 1, 2008

Yahoo/Microsoft Conspiracy Theory

Is it just coincidence that Yahoo replaced their Flex based maps application with an AJAX version? Could a Silverlight one be in the works? I have also heard reports of many of the Flex developers at Yahoo leaving and not being replaced?... The truth is out there somewhere... just Google it :-)

3 comments:

Abdul said...

Adobe Flex based Yahoo maps was not as usable as AJAX based maps is.

I love the current Yahoo! maps, I can use it on my nokia phone also...

I am sure, usability and performance were the reasons.

-abdul

PS: I work for Yahoo! but this is my own observation as an old Yahoo! maps user.

Rob McKeown said...

@abdul - Usability problems are rarely, if ever, the fault of the technology. They are usually the fault of the designers/developers. A good Interaction Designer should be able to prevent usability problems in either AJAX or Flex. In my experience, AJAX apps are more likely to suffer from performance problems, especially in Internet Explorer. Use on a mobile device may have been a factor but great strides are being made to enable Flash-based applications to run on mobile devices.

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