goowy Media
"We felt that Flash was the best platform for creating the experience we wanted to deliver."
Alex Bard
CEO
goowy media
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The web is evolving and becoming increasingly more interactive, especially in terms of personal communications, content, and media. As a result, a new digital lifestyle has emerged. But remembering a host of user names and passwords and logging into various websites to access services such email, calendaring, news, personalized widgets, games, and more, is cumbersome. Face it: this digital lifestyle is becoming increasingly more complex to manage.
Goowy media, a one-year-old startup, is working to alleviate the complexity and create a better experience for managing the digital lifestyle both on the desktop and on the web.
Formed by four friends who previously built two major service companies, goowy provides a rich online environment for managing web mail, contacts, calendar, widgets, games and more.
Challenge
The first challenge involved trying to get their web-based email application, Goowy Mail, to look and perform like a desktop application, using Microsoft Outlook as a model. The founders knew they would be demanding a lot from a browser, especially in terms of presentation. For example, mailboxes and messages had to be integrated on a single page with drag-and-drop functionality between email and other applications. The application would have to include right-click functionality, animation, and sound, plus customizable user skins with changeable backgrounds and borders.
Aside from the presentation challenges, they needed a development environment that could scale to thousands of users, run consistently across multiple browsers, and support a rapid development philosophy. They wanted to go to market fast, and rely on user feedback to constantly fine tune the product.
Solution
In mid 2004, before work began on the goowy service, the founders assessed and considered several front-end technologies, including DHTML. But the need for a single code base that would run consistently across all browsers, and ultimately on the desktop, was among the factors that led the team to select Macromedia Flash.
The founders were also determined to find a solution that would scale as more users joined the service.
"Flash offered the most robust framework and tool kit for achieving our vision of breathing life into a typically static e-mail experience. In addition, Flash provided Goowy Mail with a true rich client environment, allowing us to process more information and logic on the client side, resulting in a faster, more robust user experience," said Alex Bard, CEO, goowy media.
With Flash, the team could quickly implement drag and drop, right-mouse-click functionality and dynamic data delivery for added speed. The team’s prior experience with Flash also worked in its favor. "We felt that Flash was the best platform for creating the experience we wanted to deliver," says Bard.
The team chose Microsoft .NET as the framework for back-end server development and XML for messaging.
After just five months of development, a "friends and family" beta version of the new email product was ready for internal testing. Two months later, in April of 2005, goowy (re) - for "rich experience" - launched to the public. Since then the site has mushroomed to over 60,000 registered users worldwide, relying on viral marketing to spread the word.
Benefits
Benefits for Users
• Virtual desktop in a browser and new desktop client look, feel and work much like an integrated set of desktop applications.
• Flash interactivity and customizable art elements are fun and functional, raising the bar over what other web-based email sites can offer.
• Flash Player 8 improves the user experience through faster performance, integrated file uploads, sharp text output, and improved graphics rendering.
• Cross-platform browser support for Flash lets developers focus on a single code base for all users, thereby accelerating releases.
• Flash and Microsoft .NET are well integrated and can scale across hundreds of servers.
• An open API along with support for new file and media types in Flash Player 8 position the company for future growth on multiple devices.
Project Details
By fall of 2005, goowy (re) had gone through four major revisions and is now widely acclaimed as a showcase site for rich Internet applications. Besides email, today’s site boasts a customizable Desktop page, Widgets page, and Microsoft Outlook-compatible Contacts module. Other recent additions include an attractive two-panel Calendar with events and reminders, Flash games and user-selectable RSS feeds. And because each application is always live, there’s never the need for a browser refresh.
Thanks to the company’s rapid development spirit and new features in Flash Professional 8, goowy (re) launched a desktop client download in October 2005. Blurring the distinction even more between web and desktop applications, the desktop client installs as a tray icon. From there, it automatically notifies users when a new email arrives or calendar event is triggered.
Right click on the icon and you can automatically launch any goowy (re) application, plus a growing number of desktop Widgets such as Google search, Flickr photos, News, Integrated Audio, and Video, and a stock ticker. The desktop is entirely Flash-based and is the company’s first deployment of Flash on the desktop (without a browser).
The latest site now fully supports Flash Player 8. As a result, users get improved performance, better text rendering, and support for more image types, including progressive JPEG files. And users can now attach files directly in Flash Player 8 rather than rely on an HTML popup. “In email, that’s critical,” notes Bard.
A Contacts module is among the newer additions along with a free storage upgrade from 100MB to 2GB in size. The Contacts module holds up to 1,000 addresses and can import records in popular PC and Macintosh formats. Still under discussion is a possible addition of streaming video email. "That would move us toward the use of Flash Media Server," says Bard. Other strong possibilities include a virtual desktop storage option and the use of Flash Lite to support goowy mail on cell phones and related devices.
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