Ryan Stewart of ZDNet discusses the new Curl 6.0 beta release and likes what he sees. Ryan is a must-follow voice in the Rich Internet Application space. He's been covering RIAs on his personal blog and on The Universal Desktop at ZDnet for quite some time and brings to the discussion his own experience as a Flex developer. Although he's recently joined Adobe as an evangelist for their AIR (Adobe Integrated Runtime) product, Ryan has maintained a unique and independent voice. If you're tracking this market or are actively involved in developing and deploying RIAs, he's an important resource.
Discussing the new skinnable application controls we've incorporated into version 6.0, Ryan writes:
...the biggest thing for me is the new skinning support. Curl now has a skinning application that lets developers make the interfaces look a lot more polished. The new skinning support uses style-sheets so that most designers will be at home in the environment. Because of the enterprise focus, Curl has always been great performance-wise, but the aesthetics left a lot to be desired. With the new support for skinning, people using Curl will be able to make applications that look good as well as run well. Another piece of this is the new rendering APIs. In addition to skinning, Curl now supports alpha blending and antialiasing. This should really help developers create engaging and interesting interfaces.
