RIA technologies: lets compare font rendering.

The idea is to compare the current RIA frameworks like Flex(Flash), Silverlight and JavaFX and see what are the fonts that they produces. We are in 21th century most of the people have laptops and use TFT screens and windows is the most usedOS this days, so most of the people use clear type font rendering. Lets see how each technology uses clear type : For me the best fonts with clear type enabled are fonts in WinForms and native windows applications. I’ve found very interesting comparison here: http://www.scottlogic.co.uk/blog/wpf/2009/07/silverlight-v3-cleartype-font-rendering-a-comparison/ I will use some of the screenshots from there. WinForms (ClearType OFF) You can see that WinForms with ClearType off are still best for CRT screens but not good for TFT screens. WinForms (ClearType On) The WinForms + ClearType is the best from microsoft for now. Silverlight v2.0 Silverlight v2 fonts are so bad I cant see the RIA when I have bad fonts. Silverlight v3.0 Silverlight v3 have ClearType but it is still far far worst than the WinForms ClearType. WPF (ClearType off) WPF with ClearType off is worst than WinForms with ClearType Off it is bad for CRT and bad for TFT displays. It is bad for everything maybe this is the reason why there is no WPF applications. WPF (ClearType on) WPF with ClearType on is better than Silverlight for me but it is still bad. In .net 4.0 it will be finally fixed if we can believe to Microsoft. JavaFX/Swing (Java 1.6u10+) JavaFX and Swing with Java 1.6 update 10 have very good ClearType support I didn’t see the difference between this and WinForms. But to...

RIA is nowhere. RIA is uglier than current non RIA apps.

First I want to explain that saying RIA I mean Flash, Adobe AIR, Microsoft Silverlight and Sun JavaFX. I am not speaking about AJAX,CSS, JavaScript etc. Everyone is talking RIA is the here now, RIA applications are beautiful, RIA applications are fast, you can develop RIA applications very easy. I will prove that : RIA is not here or maybe it is here but nobody care about it. RIA is not beautiful, in meter of fact standard WinForms application or Swing application or QT application can look more beautiful. RIA is fast. Hahaha If you ask me RIA is slower than Java Swing. RIA can be developed very easy – LOL really we will see ? First lets see how beautiful is RIA. I will create a simple Silverlight 3 application. It contains only TextBox, Button and Calendar and uses the default look and feel for Silverlight 3 application. Can you see the fonts? they dont look native. My Windows have clear type enabled and this is not clear type. Check the regular normal WinForms application : You see the difference right ? You can check the Telerik demo application too : You can see it the live demo here : http://demos.telerik.com/silverlight/#Calendar/FirstLook So is this “beautiful” this fonts are bad for reading and for me a PC user that uses his PC for 10+ hours every day the fonts are the most important part. So lets speak about Flash. I will use a screenshot from http://www.parleys.com/ This fonts look terrible they are even worse than Silverlight. And last lets see JavaFX I will use the sample app from http://javafx.com/samples/ProjectManager/index.html...