I'll post a big thumbs up to Flex/Flash as a client technology for this market.
The primary reason is that there have been lots of great small press games that I've wanted to play with my friends, but not only do I know that some of them use macs, some of them use old macs without a lot of memory. It's been a killer really frequently.
I really want to at least experiment with the windows clients for email games, but found that even running parallells on my computer took much more than the 3gb or RAM than my tower came with. The clients are dinky but the operating systems themselves are huge and it takes a lot of ram to load them both at the same time. I upgraded my tower to 12gb, and that will work for me, but I have to assume that most mac using clients are using macbooks with around 2gb , making parallels kind of a drag. Bootcamp might be a better move, but still, that does require rebooting.
To be clear, I've generally been a windows developer from 1990 to 2000k. The last version of windows that I liked as a developer was windows 2000. Since then it seems like MS has been focused on the os more as a marketing vehicle than an os, and mac and linux have been kicking ass since about the same time, but never to any difference. I think in this one niche it's worthwhile to be cross platform. I love os x and though I still don't know of that single linux distro that I could sell to my mom, i know that someday it will happen. It's only been about a year since I've had to go to my wife's computer to test things on windows.
Regardless, web technologies have really made a pretty good case for themselves for distribution and the flash player enables that distribution method for strategic games that fits pretty well in my thinking.
I do agree with Ixnay that html and the current ajax frameworks look pretty promising for this niche, which is more abstract than graphical, but the capabilities of the flash player are so beyond html 5 that in absolute terms I think it has a huge advantage that is unlikely to ever go away. In the end it's probably a "what's most comfortable for you" kind of question. And though Flex has it's warts, I'd recommend it for this niche.
I've looked a lot at pygame and the java gaming toolkits as well and they seem to be further along in terms of design, and yet are hobbled by their client installation processes.
I think that weborb and flex are, in particular, the best technologies for this niche, but that whatever is easiest is good enough as well. Time will certainly tell.
The primary reason is that there have been lots of great small press games that I've wanted to play with my friends, but not only do I know that some of them use macs, some of them use old macs without a lot of memory. It's been a killer really frequently.
I really want to at least experiment with the windows clients for email games, but found that even running parallells on my computer took much more than the 3gb or RAM than my tower came with. The clients are dinky but the operating systems themselves are huge and it takes a lot of ram to load them both at the same time. I upgraded my tower to 12gb, and that will work for me, but I have to assume that most mac using clients are using macbooks with around 2gb , making parallels kind of a drag. Bootcamp might be a better move, but still, that does require rebooting.
To be clear, I've generally been a windows developer from 1990 to 2000k. The last version of windows that I liked as a developer was windows 2000. Since then it seems like MS has been focused on the os more as a marketing vehicle than an os, and mac and linux have been kicking ass since about the same time, but never to any difference. I think in this one niche it's worthwhile to be cross platform. I love os x and though I still don't know of that single linux distro that I could sell to my mom, i know that someday it will happen. It's only been about a year since I've had to go to my wife's computer to test things on windows.
Regardless, web technologies have really made a pretty good case for themselves for distribution and the flash player enables that distribution method for strategic games that fits pretty well in my thinking.
I do agree with Ixnay that html and the current ajax frameworks look pretty promising for this niche, which is more abstract than graphical, but the capabilities of the flash player are so beyond html 5 that in absolute terms I think it has a huge advantage that is unlikely to ever go away. In the end it's probably a "what's most comfortable for you" kind of question. And though Flex has it's warts, I'd recommend it for this niche.
I've looked a lot at pygame and the java gaming toolkits as well and they seem to be further along in terms of design, and yet are hobbled by their client installation processes.
I think that weborb and flex are, in particular, the best technologies for this niche, but that whatever is easiest is good enough as well. Time will certainly tell.