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Webification - a drawbridge between island and cloud
Rob Finn at Edison Ventures discusses Desktop Applications:
While not a new concept, the desktop is also becoming more web-connected. More and more desktop apps are talking to software and to web content that are consumed through a browser. Richard MacManus describes this as the webification of the desktop. Example webified applications include iTunes, Qumana (blogging), Quintura (search), Webaroo (offline search), Picasaweb (photo organizer), Smilebox (greeting cards), Weatherbug (weather), Omnidrive (storage), Bubbles (communication tools), Trillian, Pronto (comparison shopping), Invisible CRM, Slide, FeedDemon, and Visokio. There is a long list of such desktop apps thanks to web services, APIs, open source communities.
Some of this recent desktop centric growth has also been evangelized by the portability of content due to consumer demand for personalization and decentralization of web content. Exhibit A: Widgets on sites like Myspace on the desktop (e.g. Konfabulator/Yahoo and Vista’s Sidebar).
The article referenced above, Webified Desktop Apps vs Browser-based Apps, is actually by Ebrahim Ezzy (but published on McManus’ blog as an opposing viewpoint) and contains the following insight as well:
I rely on various web applications to create documents, presentations, spreadsheets; share images, videos, data; manage and organize tasks, projects and life. But I still believe the future of computing isn’t entirely web-based. It’s necessary to have the desktop as the pivotal point, because the power of the desktop is important for a rich user experience - and will be, for a very long time to come.
What we require then are smart, webified, internet deployable desktop applications - that can reliably store data, serve it robustly, and interact with both remote and local databases. This connected model will ensure that applications will function in both online and offline states - for a seamless, uninterrupted experience.
I have written about this general idea under the rubric of “tech cosmopolitanism” before, but the point these guys make specifically is worth noting - that the experience of a user who is intermittently connected to back-end systems is going to be better when that experience is closer to the user.
That said, there are best practices from web-based services that all should keep in mind:
- Updates: software should self-repair relatively silently and easily.
- Collaboration: connectivity should help people work together, both in real time and in a stateless mode.
- Redundancy: data should be protected, and having it both in the cloud and on the desk/laptop/handheld is valuable. This creates a synchronization complexity, which we can deal with another day.
Am still thinking about these issues.