web versus desktop clients
March 8th, 2008[ Software Development ]
Of late I seem to find myself ranting about the return of desktop applications. It certainly wasn’t intentional. Maybe I’m just bored of building applications for such a mess of a medium known as the web. In any case I’m excited about desktop applications which seems so 1980’s of me.
Moving applications to the web browser certainly fixed some things, however, it broke a bunch as well. First, let’s dispense with the notion of the web browser being web-based and traditional client applications being non-web-based. Upon closer inspection it seems that web browsers themselves exhibit most, or all, of the attributes of a traditional application. My point is, every trad application can access and do things ‘in the cloud’ so they’re web based.
A good example is the trad application I’m using to write this very entry. Drivel is a Gnome client “for working with online journals”. I no longer write web posts in a web browser. I was sick of losing posts by accidentally closing a browser, not being able to write or edit while offline like being on a plane among other annoyances. I now enjoy the rich features of a trad application, save posts locally etc, as well as being able to post directly ‘to the cloud’. As well, I use drivel to post to multiple blog applications which gives me a consistent writing experience regardless of the blog software I choose to run the blog on.
Further complicating this issue is that two giants are on either side of this. Microsoft owns the desktop, google owns the ‘cloud’. My 2 cents is that google will do everything they can to get you and your applications on the web as they don’t own your OS. The more you take off your desktop and put entirely on the cloud then the more of you they have.
Mozilla’s prism is now trying to help you “split web applications out of their browser and run them directly on their desktop”. I’m only getting more confused. Mozilla claims that the problem with trad apps versus web apps fixed was that they had slow installation, a verbose update process, and they didn’t have ‘data in the cloud’.
We’re already mentioned that the ‘data in the cloud’ no longer differentiates. So that leaves us with install and update. I believe I’m biased in that I’m an ubuntu user and therefore have access to synaptic. That means I’ve installed virtually every application by typing one line in bash or using the synaptic client. Once an application is installed I forget about it for the most part and synaptic handles all updates for me.
“Synaptic maintains a database of packages on your system in order to keep track of installed software. This list is checked against the software repositories to inform you of new packages or updates. Synaptic checks for new software packages when you launch Synaptic.”
This means I no longer suffer from a cumbersome install or update process for trad apps. Should we not just take the synaptic path and fix the real problem, making trad apps dirt simple to install and keep up to date? Cripes, I’m starting to feel old..