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The Blurring Line Between PC and Web
The NYTimes has a feature about software development systems that move the Web offline and desktop applications online, with a focus on Adobe Air, which will be released tomorrow. The article has quotes from the developer behind Microsoft's Silverlight (he was a colleague at Macromedia of Adobe's Air guy), and from the head of the Mozilla Foundation about their online/offline offering, Prism.
he was a colleague at Macromedia of Adobe's Air guy
For people who would like that translated into English, he worked at Macromedia with a guy that worked on Adobe Air.
The problem with AIR is that it requires "porting". A website won't just work in AIR, and once it's been ported, it will no longer work as a regular real website, as it'll have dependencies on Adobe AIR. This effectively means that if you as a developer want the best of both worlds, you'll need to maintain two version of your application.
The approach Mozilla is taking with Prism on the other hand (which is also being taken with Bubbles and Fluid, with standardization between these in the early stages of being talked about), is to make available small features which allows a real website to gain some properties on the level of a desktop application when run from Prism, without stopping to work as a website. This is the progressive enhancement approach, which helps keep the web open (any browser can continue to run the application). It's very important for developers to realize this distinction, less the web gets locked into a proprietary realm. (both Microsoft and Adobe would love nothing better than to be the sole gatekeeper to this realm.)
It may not be everyone's favorite software, but Lotus Notes has done this for a decade or more.
There will always be offline applications and the need for them. There are so many situations where access to the Internet is not available.
True, but the gap between online an offline will blur: desktop apps that query online databases, and web kits that install through the web AJAX-like applications with local caches. The user will no longer be aware of the browser methods to persistently store content found online.
As for archiving visited pages, the best solutions I've found are through Firefox extensions. I've tried [[Google Notebook]] and [[ScribeFire]] (both take care of online storage and thus multi-PC synchronization), though I've heard wonders of [[Zotero]](1).
(1) I think we're not in Wikipedia anymore... you'll have to google them.
Singularity: a belief in the "God" idea with the "demiurge" relation inverted.
AIR provides a graphics layer inside a web browser that is 2nd to none. Firefox 3 SVG is coming along, but it's not there yet. Check out what we were able to do with AIR & Webkit: http://about.stompernet.com/scrutinizer It's a simulation of human vision dropped on top of a browser. Wish we could have done it in FF3, but it's not quite up to the task yet.
On the WinXP side, I've been using local web hosting with XAMPP for development for around a year. Works well from a USB drive.
Lately I've also been looking at personal wikis as a kind of outliner on steroids tool. At least one launches its own micro web server and uses your choice of browser as the interface, with the scripting done server-side (but on your machine). It can run from a USB drive. I've forgotten the name of this guy, because I've been focusing on another one:
TiddlyWiki uses client-side Javascript for the scripting and runs well under Firefox, and with the usual irritations under MSIE. Reports are that it works well under Safari, Opera, etc, too. It has proven itself in small applications (size of the file:///.../myTiddlies.html up to about 2MB without hassle; haven't gotten any larger than that yet). As mentioned, storage is as a local file, with no server involvement. It's amazing how capable Javascript can be in a standards compliant browser.
I'm just starting my second cup of coffee for the day, so I'm not yet ready to dig up links to any of this. But googling on "personal wiki" will bring up plenty of reading.
I suppose I need to make it abundantly clear that this is on topic. This is all about using software designed for intarweb tubes on your local machine, which is right smack in the middle of the topic category.
Now back to our normal program...