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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.
Holy buzzword-itis Batman. I am not exactly sure what that article was about, but Adobe's AIR, though a cool product, is no panacea. As broadband, WiFi, 3G and WiMax become ubiquitous we are still on that 20 year+ quest to develop those magical frameworks that let us easily take our apps that depend on network services "offline". The problem is, there were only ever a few use cases that made sense in an offline mode, and in 5-10 years it will be virtual impossible to go "offline".
The future is always on, always networked, and software developers who spend the vast amounts of time and effort required to replicate little portions of their database or webservice in a "local" mode are going to be eaten alive by those who simply depend on the ever increasing reliability, performance, and ubiquity of the Internet.
Here's another article: http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/google_apps_serious_threat_to_microsoft_office.php
Mainstream applications are moving onto the browser. Everything is changing as a result. I, for one, am having a hard time predicting the future. Does this development, for instance, presage the death of the corporate IT department?
The other day I was having a chat with our school's senior management. I observed that many apps were moving onto the browser and that this would make it easier for the students to use laptops because the school wouldn't have to be concerned about managing the software on those laptops. He observed that we still had issues with programs like AutoCad. The thing that impressed me was that the VP had a ready answer. It seems like he had already been thinking about the issue.
A sample set of one isn't something on which to draw conclusions. Even so, if management types, who don't usually spend much time thinking about IT issues, are seriously thinking about web aps, it seems like there is some enthusiasm for going that direction. Desktop applications may move online quite quickly.
There's the begining of this sort of thing in development now - Google have Gears, which provides a Javascript interface to a locally stored SQLite database. Try using Google Reader in offline mode sometime, it's the same application, and will synchronise any changes you make when you take it back online.
Joyent have also developed Slingshot, built on top of Rails, which allows you to provide your web app as an offline desktop application. Again, this all synchs up with the servers once you get back into range of a network.
Do you usually spout such nonsense?
A downloaded script will never be faster than a local compiled application of the same functionality.
Well... probably most end users will just end up installing both.
I mean, it's not a money decision on the scale of buying your choice of player and a ton of movies.
Yeah this is great, until you're in a part of the world where Internet access is sporadic, slow, and $10/GB. Then suddenly having to download a few hundred megs of non-differential patches per app and needing a connection to "verify" your software is a bit more than a minor inconvenience. It's extremely annoying when software that'd designed for completely non-networked functionality REQUIRES you to hook the machine it's installed (from CD!) on to prove you haven't pirated it. This just leads to people pirating it and distributing the copies to everyone else in the same situation.
While I would very much love to live in your future of free high speed connections that are always there, the future is looking like pay per gig to clamp down on bittorrent, recover costs for universal monitoring of traffic (without need for pesky warrants), and milk people for all they're worth. "Oh, too bad your line went down when the phone company screwed up and you didn't notice when your router swapped over to the 3G cellular backup, that'll be $54,000 this month."
Here's a tip: The US is not the entire world, and companies sell to the rest too. Try telling everyone here in Africa that "in 5-10 years it will be virtual [sic] impossible to go 'offline'", I'm sure it'll be good for a laugh.
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One of the strengths of personal computers is that they can act autonomously. Decentralization means reliability. It means that no one can control your data, no one can deny you from it. It means that no terrorist, no hardware or software failure can take out a single company leaving all the others dead in the water.
What a needless waste of bandwidth running large applications, such as office applications on the internet would be. If every application ran from the internet, there would be little bandwidth left for anyone.
Solid state drives are new, but they won't be small for long. So, the whole air-thing is a moot point.
For those who are too young to remember.... At one time, computers and software was very expensive, they had these things called "mainframes," and they would connect these things called "dumb terminals" to them. The reason why they were called "dumb terminals" is they couldn't do anything without the mainframe, really, I'm not kidding you. Anyway, sometimes the "mainframe" would "go down." That didn't mean the same thing then as it meant today, in fact, it meant something very very bad. It meant that everyone in the office had nothing to do except talk at the water cooler. Years later they started making personal computers. They were cheap, and they helped people work even without the "mainframe." As time went on, and the software that ran on the personal computers became big, and fat, and bloated, and do you know what else, some of it became so expensive that people couldn't use them any more, so they didn't. One day, a man became upset that some people still had some money left in their pockets, so do you know what they did, that's right, they hired some marketing people and some programmers to make these things called "Web Applications." They fooled everyone. The man made lots of money, and that made him very happy, until one fateful day in an office, a "Web Application" wouldn't work, and for the first time in many years two people walked to the water cooler to talk. One of them said, "We've reduced our PCs to the level of dumb terminals." The other one said, "Yea, terminals hooked up to someone else's mainframe." They laughed, and laughed, and went to make some coffee.
https://www.youtube.com/c/BrendaEM
Well, it would lock me out of my data. A lot of places I work I have no internet access (not even via mobile -- not allowed to use one in some locations, and I've not found a way to access the net when riding the London tube). I deal with the issues of having data available wherever I am the easy way -- I keep anything I might need on my laptop, and synch to a server when I get back to base. If there's anything I've forgotten, or I need to check email, then I need to find an internet connection. Works anywhere this guy's solution will work, and a lot of other places besides, and I don't need to buy anything new.
Maybe I'm a luddite, but I don't see the point in moving stuff onto the web that's better placed on one's desk or laptop.
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Seriously, why do we need any of them to triumph? Let's forget the proprietary lock-in aspect of these technologies, let's consider that they make your page much less accessible and platform dependent (platform dependency on a web page sounds so awkward or bizare to me, really, who would want such a thing?) The fact that they screw people with disabilities, is another problem, but let's forget of all those, and remember that such pages would be slugish, please. Let's forget about this idea, it was pretty bad to begin with!
Copyright infringement is "piracy" in the same way DRM is "consumer rape"
The benefit is that Adobe and Microsoft get to mine your data.
Badass Resumes