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.

Comments

Cloudy thinking

[joshv]

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.

Expensive thinking.

[Gldm]

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.

Re:Expensive thinking.

[blincoln]

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.

Even in the US it's laughable. There are huge chunks of the country where there is no cellular service. I know a lot of Slashdot's readership doesn't go camping or drive through the middle of nowhere, but it's important to realize that not everyone lives like that. Using a network to get data is great. Depending on it as the sole source of data for things like navigation (or worse yet, the navigation application itself) is stupid.

Re:Security nightmare?

[digitig]

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.