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

Security nightmare?

[Corporate Troll]

It took data stored on the Internet and used it interchangeably with information on a PC's hard drive.

Am I the only one who frowned and thought about the security issues, when reading that?

You can never remove the need for offline.

[apathy maybe]

There will always be offline applications and the need for them. There are so many situations where access to the Internet is not available.

As for having the web offline... The big thing about the web is the links between the various pages. Using a tool such as HTTrack might well enable you to keep the links between pages, thus letting you have the experience of browsing multiple domains using your web browser, even when not connected. But most people just "save as" which gives a different experience depending on if you save the full page or just the HTML, and depending on which browser you use. (Thus guaranteeing that not all the links will work.)

Anyway, I would love to be able to take all the pages that I have already saved and quickly and easily form them into some sort of net, doesn't anyone have an automatic tool to do this?

(Oh and I need to both register and have cookies enabled to see the article. Fuck that. Can someone post the full text?)

Laptop anyone

[chelsel]

"annoyed that he could not get to his PC data when he was traveling"... What about a laptop... the Internet data cloud will not be my primary storage area for many years, if ever... it will be a secondary backup location at best. My primary working data will reside on a fully backed up, as secure as necessary, laptop. First level backup is a self managed RAID NAS (which itself is backed up).

what does AIR/Silverlight offer that is new/better

[feenberg]

We already have Javascript, Flash and Java - what do AIR and Silverlight offer that is better than those? Faster? Better languages? If the improvement is that they relax the restrictions on file I/O and access to the Internet, then do they have replacement restrictions that protect the user?

Anyone know how sluggish these apps are?

[Bombula]

How much of these applications run client-side? The thought of using a sluggish word-processor turns my stomach - and not the typing, but the menu interaction and so on. It reminds me of my recent cell phones. New and flashy and fully-featured as they are, it drives me out of my gourd that there is a 1/4-second delay when pressing every button. I can't stand that. I have an ancient Nokia - monochrome amber and all - and it responds instantly navigating through the address book, settings, or texting. If these online applications are anything like using a newer cell phone, count me out.

Re:what does AIR/Silverlight offer that is new/bet

[ozmanjusri]

We already have Javascript, Flash and Java - what do AIR and Silverlight offer that is better than those?

Mostly more control and better programming. OpenLaszlo, which is briefly mentioned in TFA, is an XML/javacript based programming language which compiles to Flash and/or DHTML. It includes a bunch of APIs for things like layout, data binding and server communication, and is one of the easiest prototyping tools I've ever used.

The slogan is "write once, run everywhere", which may be familiar to some older Slashdotters, but it's not too far off the truth. I'm using it now to develop auditing apps for the Nokia N800/810 internet tablets, and it's impressively simple.

If you're interested, I'd suggest you download it and try it, or check out the tutorial. It's very easy to get started, and the tutorial compiles and runs your code online.