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April 07, 2007

Desktop dead?

Desktop dead? I don't think so. Paul Graham, an entrepreneur of Web20 teams, writes: "Everyone can see the desktop is over. It now seems inevitable that applications will live on the web -- not just email, but everything, right up to Photoshop." For his example, the ability to do Adobe-style image-processing in a web browser will provide new usefulness, true, but won't duplicate the ever-advancing ability in local storage and processing -- "Adobe Photoshop" isn't just a single application, but is a whole related family of well-known interfaces, APIs, and technical capabilities. For Paul's conclusion, we've been working on network-aware applications here for a decade (in-browser Shockwave since 1995; NetLingo Projectors since 1996), and both in-browser and beyond-the-browser work are reaching full maturity now. Sometimes you'll want machine-independence, sometimes you'll want network-independence, and there are times when you'll want to combine the two, too. Today's options are a bit richer and more varied than such punditry suggests.

Posted by JohnDowdell at April 7, 2007 02:09 PM

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Comments

Agree ;) Adobe/Macromedia in the past has done an excellent job with "extending the browsers reach" per say. The trick though is client-side performance, i mean until AVM came along in Flash 9, I would of suggested that in theory yes, but in practice no.

We are reaching new heighs in power with runtimes, but in the end its going to come back to runtimes and how well they are not only seeded, but scale in terms of performance. I appreciate Web 2.0's agenda and celebrate the fact that both brands are working towards it, yet we need to strengthen the foundations we are about to build onto in order to succeed in what Paul is suggesting.

More work to be done me thinks though.

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Scott Barnes
Developer Evangelist
Microsoft.

Posted by: Scott Barnes at April 7, 2007 11:02 PM

I agree too - some desktop applications are suitable for webification, some are not. The main issue I see is network latency - anything that requires a large source or data files going back and forth between the client and server will render a 2.0 app unusable.

Don't get me wrong, I'm a big believer in Office 2.0 - just not Photoshop 2.0

Posted by: Alex McCabe at April 8, 2007 01:38 AM