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January 02, 2008
Different kinds of tech
Different kinds of tech: BBC attempts to survey trends; includes this line: "Search giant Google announced its Gears application whilst Adobe launched Air and Microsoft released Silverlight. All the technologies have the ability to take rich web content and make some of it available offline." I filed this under "web sociology" rather than "web tech", because reporters listen to each other and don't think enough for themselves. Microsoft Silverlight is definitely the odd one out here technically -- the only reason it's included is because other reporters mentioned it in "offline access" stories before. (And even "Silverlight" is a misnomer, because the "WPF/e" browser plugin Gates was talking about in 2005 is planned for initial ("go live") beta sometime this coming year, yet most reporters fuddishly confuse 1.0 and 2.0, and that "bringing desktop apps to the browser!" line remains overdiscussed fantasy in whichever version.) The ongoing MS announcements got a free media placement in this article. Google Gears is, like Microsoft Silverlight, a proposed browser plugin -- this one offering a local SQLite database rather than video. Gears doesn't provide "offline" in itself, but allows webpage developers to call its API for local storage, and possibly set up their own synch methods. Few webpages have relied upon this upcoming browser plugin yet. The Adobe Integrated Runtime is not a browser plugin, and it's 'way past time for "tech reporters" to stop comparing it with browser plugins. AIR makes desktop apps, with drag/drop, local file acess, native windows, notifications, and -- oh yes -- it also offers a local database like Gears. A reporter could lump all three initiatives together as "new names I learned about in 2007!", but other than branding freshness, the three have only incidental similarities. The Silverlight plugin doesn't do anything new; the Gears plugin has the potential to improve Ajax webpages; but AIR is a cross-OS runtime using web techniques to create desktop apps.
Posted by JohnDowdell at January 2, 2008 08:17 AM
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