Fri Jun 18 04:33:57 UTC 2004

I’ve been thinking about Joel’s rant on the Death of the Microsoft API, and Paul Graham’s The Other Road Ahead, and I think they’re generally on the right track: there is a lot more future in web apps than we think.

But web apps suck, don’t they?

Paul Graham asserts that web interfaces are “good enough” now, but I think they’re better than that. The traditional problem with browser-based applications is that they have a set irritating limitations that rich clients don’t — things like latencies, limited widget sets, and a painfully stateless client/server model. But there are several significant advantages of browser apps that are rather difficult to provide in rich clients.

The most obvious advantage of the browser interface is ubiquity, they’re everywhere. Take an application like webmail, for instance, where users can roam between computers and not care about installing or setting it up. The details of POP, SMTP and application setup/configuration are totally hidden from the user. The effort involved in maintaining the underlying hardware, operating system, network setup, configuration, security, and backups are managed by someone else too. Users are insulated from all of the nasty details, which is a great thing to do.

Not only do web applications provide universal access, and a powerful abstraction from the underlying complexities, they provide a set of freedoms in the presentation that are not easy to manage in rich clients. One thing I realized today is that I couldn’t imagine reading news, or in-depth articles in a one-size-fits-all interface as provided by most UI toolkits. In fact, I tried a rich-client RSS reader recently, and found that the blandness of the UI widgets took away from the character of the material. Presentation matters.

I still use RSS, but I follow the headlines to the sites, so that I can experience the articles in their fully published form. Reading a Joel On Software article without the serif font and side-bars just isn’t the same in sans-8, in the small window of a client-side aggregator.

The client-side aggregator has the other problems of rich-clients too. Straw requires several libraries to run, none of which come with the standard Gnome distribution. The application stores configuration and data locally, which has to be copied between every machine it is used on. And the application uses a great deal of resources to synchronize its news feeds, which is a huge drain on larger websites, as the cost is scaled by the number of rich-clients running on user’s desktops.

With web-based aggregators all of these deficiencies are solved, and the usability is generally improved. Users can roam between PCs, and retain their settings. Sites that provide RSS feeds are polled much less frequently for their news feeds. The experience is arguably better too, as there are many more interface layout options, and it is faster and more natural to pop open browser windows from an already open browser. In the end, the browser-based application wins.

And then there is Google. They provide Zero-Hassle applications for everything the average user needs: web-search, news, blogging, and mail. And as more user data moves to the web, the things like new SQL-based file systems for local searches become less relevant. It may be that both Microsoft and desktop Gnu/Linux applications are already (or soon to be) mostly irrelevant.

It’s official, weblogging is now all the rage with the big-boys, both Microsoft and Sun have exposed their devs to the masses. The blogspace predates these recent enteries by some years, but I’m sure that the big boys will somehow claim that they were first.

I purchased and installed Codeweaver’s CrossOver Office today, a professional repackaging of Wine is not an emulator. I’m finding that none of the Gnu/Linux-native office tools are quite robust enough for import/export of Office documents (though they are getting close), and the vanilla Wine RPMs are not that stable. I do like using Open Office and Gnumeric for creating new documents, but I’m having trouble with a few important client-related documents (and I’m not a purist).

So I decided to try CrossOver. The really cool thing is that it just works, and it’s fast (faster than native it seems). It is a bit weird, though, to see the Word and Excel icons on my Gnome toolbars.