Web vs. Desktop
Traditionally, from an application perspective, people have been divided between the web and the desktop. Some believe the web is easier to develop and deploy for and the desktop is sooooo 1998, and some believe the desktop offers a far richer and more integrated experience and that the web is just a fad perpetrated by square-orange-sunglasses wearing poseurs. Jono Bacon and Stuart ‘Aq’ Langridge explore whether we need this divide and whether Open Source can’t bring both together in perfect harmony.
Of course, we are the very start of the conversation! What do you think? Are you a web or desktop person, both or neither? Do yoiu think that we can merge together more effectively? Do you think there needs to be divide, or that one even exists? Do you think that Open Source can solve these problems? Share your thoughts in the shot comments below…
29 Comments to “Web vs. Desktop”
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Great shot guys,
That is defiantly the obvious next step, I mean how often do you use a computer not connected to the internet… almost never.
App of Jaq is a wonderful idea, it would make the discussion more interactive. And will probably double your comments to each shot.
As always looking forward to the next shot.
Thanks, Rezza! Glad you liked the shot, and we are looking forward to getting App Of Jaq out soon.
“I mean how often do you use a computer not connected to the internet…”
On planes. On other forms of transport where 3G coverage is spotty – such as during my recent narrowboating trip. When my mobile is out of coverage. When I’m staying at a hotel with no 3G coverage and no wifi.
And, of course, when my internet connection is down.
Gerv
Oh, and when you are abroad, where 3G roaming charges are astronomical and wireless (if you can find an access point and if you have an account with a provider and if that provider has a roaming agreement) still costs 8p per minute.
Gerv
Well I think there will be some overlap but the cloud wont catch on till we have almost universal broadband coverage in the western world. So everywhere you go you will have to be connected to the internet before it will really catch on I think. So the desktop wont die before then for definite and it still will have many uses after then.
I see the web as the next OS, maybe it will take a while but its is the next platform.
Google is pushing it everyday. Gnome is pushing it using Gnome-Shell. Ubuntu with the UbuntuOne Sync.
So if we can achieve having the Web-Code running natively on the machine out of the browser, we can have the best of both worlds.
I think the down-side of this will be the extensive use of JavaScript, which may make the desktop run slower than usual.
I think you are always going to need a mix of both the Desktop and the Web. There are certain things it just makes more sense to use on a Desktop, like Video Editing, that would take a while on the web, and use lots of bandwidth. I think what you may end up seeing is something coming out that may take the place of Http. Some new protocols may arrive, to overtake HTML as the new standard on how things would work. Much like HTTP overtook things like Gopher back in the day. These new protocols will allow programs to directly move from being just a desktop application to a Cloud Application. This could be quite interesting.
I’m all for web! The only application I use on the desktop is vim, and thunderbird (work email) I don’t see the need to keep on adding and adding programs for tasks I can do just as easily on the web.
Here in South Africa, we’re finally getting uncapped broadband, which is making the web much more affordable. I like the idea of being able to “login” on any computer, anywhere in the world, and be able to starting working from the word go.
Only problem I have with web-apps the the amount of crap people can put out, take “farmville” as a example. Yikes.
The Cloud is taking over….
I feel more comfortable using desktop apps, even when all they do is present data from the web. I use desktop clients for web services whenever possible because, as was mentioned in the Shot, I feel like I get a richer experience as well as the desktop integration with notifications and the messaging menu and whatnot.
It feels like a hassle to have browser tabs open for identica, twitter, facebook, gmail, work email, and other web services that I have to manually poll when I can just have programs running in the background checking them for me and alerting me when something interesting happens.
I’m looking forward to App of Jaq as the one-stop shop for all my Jaq needs. It’ll be nice being able to listen to the Shot and comment on it without leaving evidence on my work machine’s web browser.
I think it is going to be pretty cool. The idea with App Of Jaq is to really build the conversation experience into the desktop. It will be simple at first, primarily showing notification bubbles when new comments arrive and automatically downloading new shots and being to play them, but we hope to build a community of people who are keen to contribute to App Of Jaq to make it more interactive and interesting.
3 lines of code to post to twitter? feel like sharing these lines of code and pointing to any docs that might document that?
OK, I did a little searching, and it’s true, it’s super easy to do (so easy that it’s a bit scary). Still, any documentation on this?
Rock!
Isn’t this what everyone is trying to do now, but with different approaches? Adobe has AIR, Microsoft has Silverlight, Apple has their native iPhone/iPad Objective-C Apps, and everyone else has HTML5. All of these are supposed to bring the web and the desktop together.
What you seem to be offering is the Apple approach (native apps), but using Python instead of Objective-C. I think all you’re lacking is a trendy name for it.
“There’s an App of Jaq for that”.
Not really: the examples you gave are rich web frameworks that happen to run on the desktop too, but they don’t really integrate with the desktop as much from what I can tell.
You’re looking at the details of the technology, and not the role they fill in the market. The sort of “apps” you’re talking about fill exactly the same niche – small dedicated applications that bridge the Internet (or network) to the desktop.
HTML 5 and Adobe Air achieve platform independence by sacrificing integration. Apple sacrifices platform independence but gains integration. Microsoft Silverlight sacrifices platform independence and integration and gains – well nothing from the looks of it.
The degree of integration by the different approaches is just a design decision. Why do you think that Adobe is so keen on getting Flash onto the iPhone, and Apple is so keen on keeping it (and Silverlight and Mono) out? It’s because they can do the same thing as Objective-C (while sacrificing integration) for those types of applications.
I think the well integrated app approach is the correct one for the sort of application you are talking about. Python and Gnome is the platform. The repository is the “app store”. As I said, all you’re really lacking at this point is a name for it.
100% web/cloud based would cost a fortune if you needed to make use of WiFi in EU hotels or international data roaming just to be able to work.
If you do sway towards the web app end of the scale, make sure you don’t let your ISP cut your connection when your offspring or visitors download too many dodgy movies
Considering how many different devices people tend to want to communicate with, popular communication oriented applications end up often developing a client-server architecture, and websites develop APIs. What’s better? What your users want is what’s better, and what’s best is being able to let people help you out to get there. So if you’ve got a good idea for an app and you want people to use it from their phone or their desktop, really, you need to provide the service and the API for other people to build their preferred style of client for. Because if twitter has taught us anything — no one client serves. You can twitter from your toaster, no?
I’m rather amazed no-one’s mentioned OwnCloud (owncloud.org) here. This is an attempt to basically let people create their own personal, open source cloud easily that lets all your desktop apps use / sync to / keep revisions on the web.
It’s early days yet, but for anyone who hasn’t seen it yet, I highly recommend checking out the presentation at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5IdMWxtMMB8
(Yes, he talks about KDE in there, but OwnCloud is cross platform. The idea is that any device can use it regardless of OS or desktop environment)
First off, great Shot! Also, thank you very much for the mobile theme; it makes it very pleasing to browse the site from my new Droid Eris;-) You guys focused on the traditional web vs desktop development argument, but what about mobile development? It is possible to integrate across the web, desktop and mobile devices?
The way I see it is a great service has an application for each platform and takes full advantage of what each platform has to offer.
Web – Take it wherever you go, but requires the user to actively go onto your site
Desktop – Powerful, more common to users, easier methods for giving user notifications
Mobile Device – Gives user opportunity to perform tasks where previously not really available, plus extra sensor data (GPS, Camera, Accelerometer)
For me each service offers something different, and if you get a user on each platform with your service you can do some pretty kool things, other them an experience, that for me, is pretty few and far between and something I think apple probably has best with things like mobile me and Ubuntu One has the possibility to be a similar sort of service.
Pity the cross-platform nature of the web can’t be easily introduced to the desktop along with all the whizzy new desktop glitter. Adobe AIR tries but suffers the same issue as Flash (runs like a dog). Java does this but it feels like every linux using podcaster I’ve ever heard except Dick Wall can’t stand Java (and presumably this extends to JavaFX), so that’s a bit of a downer too.
I think the App of Jaq idea is great too and will love to see it up and running, but the platform-specific nature of it leaves a little to be desired.
Great shot guys.
..”I mean how often do you use a computer not connected to the internet… almost never.” I love it when people answer the very question they raise. Personally I often use a computer not connected to the Internet – at home. Although I live in a “modern” country, with the latest technologies available, I currently retain Internet access. I cannot get access to ADSL 1 or 2, nor cable or satellite Internet access. The only option available to me is wireless but in my home the signal strength is so poor that it’s simply not worth it. Wireless is significantly more expensive than wired access, so I would be paying a premium for an incredibly poor level of service.
For me then, the answer is that I must retain the “legacy” desktop. Apps in the cloud are just not a viable replacement. Besides this I still like the fact that the apps I use on my desktop are free (beer) and free (freedom). The web sites I use most often on the web are not.
“The desktop” is really just a design metaphor, but it’s one which has become so ingrained in our understanding of personal computers that it’s going to be difficult to replace.
I can’t really see desktop applications and web applications co-existing as they do now for much longer though, I feel there will eventually be some convergence which works to the benefits of both approaches.
HTML5 is a step in this direction, giving web applications more access to low-level hardware and providing native audio/video, vector graphics and offline storage capabilities. Google Chrome OS is also a step in this direction.
The iPad has interesting examples of graphical user interfaces that don’t exist within a desktop environment and it will be interesting to see how this style of interface design transposes to the web environment with the emerging standards for native graphics capability.
Underlying this issue is the other question of cloud computing (discussed in another shot) of where computing takes place and where users’ data is stored.
Aq: “A web browser by definition only shows you stuff on the web.”
Not at all. Google Desktop, for example, provides a search UI by running a local webserver. And you can load files from disk. And HTML Offline Storage means you can run entire apps stored in the browser without being connected to the web at all.
Gerv
Ah. I should have been clearer about that. There is a (largely spurious) distinction in my head between “a web browser” and “an application window with a web rendering widget in it”. “A web browser”, for example Firefox, has lots of stuff in menus and toolbar buttons dedicated to making it better at browsing the web — bookmarks, password-remembering dialogs, cookie management, and the like. Providing a local administration interface for your application by serving up a website from a local Apache could usefully be done by providing a local app with a Gecko widget in it which browses to said local Apache — it doesn’t need an address bar or remembered-password editing dialogs or bookmarks for that. That we can use a normal web browser to do these things, because it does the web and does local stuff as well, doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s the best approach. HTML5 apps using local storage are an interesting blend of the two (I wrote one this weekend, for example
), and fall somewhere midway down my continuum of web-to-desktop.
As another me-too comment… I would agree that the future is in rich, fast, native (desktop/mobile) applications that tie into an increasingly more flexible web. Or at least I’m betting on such a future.
Great shot guys, however I can’t help but feel that this shot is almost a bit dated. Back in the 90s it was very much desktop as it was so expensive just to be online, never mind downloading anything. Then after the turn of the century it reversed and went to the pay a set fee per month very similar to what it is now and everything went online, it wasn’t cool if it wasn’t online. However over the last few years I think that apps in general are making use of the fact that just about every desktop has an internet connection, yes the program is still installed locally however a lot of the information is taken from the web.
If people were to limit this by saying they would only work with one or the other then this could have a serious impact on the potential that programs have. I hope that programmers and designers continue to integrate web and desktop technology as one, not separate or rival entities.
How about this for a future shot: phone v web. I think there is still a distinctive split on the phone apps.