The Next Step
April 8, 2008
I’ve just been perusing Khoi Vinh’s article over on subtraction.com and realize there is a lot of merit to his opinion. As a web developer, I have a strong urge to fight back. After all, aren’t online applications the direction software is heading?
But he’s got a point: some things are still lacking in web apps. And regardless of how fast internet connections get, there will always be the sporadic downed line at home or dns error. There is a convenience to the speed and accessibility of a native application.
As developers, I think we need to start pointing ourselves even further ahead than the rising online SAAS model. Software available online is brilliant. But we need to strive to blur the line between online and native apps. I believe we can create applications with all the advantages of both.
Imagine a word processor that was installed natively, and saved local copies of your files, but also updated itself instantly every time it opened, and kept a copy of your files on a server, accessible from any computer. And if you lose connection for a few days, you could just continue working on the local files and it would see the differences and sync the online copies to match when you reconnected.
This may even be where the next generations of web browsers should point themselves: to be flexible window management programs. We’ve already jury rigged them to do that with AJAX, and it does a pretty remarkable job. Now we just need to find a way to create a closer tie between the JavaScript tools of Google Docs and a faster, locally-stored version of the same program.
Vantage