Desktop Applications Dying, Dying…

Dietrich Kappe, Thursday, October 18, 2007 @ 11:07 am

My post the other day on the death of desktop applications got me a large volume of hate mail. I was alternately an ignoramus or a hater. One common refrain was that Web UI's still sucked and would never replace Desktop apps in terms of the user experience (OK, it was usually not phrased so elegantly). I guess many readers missed my point. My point was that it rarely makes sense to develop a pure Desktop app anymore, not that everything should be a webapp. Why is that?

1. In many cases and for many uses, Web UI's are as good as Desktop UI's. Look at all of the Ajax photoshop knockoffs (here and here), the various word processor or spreadsheet apps, and the direct manipulation interfaces such as Yahoo Pipes.
2. The choice is no longer between the Desktop app and the Webapp, but between just doing a webapp or using something like Adobe AIR or Google Gears to do a Desktop RIA and a webapp at the same time.
3. As the capabilities of browsers increase, with faster and more efficient Javascript engines, offline features, etc., and the maturity of Ajax frameworks evolve, the reasons for writing Desktop RIA's that can also work as webapps become more compelling.

Those that persist in yammering about how kludgey webapps are live in the distant past, confusing the Green Screen nature of the pre-Ajax (as I observed here in 2006, and Joel Spolsky did here over a year and a half later -- more on what Joel got right and wrong in a later post) with the current ability to develop Component GUI applications just like those Desktop apps.

My point remains unchanged: spending significant resources to develop a purely desktop app only makes sense in specific circumstances, and unless you have tons of money to write your own network integration systems, you are best off using the already available Desktop RIA frameworks.

Technorati Tags: ajax, desktop RIA

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1. 

   I totally agree with you, Dietrich. For a large class of applications a solution involving a web application + Gears (or AIR) to expand offline represents a competitive advantage in terms of deployment and in many cases capability.

   Comment by Mark Holton, Thursday, October 18, 2007 @ 12:52 pm

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