Web apps on your desktop

Posted on July 22, 2008 at 5:23 am

Just when everyone was expecting that all our software and services would move completely into the browser and off the desktop, a movement begins to bring services out of the browser and back onto the desktop.

Over the last year or two we have seen a number of technologies and developments aimed at achieving this with varying levels of success.

Google Gears

Quite promising, Google released Gears just over a year ago with the concept of allowing web services to tap into the power of desktop software somewhat.

The release was met with interest, but not a great huge number of services have adopted the technology. Off the top of my head I can think only of MySpace and the new WordPress 2.6 release.

The premise was to allow offline access to popular web services and Google demonstrated the capabilities of Gears with their Online Docs office suite.

What’s interesting is that rather then using Gears for offline access, developers are seeing it as a great way to provide speedy navigation of frequently used services while online. WordPress is a good example, the new ‘Turbo’ function doesn’t let you blog offline, but it does make using the admin dashboard while online a whole lot faster.

Gears is powerful, but we are yet to see any kind of mass adoption, Google of course has been the biggest adopter so far, but perhaps services like MySpace and WordPress will encourage others to also adopt it.

Adobe AIR

Adobe AIR has been getting considerably more excitement from developers and a lot of very handy applications have been springing up lately.

Adobe AIR is a technology which lets developers do more then just bring their website and services onto the desktop, it lets them further extend their service in ways typically only desktop software was able to do before.

This means new interfaces, improved performance and more features. It’s also cross platform which is a huge incentive to develop using AIR. Adobe has tried to make it as accessible as possible for developers and AIR applications can be created with HTML and Ajax, Flex or Flash.

The Adobe Marketplace now has hundreds of applications and is worth checking out.

Mozilla Prism

To me Mozilla Prism seems a bit half-baked, but it does have a few distinct advantages to just using your normal browser.

Prism is designed so any user can create a desktop application of any of their favourite web services, however what you get is just a site specific browser window without all the toolbars etc.

The good thing about it however is that because it runs separately it won’t crash when your browser does. You can also have shortcuts within your start menu to open up the application, another handy feature.

I like some of the ideas of Prism but at the moment it seems more experimental.