Recently I’ve often found myself thinking about the differences between a typical desktop application and a web-based application, not so much from the technical aspects but from the usability and presentation aspects.
In a typical desktop application, people tend to expect an application to look and largely work the same as all the other applications they have on their desktop (take for example the concepts of copy-paste, “save” vs “save as”, near-universal use of menu bars and status bars etc), but on the web it seems that all of this goes out the window and anything seems to work.
So it was with this in mind that I had a quick play around with the new Alpha of Adobe Apollo - basically a framework for web based applications, but on the desktop (cross platform too it seems, although currently the Linux build is missing), allowing access to the local machine in ways not previously possible with just a browser. Unfortunately the only sample I could get to work was a pretty boring looking RSS reader, complete with fairly average looking widgets - technically great I am sure, but show me something innovative and exciting that I cant already get on the desktop! Still I guess it is an alpha so you’ve got to expect some teething troubles.
I’ve not given it a good look over yet but it seems like this could be fairly interesting. Part of me though is saying that the reason that web applications can get away with their “crazy” interfaces is because people feel safe when they know its “just a web site” which they can explore as they like, relying on the Back button to get them out of trouble - I’m still undecided if they’ll feel the same about Apollo applications. Another part of me is asking why anyone would bother developing applications using Apollo - after all if you’ve not already made an app in Java or C# or something, you can probably knock up a pretty good version just using local HTML, CSS and Javascript files (browser-limitations permitting of course). I guess we’ll just have to wait and see what happens…