Building Desktop Applications is Hard 
April 9th, 2007
Ryan’s stirring the pot again with his post on “Why Do People Hate Building Desktop Applications“. I don’t think it’s that people “hate” building them, come on we all know hate is very strong word. It’s that as his post points out, building them is damn hard. You need to know quite a bit about computers and likely a complicated programming language, then on top of that building the GUI is likely going to be a major pain and look like junk. Another big challenge was getting them to talk to the internet, but that’s gotten I easier. The other trick is installation, it’s a lot harder to get people to install something on the desktop than browse to a URL or even login to a web app. So web apps are easier to get people to use and easier to build, but not as rich as well built desktop apps. Ajax (and Flash) have certainly changed that richness aspect. For example I use Gmail (@gmail and @nitobi.com) almost exclusively now. I would never have considered 5 years with lame ass web clients that were out there. But it would be cool to have a desktop version mostly for better file (attachment) access, offline use and native keyboard short cuts (I want ctrl+enter back!). So ya more and more apps are going to move online definitely, but not all of them. I would guess the majority of business apps will though. Can you think of any business line apps (accounting, crm, inventory, billing, call center, shipping, etc) that couldn’t use an RIA interface exclusively? Now I know there’s an online version of Photoshop coming but it sure as heck isn’t going to be as powerful as the CS3 release, but maybe good enough for most uses? I think in the future you won’t even give much thought as to whether an app is online or not…it’ll just there…wherever you are:)
Technorati Tags: ajax, flash, flex, ria, desktop, ryantewart, ui, ux
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This entry was posted on Monday, April 9th, 2007 at 8:28 pm and is filed under Technology, Software Development, AJAX, Usability – HCI. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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April 9th, 2007 at 11:34 pm
I must agree with you that this used to be reason behind the “web vs desktop controversy”, but, does this controversy should really exist?
The key point is how we build the user interfaces nowadays, it’s just obsolete. We need user interface builders (we coined the term “guilders” for them), and not platform-dependent strategies. I want to build my user itnerface, and then decide the deploy architecture to use (or use both, and choose on-the-fly depending on the connection speed and the user desktop configuration). And so, we need abstraction.
You may want to check our point of view at http://www.himalia.net/cases.html.
I think our time is comming 😉
April 10th, 2007 at 1:53 am
I agree that you should be able to design and build app/guis without worrying about the underlying technology, and that is always the goal of new tools. We’re always trying to make things simpler via abstraction, but it seems elusive most of the time. Also, there are also different constraints that one must keep in mind no matter what the platform you’re deploying too.