Note: this post was started months ago (it's currently October), and could be a lot more fleshed-out than it currently is. However, in the interest of actually getting new content on this blog, I'm slapping it up here with all its warts and missing bits.

There are a few areas where web apps are way ahead of their bigger, often faster, native cousin, the Desktop App. In fact, you'll see that a good number of desktop apps are beginning to take some cues from their angle-bracketed cousins.

Decent visual design (or, Goodbye, Sea of Gray Dialog Boxes)
This is likely an artifact of the ratio of graphic design folks to programmer folks in the world of the web (versus the world of desktop apps). More than just looking better, well-designed web apps just make much better visual sense. Go look at something like Odeo or Backpack if you want to see what I mean. There's something about the flexibility of page layout that just seems to work really well. On the other hand, different types of applications require different sorts of interfaces.

I'm actually waiting for someone to come out with a good, solid way to make "hybrid" apps that can take advantage of web page-like flexible layout but still have some of the local/native-code speed benefits of a fat client. The Eclipse platform's Forms API is a step in this direction, but I do think it could be made much simpler.

Familiar Metaphor, Simplicity
The web page is a much simpler mental model for normal folks. People just seem to "get it" much more easily, and they seem less intimidated by web apps. This may be due to forced app simplicity imposed by the limitations of being a web app, but sometimes this is a really good thing.


Common, Scriptable, Hackable Model
Web applications are based upon HTML pages. While this seems like a nasty limitation (and believe me, sometimes it really is), it is also a huge boon for mix-and-match applications.
If you haven't checked out Greasemonkey, go check it out soon or you will miss out on one of the most exciting things to happen to applications in a LONG, LONG time.

With the exception of cut/paste/drag/drop, desktop applications are largely missing out on this interoperability.


Your data is everywhere you are
At some point desktop apps will catch up with this, but for the time being, they're way behind in terms of data accessibility. Of course web apps require you to be connected to the net (mostly), but this requirement gives you the flexibility to access this data from anywhere you are. I think the whole "your data is in the cloud and it doesn't matter what directory it's sitting in" thing will become more and more prevalent. Of course, this also introduces some interesting security issues.

Connected, connected, connected
I'm sure I'm not the first person to think about this, but it seems to me that the usefulness of a program and its associated data are proportional to how available it is to be connected to/accessed from other computers and other programs. For example, check out all the wonderful hacks associated with Google Maps. There lies the future, folks!

Needless to say, web apps aren't appropriate for every purpose. I'm not sure that I would want to do photo editing in a web app that didn't have some serious additional controls beyond text areas, buttons, and dropdowns; similarly, I'd hate to have to run a drawing program or surf the web with only a command-line.
posted on 7/21/2005 10:51:00 PM