Cobalt Edge

For a few months now we've been seeing more offline web app support. This includes technologies like Apollo, some of the tricks people are using with Firefox (like ), http://www.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gif, and lately .http://www.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gif

What amazes me is how much people want to seem to stay within a web browser. They're trying so hard to cram a feature into a space that wasn't designed for it, not to mention is just a crappy solution. No doubt there are a few nice uses of offline support for a pure browser-based app, but why haven't more people started to realize how much better they can do by going beyond the browser? Why do you want the browsers UI to be your dominant surrounding UI? Why do you want to be constrained to the browser's window, and force your user's to have your app running in another http://www.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gifapp, that doesn't have it's own dock/task bar icon or ability to interact with the OS?

I also don't think it's an all or nothing situation. I value having a browser-based UI available to me, so that when I'm not using one of my computers, I can still view my data. I don't expect the experience to be as good, and it can lack features, but I can get to the data in a pinch. But, I would much rather have dedicated applications for the "web applications" I use a lot. Examples of this would be Backpack, project tracking systems (currently I use Scrumworks, which has a Java desktop client that works with their web app, and Basecamp), music players, weather watchers, GotAPI, Twitter, and many others.

There are some examples popping up. Twitter has Twitterific, and FineTune has their Apollo player. These are both excellent examples of how deficient the browser is for many web applications, and how much better you can do outside the browser.

I admit that Apollo is really what took my thinking on this to the next level. You no longer have the excuse that you don't know native code or native code toolkits and such. Building an Apollo app can be done the same as you'd build a web app, and even gives you the choice of Flex or HTML, or a combination (this gets very powerful). You can even simply pop an existing web app into an HTML view in an Apollo window, and thus have a dedicated application (doesn't give you much more but at least you aren't just a tab in your browser, and can display it on a different virtual desktop or size the window differently than your browser window, etc.).

To make this more positive, this is a call to all web developers to think hard about this. Even if you don't need offline support, or you don't need it right away, think about the user experience and how you might create that much better of an app by not being constrained to a browser. I won't have anything in the next week, but yes, I'll be eating my own dogfood, and having some apps out soon enough (watch this space).