Desktop. Web. Web Desktop. Portals. Widgets. Gadgets. Pageflakes(?). Sidebars.
It’s as if we’ve taken the content and applications on the web and run them through one of those made-for-TV slice and dice contraptions.
It’s an exciting time for software development and more importantly…experience design. There are two clearly distinct experiences today for the great majority of users: the desktop and the web. As we trend away from this distinction the possibilities really take off.
At Arc90, we’re investing a lot of our brainpower on Adobe’s Flex platform, and we’re excited to see how nicely our investment will pay off on the desktop with Apollo – Adobe’s cross-OS runtime. It brings the power and ubiquity of Flash to both Windows and Mac desktops. Apollo isn’t publicly available just yet, but the buzz is already building.
While it’s cool to think up new and neat ways to deliver web functionality on the desktop, that’s just the tip of the iceberg. To really leverage zero-installation platforms like Apollo, we need to start thinking in a new paradigm. A paradigm that blows away notions of URL’s, install packages, and that critical line between “application” and the “assets” or “currency” that application helps us manage.
With RIA’s like Apollo, the distinction between delivering that currency or what we commonly recognize as “data” and the application itself are blurred. The technologies to deliver functionality and end-user experiences right along with the payload are finally arriving. For designers and developers, this challenges us to rethink how we design and deliver this new breed of software.
To date, the critical barrier of adoption of tools today – especially collaborative or communication tools – is the daunting “setup process.” Download this, save it somewhere, install it, and shift how you think and work around it. Web apps address this to a large extent, but web apps have their own baggage: they’re limited to your browser’s walls.
With this new frontier, we’re able to do a few things differently. At the risk of sounding…spooky: we really don’t need to “release” applications anymore. Applications can seep into people’s desktop experiences, thus drastically reducing the work people often put into dealing with new applications. Furthermore, applications can and should evolve over time. The days of major bundles of functionality packed into “major” releases can give way to gradual, incremental augmentation.
Adobe and others have taken care of the technology part of the equation. Now that we’re armed with this new platform, the real challenge is learning to truly treat it like a new way of doing things, and not just as an evolutionary step for the web or desktop.
The more I think about it, the more I’m convinced this isn’t about exposing some API in a new skin or widget. It’s about taking a look at this new landscape and inventing something truly new. Something that, had we not had this new technology, we would’ve never been able to pull it off in any of the ecosystems we have today.