Dev::Blog

I finally made some time to watch the Evening at Adler Mac OS X developer panel discussion, and coincidentally it was on the same day that I finished listening to the Carson Workshops Future of Web Apps panel. Panels. Lots of panels. So. Many. Panels.

Anyway, interesting thoughts from both sides, but two struck me:

“Desktop apps are hard to make”

This was, not surprisingly, from the web guys (Carson). I’ve only been a “professional” web developer for a year and a half or so, with 9 years of desktop/hybrid app development to fall back on, so my perspective is a bit skewed. Desktop apps are easy. Fine, good desktop apps are a bit more work, but there are enough widgets out there that a passable 1.0 app shouldn’t be that hard to deal with, at least if you’re someone like me - someone who, as my boss said, has the design sense of a hamster.

“AJAX will replace a class of apps, but desktop apps will thrive”

That’s from the desktop folks (Adler), although it was echoed in some other Carson talks (Flickr’s desktop photo importer comes to mind). Time will tell if that’s the next “640K is enough for everyone” line. In any case, there’s obviously a big market for desktop applications - I only subscribe to one web service (which is in fact debatable, since it’s Yahoo Music Unlimited, which is web-served, but requires a desktop client), but I seem to buy new software at a rate of a program every other month.

So why aren’t desktop apps getting any press in the age of Web 2.0? There are a ton of design blogs out there, and it’s obviously easier to link to a site and let the user experience exactly what you’re talking about, but I feel like I should see more press on desktop stuff.

Of course, this is likely biased by what I read - to get up to speed on web work, I had to skew my reading a lot. Maybe it’s time to go the other way - any recommendations?

I think the main thing that’s on my mind today is why I don’t develop more desktop stuff, even if it’s just for my use. One of the nice things about the web is the near-instant gratification, which is increasing with new stuff like Rails. I started web development as a hobby when I worked on desktop stuff. With my new responsibilities, maybe it’s time to flip that around.