Offline is a Small Part of the Apollo Value

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I’m going through feeds and I came across another good Web Worker Daily post by Anne Zelenka that asked do you crave offline web applications. She goes through the intro and then lists off some technologies that are looking to bring web applications offline including Apollo, Zimbra, Firefox 3, and Google Gears. You can throw Dekoh in to that group as well. People seem obsessed with the idea of bringing web applications offline, so I want to make it very clear what I think the biggest value of Apollo will is:

Desktop applications that can be built with web technologies.

I don’t think this is about offline web applications at all, it’s about desktop applications. People expect desktop applications to always be available, which some people misconstrue to be “offline”. But that’s not the only thing. I’m planning a post on this for ZDNet later this week, but I really want to start talking about why I think Apollo is significant. A huge part of that is being able to create desktop applications, and all of the features that implies, with web technologies we all know.

So think about all the desktop applications you use today. Think about what you like about them and what you dislike about them (on both Mac and Windows). Think about how much more innovative the web has been than the desktop. Then think of being able to take the good things you like about your desktop applications and the creativity/innovation of the web. Now combine them and think of your own web development skills. That’s why I’m excited about Apollo.

[tags]Apollo, Firefox 3, Dekoh, Google Gears, Offline, Zimbra[/tags]

Related posts:

  1. Apollo Makes Firefox 3′s Offline Feature Irrelevant
  2. All "Offline Desktop" Solutions are not Created Equal
  3. Steer the Rich Desktop Application Conversation Away from "Offline"
  4. Why I think Firefox 3′s Offline Feature is a Bad Idea
  5. Offline Cache Support Added to the Firefox Code
  • http://driveactivated.com Sam

    Spot on Ryan. There’s been way too much has been focused on the offline and ‘breaking out of the browser chrome’ aspects of Apollo. The most appealing bit of Apollo to me is that finally web apps become first-class citizens on my desktop, none of the sandboxed behaviour that although needed for browser security, is very limiting.

    Being a first-class citizen, I can access files on the desktop, make net requests to any site I want, among other things. One of the best side-effects is that it opens the doors to massive integration potential between apps. After all, your OS is the ultimate broker of your data, so now that web apps can talk directly to it, it makes it much easier to get data from one web app talking to another, without the annoying browser single-file downloading/uploading process. The desktop file formats we already use are pretty much standardized in reality anyway and most web apps can export and import between them, so it’s the connection between apps that’s missing.

    I’m not sure how Apollo’s going, but a great example would be if I could drag multiple pictures from the flickr Apollo app or my digital camera’s SD card, directly into the Buzzword Apollo app and have it work as if I just dragged a bunch of pics from a folder into Microsoft Word.

    This is stuff that people won’t realise is great until they actually use it and can’t go back to working the way they do now, which is why I suppose, there’s so much confusion and misinformation out there about Apollo – people are only understanding the concepts that they’re familiar with, not the others and how they fit into the big picture.

  • http://phenotypical.com Jason

    Yeah I was glad to hear someone play down these technologies’ angle on bringing computing off-line. I’ve wondered what all the hype was about. When are any of us off-line anymore? I’m sure I don’t appreciate that access may not be so easy to find elsewhere in the country. But in our larger metropolitan areas, if you want a connection, it’s hard not to be able to find it somewhere.

  • http://termiteinsects.com/ Earwig

    Excellent example of such desktop application with web technologies uses is Google Earth. Am I right?

  • http://blog.kevinhoyt.org Kevin Hoyt

    To your point, Ryan,

    I’ve posted a series of “Apollo Beta Sneaks” this past week, as has Danny Dura and Mike Chambers. Not one involved an offline example. System icons, custom chrome and native windowing, clipboard and native drag-and-drop and sound. We didn’t even touch file extensions, native menus, and others (more sneaks for you). Offline is just a part of what’s enabled by Apollo. Even further, how offline is Finetune?

    To Sam’s idea,

    The Apollo native drag-and-drop feature is all about this type of functionality. To extend your thought however, how about from an Apollo-based Flickr app into Word? How about “cutting” a picture from Word and “pasting” into Buzzword?

    Apollo applications, as desktop applications, should have first-class desktop functionality. There’s no need to differentiate. At the end of the day, the fact that an application is running on Apollo should actually be transparent to the user. How cool is that?

    Regards,
    Kevin

  • http://blog.digitalbackcountry.com Ryan Stewart

    Sam, I loved this quote:

    Being a first-class citizen, I can access files on the desktop, make net requests to any site I want, among other things. One of the best side-effects is that it opens the doors to massive integration potential between apps. After all, your OS is the ultimate broker of your data, so now that web apps can talk directly to it, it makes it much easier to get data from one web app talking to another, without the annoying browser single-file downloading/uploading process. The desktop file formats we already use are pretty much standardized in reality anyway and most web apps can export and import between them, so it’s the connection between apps that’s missing.

    I haven’t talked enough about the *good* security implications of Apollo and not having to worry about a cross-domain.xml file. That’s a powerful feature for developers.

    Kevin, yup, Finetune is one of my favorite examples. And their new version is going to rule.

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  • http://blogs.zdnet.com/Orchant Marc Orchant

    Thanks for injecting a little reality into the conversation Ryan. Your point is well taken and a shift away from online-offline as the sole determinant of the value of RIAs is long overdue. As you point out, the big win is a fundamental change in the way we think about application construction, integration, and data portability.

    Google Gears notwithstanding, I see what Adobe is doing with AIR as well as approaches like the way Curl leverages the power of the client PC and the currency of data in the cloud to create a different paradigm for accessing, manipulating, and presenting visualizations of data to be the real reason for excitement.

    It’s not that online/offline isn’t important for many people – it obviously is. It’s simply not the most important aspect of the emergent RIA space.