There’s a really good article in BusinessWeek about how the lowly desktop is attempting a Coup d’état on the browser. It cites examples like eBay’s San Dimas project and even Google Gears as evidence that the desktop is making a resurgence. It also makes some great points about why people are turning to the desktop in lieu of the browser’s limitations.

Pam Deziel, from Adobe had a good quote about how the desktop wasn’t really ever dead, “I don’t think the desktop was ever quite as moribund as people said” was her explanation. I think that’s very true and I think part of that comes down to developers. It’s relatively easy to build a web application but much harder to build a desktop application. I think people want to build desktop applications but a majority of the developers out there come from the web If you can give those developers the capabilities that the desktop provides but still keep the ease of web development, I think a lot of people will find that compelling. The excitement around Google Gears and Adobe AIR seems to reinforce that.

Having a presence on the desktop can be huge for your product. I’ll leave you with a quote from Martin Kay, the CEO of Finetune: “People tend to forget about Web sites.”. Indeed.

[Via Daniel Dura]

I think a lot of people have seen this article by Tim Anderson (and Rey’s thoughts on Ajaxian) but I wanted to throw my two cents in. Tim said he was at a couple days worth of briefings about our developer products and had a bunch of takeaways with Adobe AIR. I tend to agree with 99% of what Tim said (on both sides) and I think anyone considering AIR should read the post. There were a couple of points, both cons, that I want to talk about:

7. Schizophrenic development model. AIR supports either Flex development, or HTML applications which run in WebKit. The ugly side of this flexibility is that there are two SDKs, even two JavaScript virtual machines with different capabilities and characteristics. While it is nice to have a way to render HTML, I am not convinced that the web application model is worth it, given the complications it causes. After all, web applications run perfectly well in the browser.

I thought this was really interesting and it was something I hadn’t given much thought before today. I’ve always seen the Flash/HTML flexibility as a good thing and I think the script bridging between the two is one of the most compelling features about AIR. That said, as you really dig into AIR and start pushing it to the boundaries, I can see how dealing with two virtual machines and rendering HTML inside of Flash starts to become complex. I think web developers are a creative bunch, which is what makes AIR so interesting for me. The web application model is very, very different from the traditional desktop application model. Bringing those two worlds together is kind of like mixing oil and water. I’m hoping that the model we’ve chosen is flexible enough for developers to hack around and find interesting solutions to the problems they encounter. I think that’s the spirit of the web and hopefully the spirit of AIR (now that sounds weird).

The second point deals with security:

8. Security concerns. AIR is close to the worst of both worlds, being tightly sandboxed from a developer perspective, but not particularly safe from the user’s perspective. Adobe says it will allow unsigned applications, which I think is a mistake.* AIR has the same access to the file system as the user, which in the case of users running on Windows XP with full admin rights is very extensive. Example bad scenarios would include downloading malware and placing it your startup folder, or searching your file system for bank details and uploading them to some internet location. That said, Adobe says there will be more security features, so conclusions are premature.

Security is a huge issue for us. As someone who sees it from the inside I can promise you that we’re doing a lot of thinking/discussing/inquiring about the best way to handle security in AIR. We’ve talked to people like Rey inside of the Ajax community and a ton of other people to get their feedback. I think that when AIR is released we’ll have addressed most of the security issues while still giving programmers the ability to create the applications they want. Always keep in mind (as both a user and developer) that these are real desktop applications and can act accordingly.

[tags]Adobe AIR[/tags]

Faizan Buzdar pinged me over IM today and told me that his company, Scrybe, got an article in the New York Times. Adobe recently invested in Scrybe and after talking to Faizan about it, I’m enthusiastic about where the company is going and the technology they’ve got. Apparently so is the New York Times. The article does a bit of an overview about the future of Organization Software but the focus of the article is Scrybe and the things that separate it from other tools on the web.

Part of the reason that Scrybe got so much buzz was because it showed off a better user experience when it came to organizing your information. They used Flash, but the technology wasn’t the defining characteristic. They pushed the user experience boundaries and came out ahead. I think that’s what happens when you give people a creative medium with which to build applications. Hopefully we see much more of it.

[tags]Scrybe, New York Times[/tags]

I’m supposed to be on vacation, but before we left I wanted to make a quick note about how well the Vancouver Flex Camp turned out. Duane and the team at Massive Events did a great job and I was really impressed with the level of interest in Flex and AIR. The group was a huge mix of experience levels. Some people had been using Flex quite a bit while others hadn’t ever tried it. I think everyone got a bit out of the event and the feedback so far has been good.

The Vancouver tech scene is much more active than I thought. There are a ton of cool things going up there and judging by the diversity of the crowd and the questions that they asked, I think there’s a lot of room for getting Flex/AIR adoption. Everyone that attended was interested in having another one in the Spring, so hopefully we get to do that.

Thanks to everyone who came and all of the speakers. I’m off to Helm Creek.