Welcome the hybrids
April 20th, 2007 | Published in Interactivity, Web 2.0 | 11 Comments
Adobe’s recent announcement of the Apollo framework has had me excited for a while. This weekend, I plan to get my hands dirty with the SDK and see if I can build something. The really exciting thing about Apollo is that it’s going to bring Hybrid web applications into the limelight. Already, Adobe has announced a media player based on the platform, and eBay seems to have an Apollo application coming through soon. And yes, it has competition. Firefox 3 is going to have offline features built in, and we already have an open source Apollo competitor in Dekoh, and yes, there’s Slingshot.
Now, it’s not like hybrid applications never existed before. For one, desktop RSS readers and the several widget platforms out there have been with us for some time now. And they have existed in the “Flash” domain too. I remember playing a crazy flash desktop game during my college days that could actually store your scores and update their high scores server with them when you had connectivity. Of course, they used a stupid ASCII value modification algorithm that one could easily beat and register a high score of 465,232,000 points, but that is besides the point here. And I didn’t do it. Really.
What I love about (former) Macromedia’s core team, which I believe is still handling Flash product development, is that they have this beautiful and grand vision of the future of the web. Apart from Dreamweaver and Fireworks, which were the most innovative applications in their domains (Okay, maybe Fireworks loses out to Adobe’s Imageready… but it’s so damn easy!), they had Flash - which started off as an alternative to Java Applets for nifty text animations in the mid 90’s - and Macromedia pushed its envelope with every release. Flash 5 had powerful scripting features, with MX they started building on the RIA catchphrase and adding media capabilities with each release. These guys were out there evangelizing interactive applications and rich media (read “streaming video”) way before Web 2.0 was coined and TechCrunch sprang up.
Media-rich and interactive applications are everywhere today - in fact, one of the key ingredients of the Web 2.0 Universe are rich interfaces to applications. And some of these applications are ones that a lot of us are increasingly finding to be essential to our work. I, for example, can’t seem to get anything done without my Gmail, Google Notebook, Google calendar, and rememberthemilk task list. And the prospect of having all these available to me offline gets me, for the lack of a better expression, drooling. I’m waiting for the guys at scrybe to give me an account to have a look at their offline-ready application, and yes, I hope Google jumps on the bandwagon. How about integrating offline features within GWT?
The obvious question is - which Technology platform is going to take the honors away for such hybrid applications? Is Apollo going to wallop this domain as Flash did with streaming video? Or are websites going to have have offline features built right into their code, with some help from the next-gen browsers? I am not sure of the answers, but we’re sure to have some exciting times ahead.
Bring on the power cuts, Bangalore Electricity Supply Limited, we have hybrid power!
April 21st, 2007 at 11:48 am (#)
I really liked this blog post except that I found this very corny - “Bring on the power cuts, Bangalore Electricity Supply Limited, we have hybrid power!”
You’re the person!
April 21st, 2007 at 12:55 pm (#)
lol okay, point taken. Let’s just remove it and pretend it never happened, shall we?
April 23rd, 2007 at 7:30 pm (#)
Do you mean to say that we will have calender, address book and all the stuff available offline? With the occasional updating when connected? That sounds like another revolution like web2.0. And I don’t exactly get it, are these what you call “hybrid applications”?
Oooh…scyrbe sounds like fun. I want to Digg this too!
April 23rd, 2007 at 8:11 pm (#)
Yes, well it’s more of a part of Web 2.0
Actually, Web 2.0 isn’t a precise entity, it’s more of a cloud of related trends and technologies. One of its clear outcomes is a fundamental shift in what we expect from online applications.
Go back to 2001. Would you have expected to edit your excel sheets online? Or apply Photoshop-esque filters to images right in your browser? Or, have access to terabytes of videos shared by people just like you?
We’ve started using web applications for so many different uses, that some of them just demand desktop integration for better usability. Case in point: online storage services. Sites like omnidrive integrate right into your Windows desktop through their tools. With Apollo and other runtimes available and Firefox adding APIs for offline usage, I guess we’ll see a whole bunch of new, innovative ways in which web applications will integrate into our desktop.
April 23rd, 2007 at 8:18 pm (#)
That would really be cool. The technologies are comin up so quickly that I think it might be gettin tougher for even the geeks to catch up! lol
April 23rd, 2007 at 11:16 pm (#)
The rush to web in the last decade has left the desktop predominantly ignored. There are a few things missing from web apps, despite all advantages…read http://blog.pullur.com/2006/12/07/3-things-missing-with-web-apps/.
One of the goals of these hybrid apps (dektop-web) is to combine the best of both world. http://blog.pullur.com/2007/03/12/combining-the-best-of-desktop-and-web-dekoh/
Products like Dekoh are trying to bring them together.
April 24th, 2007 at 7:38 am (#)
Dekoh is open source, and I love that about it. In its space, I think it’s the only open-source alternative.
I’m quite curious about it’s name though, is it a take on the hindi word ‘dekho’?
April 24th, 2007 at 3:01 pm (#)
personally i think its more connected to “desktop” than “dekho”. OR maybe I am wrong, they werent that good at hindi and spelled “dekho” wrong!
April 24th, 2007 at 3:06 pm (#)
And whats more, the eye in the “O” makes me seriously wonder its connection to “dekho”
April 24th, 2007 at 9:47 pm (#)
Yeah, one could do an entire thesis on Web 2.0 names and what they mean. Or don’t mean.
April 25th, 2007 at 11:00 pm (#)
lol yea