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The Future of the Desktop

April 11, 2009 | 5 Comments

A little over a month ago, I went to the Future of Web Apps Dublin, hosted by Carsonified. As some of you may be aware, I’m building a time tracking application called Lapsus. I decided that my initial market for the software would be freelance Web Developers. It’s maybe ironic then, that Lapsus is a desktop application.

A bit of background to my application as it’s relevant – Lapsus will track your time without timers. It automatically collects information about the active window in the background whilst you work then associates this with a project you’re working on. This time information can then be sent to various web applications for invoicing, reporting or collaboration. You can read a bit more here.

Back to the conference. I really enjoyed myself, met loads of interesting folk and got some great feedback on my application. I’ve done a little Web Development myself, mainly in Ruby on Rails, so I found most of the talks interesting, but they were secondary to talking to people about my idea.

Then I heard Matt Ogle from Last.fm give his talk “How to make Desktop Apps that help your Web Apps succeed” and suddenly I got very excited. He was talking about how, at Last.fm, desktop software was key to their growth. More specifically, he was talking about the scrobbling aspect of their service, where information about the music you play on your desktop is sent to your online profile. I saw the similarities to Lapsus immediately, and my excitement grew and grew. When Matt put up his slide entitled “Digital Attention Data”, I nearly had a heart attack. I had to clamp my hand over my mouth and breathe deeply to avoid seriously embarrassing myself.

I don’t see many applications that are trying to do what I’m trying to do with Lapsus. So it was really nice to see a highly experienced developer from a company I admire talking positively about the approach that I’m taking. For most of the talk, he was saying so much that I’d been thinking for years and it was a huge relief to hear these thoughts aired at last.

I understand why Web Application fever has taken over the world. I remember when I first tried Google Documents, I loved it. No folders! No need to remember to save! Lovely and simple! No messing about! Far too many exclamation marks! We’re all by now well aware of the huge advantages of Web Applications, and I’m a big fan too. I use Google Documents for my software specs, Google Forms and Spreadsheets for my surveys and Basecamp and Harvest for project management and time tracking. But for certain tasks, nothing beats the desktop.

I’m sick and tired of all these premature claims that “The Desktop is Dead”. Hmmm. Dead, eh? What are you using your Web App through again? Oh, yes, that’s right, the desktop.

I’m bored with all the talk of a utopian future where everyone will do everything through a web application. So where’s the web app with the same complexity or speed as Final Cut? I know, I know, it’s just all about bandwidth, right? When we get faster internet connections, we’ll be able to upload and edit Gigabytes of video without a hitch, right? I’m not convinced.

People talk about this like it’s either/or. Like it’s mutually exclusive. The future is the desktop or the web – Gentlemen, take your corners. How about using the right tool for the job? What about making software that takes advantage of both the speed of the desktop and the interconnectedness of the Web? The application I’m using to edit this post, MarsEdit, does a brilliant job of exactly that. I can draft my blog on my desktop using a proper, full screen editor that’s fast, native and a single click away. Then once I’m happy, I push a button and it gets sent to my Wordpress account.

With Lapsus I’m making a desktop application that, I’m hoping, will make peoples lives easier and solve a real pain. I want to make software on the desktop that compliments software on the web, not replaces it. There are so many fantastic web applications out there that have APIs, there’s really no excuses any more for not having a more integrated user experience.

I’ve got no idea what the future holds. I don’t really fancy guessing and I’m not really that interested in making predictions that will make me look a bit silly ten years from now.

I want to focus on how I can develop software, right now, whether on the Web or the Desktop, that makes our lives easier and more productive.

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Comments

5 Responses to “The Future of the Desktop”

  1. Ian Turner on May 3rd, 2009 5:40 am

    I spent a large chunk of last year working in South Africa, a country that by African standards is very modern. Whilst I was down there there were some huge problems with the power supply, with rolling blackouts most days. The knock on effect to internet connections was huge, because even when the power came back on, the servers had to be re-booted before we could connect to the internet. The results was that for about half the working day we had no internet connection.
    I can see many of the benefits of web based applications, but for huge groups of people in the world today it can not be the right solution because the infrastructure is just not reliable or cheap enough. These are the people who will be buying many of the new computers around the world in the future. Assumptions about software as a service being the only solution in the future really needs to consider the current infrastructure around the world.

  2. John on May 4th, 2009 2:50 pm

    Ian

    Thanks for your comments. You make some really good points here. The counter argument that could be made is: “Things will get better and eventually everyone will have cheap, great internet access.”

    These kind of arguments seem to assume that somehow the advancement of technology to a certain minimum standard everywhere is inevitable. I’d argue that although things will get better over time (obviously), certain areas of the world will always be in front of or behind the technology curve.

    When making bold claims about the future, we need to remember that a massive chunk of the world’s population still doesn’t even have access to a computer.

  3. reboltutorial on August 31st, 2009 5:48 pm

    Yes, I’m also sure the mix of Web and Desktop is a Winner, that’s what I’m doing with my Rebtweeter Project:

    http://reboltutorial.com/blog/rebtweeter-firstproject-vision-draft/

  4. John on August 31st, 2009 6:03 pm

    Thanks Rebtweeter. I just checked out your project and it looks interesting. I also am not quite sold on any one of the myriad Twitter clients available – for instance, why must I remember the username of anyone before tweeting? Or click on a small Reply icon? Surely there’s room for autocomplete here? Yet noone’s done that yet…

    Anyway, thanks for commenting. I’ll follow your project with interest.

  5. reboltutorial on September 1st, 2009 6:08 am

    Through Extensibility, you’ll be able to do the twitter client of your dream ;)

    Thanks for the interesting slide, have bookmarked it on Dzone
    http://www.dzone.com/links/how_to_build_desktop_apps_that_help_your_web_app.html

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