The Anomaly in WebOS Wednesday, Dec 27 2006

Was browsing through digg when I came across this, very well written article, WebOS roundup. I have been thinking a lot about web based OSes and when I look at these, it seems that in this whole web 2.0 hype we are starting to fly so high that we can’t really see why we lifted off in the first place. Let’s start from the begining.

First of all answer this question :- Why do most people choose an online web based email client like gmail or yahoomail over their desktop counterparts?

Yup. Portability. You can go to any computer, and more necessarily any operating system and you have the same interface. Everywhere. Now that’s the very reason web2.0 has had any success at all. Let’s be honest here. No web based software can quite match the massive amount of functionality offered by their desktop counterparts. Their sole redeeming feature is their portability.

After the success of so many web based software, the next logical step seems to be the development of web based Operating Sytems that would integrate these varied services into a unified interface. So we look at the endavours towards the purpose and voila! What do we have?

The OSes that I’ve seen all seem to refuse to understand the basic concept of web based services. Every OS has its own, overlapping set of features : its own rss reader, its own calendar, own notemaker…hell it’s never going to work no matter how intuitive and beautiful you make your interface!

I have but one question : Why would I not logon to gmail but go to your WebOS and use a low grade mail client? Why would I not use Yahoo! calendar and use yours? Why would I not use del.icio.us and your bookmarking service?

Give me one good reason and I’ll shut up.

I’m sure you’re being told by your business consultants and magazines that it’s all about marketing and PR. Trust me, it’s much more fundamental than that. You want widespread usage, leverage on the existing services. Give me gmail in all its benign simplcity, del.icio.us in all its innovativeness right here : on your OS and you can punch me in the head if you don’t get everybody on your system even before you know it.

All right. I understand it’s not that simple. The guys at google and yahoo! don’t want us to go to your Web OS instead of going to them. But if you think you’re worth your salt, make them come to you. When Linux came, software vendors didn’t give a damn. But when they saw us flocking around it, they couldn’t stop telling us : And yeah, we support Linux too!

If you can pull off the coup, you’ll have my money. If you think it isn’t worth it, you can bask in the prestine glory of your shiny interface, but you’ll have to excuse me; I need to go and check my gmail.

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An apology for Flash Wednesday, Dec 27 2006

These days I’m usually out of touch of the whole blogosphere discussions, primarily because I’ve been researching on my final year project, apart from enjoying the final months of the college life ; but that’s beside point.

It recently came to my notice that Adobe is planning to release a new cross OS platform, Apollo in 2007. I did a bit of reading and from the looks, I can’t say I really get what they’re trying to sell.

In its barest essentials, its seems like a rendering engine that would be able to render HTML, Actioscript and the rest of them seemlessly. Now the existing browsers do the job quite well enough I believe, and It’s quite hard to see the point, till you realise that Flash has actually failed to be a part of the whole World Wide Web Architecture.

Now, don’t get me wrong over here. I don’t have a personal enimety with Flash. In fact I love it’s ability to create sophisticated interactions. It is pretty good for those cool demos and amazing games but as much as the guys at former Macromedia or the Adobe would like to believe : it was never the driving force of the internet.

The incongruency of Flash and the WWW cannot be expressed better than in the following extract from Tim-Berners Lee’s(the inventor of the world wide web) discussion on the design of Web :

“…In choosing computer languages, there are classes of program which range from the plainly descriptive (such as Dublin Core metadata, or the content of most databases, or HTML) though logical languages of limited power … to those which are unashamedly procedural (Java, C).

The choice of language is a common design choice. The low power end of the scale is typically simpler to design, implement and use, but the high power end of the scale has all the attraction…

… Nowadays we have to appreciate the reasons for picking not the most powerful solution but the least powerful. The reason for this is that the less powerful the language, the more you can do with the data stored in that language. If you write it in a simple declarative from, anyone can write a program to analyze it in many ways… At the other end of the scale is the weather information portrayed by the cunning Java applet. While this might allow a very cool user interface, it cannot be analyzed at all. The search engine finding the page will have no idea of what the data is or what it is about. This the only way to find out what a Java applet means is to set it running in front of a person…”(full page here)

or for a different perspective, consider this by Jakob Nielson, one of the gurus of web usability :

“…Although multimedia has its role on the Web, current Flash technology tends to discourage usability for three reasons: it makes bad design more likely, it breaks with the Web’s fundamental interaction style, and it consumes resources that would be better spent enhancing a site’s core value.

About 99% of the time, the presence of Flash on a website constitutes a usability disease. Although there are rare occurrences of good Flash design (it even adds value on occasion), the use of Flash typically lowers usability. In most cases, we would be better off if these multimedia objects were removed…” (full article here)

You get the picture. The reason for the death of Java, or the failure of Flash is decievingly simple : they both seem to be running in the opposite direction of the very basic principles of the WWW. May be Adobe believes that they are nearing towards correcting the fundamental flaw in these technologies ; but from where I can see, they couldn’t be farther.

Now with this Apollo project, Adobe is once again showing that it thinks it can drive the next revolution in computing by introducing another well-hidden standard such as Java or Flash. They have been pretty clever with this, no doubt because of the years of experiences with Flash and Acrobat : the Apollo enviroment is backward compatible with all the major publishing standtards as well as with all the current browsers and they do deserve credit for this. But as far as the next big thing on the web is considered, I don’t think I’ll be too harsh when I say it falls too short.

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