July 2nd, 2008
WordPress, Gears, and the converging browser/desktop
I had a good conversation today about the browser/desktop hybrid and where the converging is going to happen. Will it be more on the desktop side or will it be more on the browser side? I think we’ve seen the original browser-based development model win out as more and more people are learning HTML and JavaScript to build applications. But what about how the actual applications behave? Well today on the WordPress blog they explained to their users how they’re converging - by using Gears.
They’re using Gears to enable their “Turbo” link. What the Turbo link does is stores some data from the admin console - things like the images and HTML data - on the local machine so it’s accessible right off the hard drive instead of having to download it over and over again. It’s a small difference but it can have a big impact on the end user experience by speeding things up and providing more instant feedback. WordPress is basically making part of the internet faster by storing it on a local machine.
I think blogging is one of the more interesting examples of the browser/desktop melding. There are still a ton of desktop-based blog editors out there. People use them for all kinds of reasons including it’s easier to edit posts, they can craft posts offline, and it’s easier to drag and drop files/images/videos onto a desktop application. But I’d imagine that most people use the web-based blogging admin interface and find it perfectly adequate (I do). So can browsers evolve enough to remove the “market” for desktop blogging software or will there always be something better about using a full-fledged desktop client for some people?
