Problems with the Gnome Online Desktop
Okay, this post just crystalized my problems with this whole “Gnome Online Desktop” issue. It’s a difference between Online Apps (webapps) and Network Intergation. The Online Desktop people seem to confuse the two. Here’s an important quote from that post:
From GUADEC I noticed an excellent behavior that consistently happened because of the spotty internet access available during the conference. Stealthily from behind, I could catch the profiled looks of despondence as people clicked on the different wireless connections. Continuously attempting to access “the internet”, but what for? If our desktop and it’s applications are so cool offline, why the need to be… online?
See, computers these days generally need to be connected to the Internet to be useful, but they don’t need Online Applications to be useful. Many of us greatly prefer to have local applications and primarly local data, mainly because web apps suck in terms of UI and usablility, but also because those apps are still useful when I’m not online.
Take email as the cannonical example. The Online Desktop people, as far as I can see, all use gmail. Every one of them. They love it, because it makes them independent of which computer they’re on. However, to use anything email related, they need to be online.
I use evo. It’s not the greatest program in existence. It’s not the fastest program in existence. But it’s UI experience is generally so much better than gmail that it’s not even funny. Also, and this is what’s more important to me, all my email is available even when I’m offline. It’s all there to search, and I use that archive a lot. Privacy issues asside, it’s much more convenient. Of course, to get this convenience, I’m tied to my laptop (which isn’t a problem for me; if I don’t have my laptop, it’s because I don’t want to do computer related things).
Now, this is the main point. Evo is not an offline app, in general. It is a fully networked app, that makes use of the Internet as it’s primary source of information to fulfill it’s primary purpose: to deliver email to me. It is a networked application. It is not an online application. It lives quite happily on my computer. If the web went away tomorrow, email would still work for me. If google turned evil, and decided to charge $100 per day to access gmail, evo would continue to work.
I’m all for a networked desktop. This is a great thing, but it’s not new. f-spot integrates with flikr nicely. Evo integrates with email nicely. Mugshot’s deskbar integrates with mugshot nicely. Google desktop integrates with google nicely. All of these are desktop apps, not web apps. I do not want (and I suspect you’ll find most people don’t want) web apps for everything. They only use them because the alternative is not polished.
So, rather than putting our deskop into firefox (which is a horrible idea…) and turning it into just another web app, make good, solid desktop apps that integrate well with networked services. Your users will thank you for it, and will actually switch to Gnome for a better experience, rather than just staying with firefox on windows.
So, to answer the question from the quote: They were online to be Networked, not to run Online Applications.
