On Tue, 2005-02-08 at 10:32 -0500, Luis Villa wrote: > With maps.google.com, gmail, etc. google is proving that the best web > apps in the world are cross platform and don't need activeX. My gut > feeling is that this is relevant to us and we should weave it into our > talking point someho
Google maps (gmaps?), gmail, flickr, and others are proving that for certain types of applications the desktop is irrelevant - you can successfully create web apps that are as good or better than their thick client counterparts. Plus if you add in the increasing number of web API's; Google, Amazon, Ebay, flickr, del.icio.us, technorati, .... Every desktop app needs this gut check 'Am I still relevant in this new thin client world? How can I provide a superior or complementary function?' To me gmail et al are starting to prove Tim O'Reilly and David Stutz right - innovation is about software above the level of one device. Gnome apps should do OK in this comparison, due to the Just Works philosophy however there is still a way to go - for example once you get an invite gmail is trivial to setup and there is no maintenance. Evolution on the other hand is difficult to setup (no more than anything else but still annoying from an end user pov) - you need know things like IMAP servers, SSL, authentication types, SMTP, blah, blah, blah. The other side is to provide more seamless integration with the web apps and services, a la iTMS or the Flickr plugin in iPhoto - I like your idea of a rhythmbox CC plugin to create a iTMS type experience. F-Spot (thought not strictly a gnome app) works with Gallery, but this highlights an issue - although it would be desirable to link into all these web services most (all?) are commercial, although free as in beer to the user, should we be connecting Free software to what might be called non-Free services? I mean in terms of the stock Gnome packages - distros and others could provide 3rd party plugins for these things of course. But wouldn't it be great if we could link together the best Free desktop apps (i.e. Gnome stuff) with the best Free and Open Source web apps - to give a small example, wouldn't it be great to sync Evo vfolders to some web based email app (e.g. IMP from www.horde.org), or in more general terms something like iSync, or an offline RSS reader that shares subs with a Planet or other online aggregator. Podcasting provides the newest area of multi (multi) device application - think of the chain of integrated apps from recording -> mixing / production -> weblog/RSS -> download / aggregator -> media app -> portable media device. Anyway this is OT I think so I end here, Paul > Luis -- Paul Cooper | Tel: 0121 634 1620 Assistant Director | Fax: 0121 634 1630 OpenAdvantage | http://www.openadvantage.org -- marketing-list mailing list marketing-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/marketing-list
