On Sep 6, 2008, at 9:33 PM, Andrei Herasimchuk wrote:
That's where the breakdown occurs for me. Web apps currently work in
an SDI mode, and a fairly limited SDI mode at that. You can't take
over the keyboard interaction, you can't make floating palettes or
slave windows that are aware of each other to pass data via a common
pipe, and you can't do other things like use OS alerts, OS dialogs,
etc. And web apps in that SDI model have to worry abut the address
bar, the back button, and other "browsing" interactions resident
inside a web browser that have nothing to do with more tool oriented
application interactions.
Yah, yah, yah.
However...
First: Gears could do those things and does some of them already. One
of the things from the interview I found interesting was that Chrome
is optimized for Gears, but Gears is also a middle-ware package for
the other browsers. I think that's a fascinating strategy to make
things work.
Second: I'm betting that somewhere between 65% and 80% of the
applications that are built today *could* operate in an SDI model.
Granted, it's nice to have floating windows, but apps with those types
of interaction modalities are fairly advanced. UPS, for example,
doesn't need that kind of interaction model for their WorldShip app,
which is sophisticated in functionality, but straight forward in terms
of the demand on UI modalities. Even something as sophisticated as
Salesforce can get away with an SDI model for 90% of what people try
to do with it. (And Flash/Flex/AIR can provide the rest.)
Not everyone builds a sophisticated tool for manipulating artwork.
Many just build tools for manipulating customer data.
But there is a big difference between Chrome being Browser #4 and
Chrome being a new application platform that happens to use
OpenSource web technologies but plans on making a clean break from
being a browser. As I'm sure you might have guessed... I wish they'd
do the latter.
There's a third possibility, which is what I heard in the interview:
Chrome is a stimulus for a competitive response by the other big
browser producers. It came out that Sergei Brin/Google would consider
Chrome a success if MS IE9 adopted the core components from the Chrome
open source set.
I think that's really where I think this is heading and why I'm
excited about it.
Jared
Jared M. Spool
User Interface Engineering
510 Turnpike St., Suite 102, North Andover, MA 01845
e: [EMAIL PROTECTED] p: +1 978 327 5561
http://uie.com Blog: http://uie.com/brainsparks
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