The Universal Desktop #2

Wednesday, October 10th, 2007

The battle is raging. What battle? The battle of the desktop. And programmers choosing the wrong side are left as casualties - with their hard work bleeding in long forgotten war fields.

What am I talking about? Well see my The Universal Desktop #1 installment.

I just found a new couple of war propaganda letters from the trenches:

• Joel on Software describes "the NewSDK applications" in his excellent blog entry Strategy Letter IV. [September 18, 2007]
• Is XAML the new HTML, Silverlight the new AJAX? Ronnie talks about the future of applications. [October 9, 2007]

What Joel is talking about is of course a step in the direction of the SDK to develop for The Universal Desktop. Uhm, I like it.

Ronnie lists what we really need for the web applications for the future. I've taken the liberty to edit his list - my deletes in strikethrough and comments in italic:

What we really need for the web applications of the future:

• Zero deployment. This is utopia - you always need to deploy something. What you mean is really "easy deployment" as in minimal distribution for developers aka. "the distribute command" and the "select and run" - no waiting time, please - for end-users.
• Cross browser / cross platform. Call it what you want. The browser is the platform or the platform is the browser. They will merge. I tend to like the word platform. And as you, I want my application to run on The Universal Desktop.
• Write once, test once. What do you mean? Are you sure it is enough to test once?
• Take advantage of the client (local user machine) power.
• Scalable vector based. Sure! And please increase screen resolution to print resolution (this is for hardware vendors). Read Magic Ink.
• Sharing as much as possible with desktop technologies. Which are?
• Multi tier, service enabled. Are you sure users/customers want this? As developer doing design and maintenance I understand this.
• Same language, same tools, for all layers. Again this is a developer and maintenance issue. And I tend to agree.

Before you get too excited about The Universal Desktop - as in no more World Wars anymore - you should observe that this is utterly naive thinking. As long as there are people living they will strive for making things better. So if The Universal Desktop were developed - as de facto standard or through standardization through United Nations  (ISO or whatever) - there will be some intelligent person (company) who believes that s/he can do better. And s/he will be right.

On the other hand it is not a bad goal to strive for perfection. That is what we do every single day.

What we need is an SDK/API to the cross platform - The Universal Desktop - that can be used from all programming languages. Which leads to my Carthago delenda est:  Please don't take the programming language as hostage in the battle of the desktop.

Related links (oldest first) - last updated November 2nd, 2007:

• EA wants an open gaming platform - the gaming industry have the same problems. (October 2007)
• Microsoft exec: Desktop application software is not dead (October 2007)
• RE: Desktop application software is not dead, Microsoft exec says  (October 2007)
• Mozilla Prism - running web applications without the browser (October 2007).
• Software's Future: Melding the Web and the Desktop (October 2007)

All installments - the series of blogposts about the Universal Desktop:

• Universal Desktop #1 - June 2007 - The future will not be battleless.
• Universal Desktop #2 - October 2007 - The battle of the desktop.
• Universal Desktop #3 - September 2008 - Google Chrome.
• Universal Desktop #4 - November 2008 - Cloud computing is a trap.
• Universal Desktop #5 - May 2010 - Chrome OS and Native Client
• Universal Desktop #6 - November 2011 - Will HTML5 overtake native apps?