Should I build it or not?
Web applications are the hot thing these days. You don’t use Word but Writely.com. You use Gmail, not Outlook. You could even do your spreadsheets and Powerpoint on the web instead of in Powerpoint and Excel. I like this trend and plan to take full advantage of it. I allready do with BaseCamp, Tadalists and Plaxo. Everything is moving to the web, just like Microsoft feared it would when you started to compete with Netscape.
So once you realize and accept that this is going to happen you might be able to come up with a few extra tools that you will need once the Web will be your desktop. One thing I came up with is the Graphical User Interface.
Cool huh?
Ok, I might need to explain this a bit more. Considering that the browser will be THE tool for accessing your applications the current way of doing that is still the command line interface:
If you want to start Microsoft Word you double click an icon
If you want to start Writely you type “http://www.writely.com”
So what we need is a Graphical User Interface to access Internet Applications. I don’t know what would be the best way of doing this yet. I could build a Finder/Netvibes like webpage that you could use as a application launcher or I could build a browser button for each Webapplication that you could add to your browser.
I’m going to pend more time thinking about it but I am sure that if we are going to get serious about WebApplications we need a new way to access them.
good thinking boris, let me know when it emerges, i’ll like to take it for a testdrive.
Take a look at Bubbles: http://www.3d3r.com/bubbles/index.php
Oh and my own solution is actually quite simple, see for yourself:
http://content.imagesocket.com.....rks01e.jpg
Just a number of bookmarks in my bookmark-bar in Firefox, without a description, so I only see favicons. I can’t see why I’d need anything better. Flock tried to be more integrated but I just like the original online interface with the app better.