Peeve Farm

g r o t t o 1 1

Peeve Farm
Breeding peeves for show, not just to keep as pets

Brian Tiemann
Silicon Valley-based purveyor of a confusing mixture of Apple punditry and political bile.

btman at grotto11 dot com

Read These Too:

InstaPundit
USS Clueless
James Lileks
Little Green Footballs
As the Apple Turns
Entropicana
Cold Fury
Capitalist Lion
Red Letter Day
Eric S. Raymond
Tal G in Jerusalem
Secular Islam
Aziz Poonawalla
Corsair the Rational Pirate
.clue
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Rosenblog
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Tuesday, March 22, 2005

14:02 - Talkin' bout a revolution
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/APIWar.html

(top)

Chris M. sends this, and says:

Basically, unless I'm misreading him, Joel [Spolsky] is saying that web-based apps are going to be the wave of the future in the Windows world.

It's certainly persuasive in the context of the Windows market. The basic problem is that while Windows PC "rich clients" are better than webware, they're not *that* much better and in some cases, they're worse. The "more interesting user interfaces" usually aren't that much more interesting. And there's no sign that things will get better soon.

But I've just been looking at the new features in Tiger again and I'm wondering. With the new search engine, the way the mail program interfaces with iPhoto and the rest... I think the experience will be SO much better than either Windows or webware that Apple will be a full-fledged "third way" (hey! it's even Clintonian!). One of the great things about Tiger is that Apple is going to satisfy needs we didn't even know we had, until they created software that filled those needs; that's just about the definition of a great product. And at some point these new features combined with sheer speed (very important) will become irresistible for a large group of users, who will switch.

That doesn't mean that Apple is poised to take over the world, but the next few years may be very interesting.

Yeah. To be fair, some of the Tiger features aren't exactly Mac-specific (Longhorn will enable the same kind of integration and real-time query-based data aggregation that Spotlight will, and Google Desktop apparently aims to do the same thing already); but others, such as Dashboard, are appealing precisely because they eschew the Web. Joel may have observed that people are willing to put up with a certain amount of wartage on Web-based apps:

Every developer has a choice to make when they plan a new software application: they can build it for the web or they can build a 'rich client' application that runs on PCs. The basic pros and cons are simple: Web applications are easier to deploy, while rich clients offer faster response time enabling much more interesting user interfaces.... And users don't seem to care about the little UI glitches and slowness of web interfaces. Almost all the normal people I know are perfectly happy with web-based email, for some reason, no matter how much I try to convince them that the rich client is, uh, richer.

So the Web user interface is about 80% there, and even without new web browsers we can probably get 95% there. This is Good Enough for most people and it's certainly good enough for developers, who have voted to develop almost every significant new application as a web application.

...But these people evidently overlap with the ones who would choose a desktop-integrated stock ticker or weather tracker applet, if only said applet was that much better than they'd get by pulling up a browser and going to some website.

I have a hard time knowing what exactly to make of Joel's claims, in any case. Who are the people he knows who prefer web-based e-mail, and why? What rationales do they provide? You don't suppose that it's simply the benefit of portability outweighing the penalties of real-time interactivity and drag-and-drop multimedia and spell-checking and such? My experience is such that people often tend to put up with a second-rate alternative because of one small but glaring flaw in the first-rate solution, rather than going with the first-rate solution and putting up with the flaw. People tend to be surprisingly picky about shortcomings in really good software, and yet not so picky when the software in a general sense isn't as good. It's almost a matter of lowered expectations providing a kind of gray, dull comfort. People I know hate Windows with a passion, but when offered the chance to switch to a Mac they beg off with a single intractable objection: "Too expensive," usually, or "not enough games," or "I once had a really bad experience with Apple software," or "One-button mice give me hives". Some such objections inspire good comebacks, some don't. But they all, I suspect, betray a larger psychological phenomenon than any simple logistical barrier caused by a point flaw. It means raising one's expectations to a level where everything has to be a whole lot better, otherwise it'll make your brain vibrate with an unpleasant distracting hum all day. Then you end up writing endless blog posts about your computing experience all the time. Wouldn't Windows users be more apt to write running diatribes about the foibles of user-interface that they have to put up with daily? Yet it's the Mac guys who do most of that kind of grousing, even though they're supposed to be the ones with the system that ostensibly makes their life easier by becoming invisible. Once again, reality mocks intuition.

We can't predict what trends the computing public will instigate in software design in coming years. It goes against all theory that people would choose ugly and clumsy web-based apps over rich and beautiful clients, and yet here we are. Will Spotlight change people's computing habits such that the Web can no longer compete? Or will people train themselves to reach for a Web browser before delving into their filesystem under all circumstances? Certainly the Web is well separated from multimedia creation apps like the iLife suite or Pages or Keynote, and there doesn't appear to be an obvious way for that to change in the future. Which brings up the question of whether the example of web-based e-mail is a demonstrative example at all, or a misleading outlier case made special by e-mail's very network-descended DNA? We can't very well apply Joel's lessons to iMovie or iTunes or GarageBand; people aren't opting for Web-based versions of these. Not least because they're patently impossible. (Flickr might eat into some of iPhoto's functionality, but its inherent limitations are even more severe than with webmail, even given the superhuman job Flickr's engineers have done in making it behave more like a rich client than a Web app�more so than I've ever seen.)

Whatever the case, it's certainly true that Tiger stands a better chance of pumping more life into the rich-client computing experience than anything out there to date. It probably won't cause a "revolution", and Mac users probably won't notice anything unusually special. But we'll have to keep an eye on what infrastructure develops around Spotlight and Dashboard and the like, what habits we find ourselves adopting, and what annoying technical limitations we eventually come to realize we'll no longer put up with.

UPDATE: Yikes. If Web apps don't take over even the multimedia creation space, it won't be for lack of trying. Neil M. points out Beaterator, which is about as close as one can come to implementing GarageBand in Flash. It's actually pretty good... and just because I can't quite imagine actually using it for anything (some key features, like live recording, just aren't possible, and the lag and control disconnects are just a little too distracting) doesn't mean other people won't.