I’ve always been a fan of Adobe Air and all of the wonderful desktop applications that have been developed on that platform. Some of my favorites have been the twitter clients Twhirl and Tweetdeck. However, I’ve slowly become disillusioned by the whole concept of web services relying so much on desktop apps. It’s become more annoying as increasing scores of services have begun to release desktop apps for what really needs to remain where it is…in the cloud!
Letting the (Adobe) Air out of the Bubble
All this has lead me to make a decision to stop this desktop app for web services madness! With the exception of Tweetdeck, I will no longer download, install or update anymore Adobe Air applications! There, I said it. I will also do my best to replace TweetDeck once someone comes up with a better mousetrap for Twitter in the browser. The best one I’ve seen is Tweetree which Twitter should buy already!
Look, the future of the web needs to remain in the cloud, not on a local desktop. Some will argue “but what about working offline?” I reply “What about it?” How often are we really offline and not connected? On a plane? When you’re at your Aunt Tilley’s house in the middle of nowhere? Most of us have aircards and ways to connect and quite frankly the world will not end if you can’t work offline for whatever reason. Besides that, I’m all for things like Google Gears and technology that allows offline mode and online synchronization.
The thing that irks me is the whole reliance on downloading installing and updating multiple products on multiple systems. For example, let’s say you have three systems you use on a regular basis. A Home desktop, a work desktop and a laptop. Well, if you use several services that rely on an Adobe Air desktop application then that means you not only have to install Adobe air three times but also each of those apps and keep them all updated. To make matters worse, if you do any kind of tweaking or customization such as creating groups on TweetDeck, then you need to do it all over again on each computer! Yes, there are some convoluted ways you can backup the config files and copy them from here to there but that’s a pain in the neck. Desktop apps would be better served if they allowed us to store our settings in the cloud to sync with every installation we have but they don’t do that. Web apps do!
Google does a great job explaining why web apps make more sense than desktop apps and even mobile apps such as for the iPhone. I agree with their philosophy here and enjoy using their Google Tasks service not only in my browser but also on my iPhone because I never have to download or install or update anything. Best of all, it looks and feels and tastes like a standalone iPhone app! Brilliant. I wish others would follow their lead and just say no to Adobe Air. It’s time to suffocate this annoying trend once and for all.
On that note, here’s a video for NO AIR from Jordan Sparks