Thursday, 28 February 2008

A new era: Rich Internet comes to your desktop!

A lot of people will say it has been there for years/awhile, but I think that with the launch of Adobe AIR 1.0 in combination with Flex 3 and products like Mozilla's XULRunner, Rich Internet is coming to your desktop.

In fact, that is a funny thing! Over the last few years desktop applications have moved to the internet, loosing richness but gaining reach. The next move was gaining richness with the introduction of Rich Internet Applications.

But now!

By bringing Rich Internet to the desktop, we complete the circle and combine all those things. It adds the availability of local data to the whole thing. Things like this have been there for a bit for a time already, but now these big players like Adobe and Mozilla truly believe in the future of bringing web applications to your desktop, a new era has truly started. And not forget Google Gears.

Read the article by Technology Review on Adobe's Kevin Lynch about Offline Web Applications. Check the O'Reilly blog about Mozilla, part 1 and part 2.

The future's so bright, I gotta wear shades...

P.S. I'm very curious who will extend the picture above to support these new technologies.

2 comments:

Unknown said...
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Unknown said...

Yes, a very bright future indeed! I saw a very inspiring AIR application at Adobe last week: A rich company directory (you know, employee's names, phone numbers, e-mail address, room number) application. Besides a person's data, it can show you a person's position in the organization chart and also the layout and location of that person's office.