[Sigia-l] Persistence

[Olly Wright]

On TuesdayFeb 13, at 7:45 AM, Ziya Oz wrote:

> Firefox 3 will offer support for
> off-line applications

Maybe I'm being dense, but I don't see the need. Perhaps it's just  
nostalgia? The need to feel some sense of possession of our app and  
our data on our machine?

Flat rate data billing for mobile is just around the corner. At that  
(imminent) moment, there is no need for offline applications, because  
we'll never need to be offline.

I can certainly see some benefits of persistence to do with  
performance (not downloading the whole app each time, data caching  
etc), but I think it's a bit of a red herring to be focussing on the  
'also works offline' aspect. Better to improve the problems with web  
apps as web apps, rather than try to make them offline apps.

I do sometimes wonder if we're chasing the impossible by trying to  
make cross-platform apps that work well on multiple platforms. The  
emphasis for a given platform (osx, windows, symbian, etc) should be  
on a coherent user experience across multiple tasks on that given  
platform. Meaning that we should not aim for a coherent experience  
for our app on multiple platforms, but rather that our app plays by  
the rules on the platform it is being used on. For example, I want my  
microsoft apps to feel like OS X apps when I use my macbook, not  
windows apps (I wont start ranting about Windows CE / mobile /  
whatever it's called this week). This is only going to get more and  
more apparent as more and more internet devices appear, each with  
different UXs, form factors and input methods.

This means things like RSS, and Watson ( http://www.karelia.com/ 
watson/ ) are the way to go. Let the apps be device-centric and the  
web-components be content-centric (rather than presentation /  
interaction centric). Opera, Google and a few others seem to be  
planning for this possibility. And it was interesting to hear Eric  
Schmidt hint at this in his appearance at the iPhone Keynote. I  
wonder if it will play out this way.

Olly Wright