Re: Newbie FAQ #2: Where's the GUI?

Jonathan Gardner wrote:
But more importantly, webapps are terribly restrictive. You can only
do certain things, and you can't do those things well. Some of the
ideas that webapps have forced onto us are good---throwbacks to the
days of thin clients. But as an author of many webapps, I can't tell
you how many times I have run into the limitations of the webapps--
even with AJAX or what-have-you. They simply are not enough to get the
job done. Some things, yes. But never everything, and I'm always
sacrificing the user experience to fit the model of web app
programming. This is not right. It's not the future of software.
....
In short, I don't buy that we should all be writing web apps. Let's
write real apps.

Thanks for this great post. I could not agree more. Since Ken* joined the web app band wagon, I have been afraid I'd be the only one who believed in good old desktop apps.

Every time I log on to GMail (which a lot of people call fast) I get annoyed by how slow it is -- compared to my Opera 9.50. Finally we live in an age where new software runs nice and fast on my four-year-old laptop ... and then I should sacrifice all that for tcp/ip latencies?

I will go on working with cells-gtk3 and enjoy the seamless integration of cairo (yep, finally it's done.)** and soon OpenGL. What was the equivalent of that in ajax land again?

HTH,
Peter


----
* Hell Ken, you wrote cello. *All* the bells and whistles. I still can't believe you're into web apps now ...

** Available from me upon request. I will publish it on my blog next week, hopefully.
.