Web / Native Apps and their future
For the past few years i’ve been increasingly annoyed with state of native apps in OSX (ditto for any other desktop OS), and pleased with the state of web apps. I’m talking launch speed and accessibility.
4 years ago already, it was faster to open a browser tab with Google Spreadsheets rather MS Excel or Apple Numbers. It is faster to spell check via Google Search rather than with OSX’s dictionary. It’s faster to open any IM or TODO app in a tab, rather than in native app.
…ditto for pretty much any other daily-usage mid-sophistication app.
Hence a few questions.
What’s wrong with OS environments, SDKs, or whatever that makes a whole range of apps significantly slower to load (and sometimes, execute) on desktop OS?
Let’s assume this question is trivial to many — and I’m sure there are plenty of software engineers with great experience in native & web apps. I dont know the exact answer, but let’s assume there is less investment going into OS development, or there is fundamental roadblocks, or any other reason — why major consumers operating systems and apps are so far away from embracing Internet?
Here i’m talking performance, resources and accessibility.
- In OSX, why is there a Finder App and Safari? Why not merge them into one app?
- There should be no concept of “files on my computer” vs “files on the internet”; there should be no concept of “installed app” vs “not installed app”. There should be only private (and shared) vs public resources. There should be “apps” — some we use frequently, some less so, some we have not used yet.
- Why there is still a concept of “HDD space on my computer”? Whatever types of memory you have on your physical devices — should be just cache. Everything in the cloud by default, and you chose what to force-leave on your device + usage-based algorithm to cache frequently used apps & resources on your device. I wrote a short article on this before.
- Why does not Photoshop become faster on my MacBook Air, when I’m online? Can’t it distribute a computation between my laptop CPU and power of the nearest data center?
Infrastructure for most of these things are mostly in place in all urban cities. Certainly there are many challenges to achieve this immersive experience for platforms / resources / apps. The only project doing somewhat similar is Chromebook. Why this direction is still not widely happening? Is this not the future? What is then?
I’d love to hear your thoughts. Reply to: @ramanshalupau