We spend so much time looking at web-applications these days that we tend to ignore desktop apps. Still, every once in a while there’s room for pleasant surprises, and today was one of those days with the release of CSS Edit 2.5 (by Macrabbit) and Coda (by the guys at Panic).

I guess it is a little weird to be singing praises to desktop applications when it is a known fact that access-anywhere is the killer feature, but even with Ajax or RIA environments like Flex, there’s (at this point) no way to get the same kind of “gratification” from web-apps. The web still doesn’t manage to compete with the responsiveness and the constant look and feel of a great desktop application. This is unfortunate, and although changing at a rapid pace, its just not there yet.

Developing for the web and developing for the desktop are two very different concepts (although Adobe’s Apollo and Joyent’s Slingshot are blurring the lines), but there’s a lot to learn from the world of the desktop.

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You can review mapping interfaces for as long as you want, but only when you actually need them do you get a feel for how great (or how crappy) they are. Today, Yahoo! Maps got my attention with their new mapping interface (which, I’ll admit, I hadn’t paid much attention to before).

First off, it is obvious that they get “flow”. Yahoo! Maps looks and acts like a RIA. It doesn’t take your input, show you results and look “static”. It allows you to interact with your routes, add nodes or traffic information dynamically and once you’ve got the perfect route or map, it gives you immediate print access.

The reason it stands out from both their old interface and the current offerings from Google and Microsoft is because it looks and acts both simple and effective. It doesn’t get in your way, it doesn’t make you “guess” what to do. When you try it out, you know what you’ll get. It feels like a desktop application.

This feeling isn’t easy to obtain with web-apps. You are operating in a clunky piece of software (the browser), using technologies that browsers often interpret in different ways. But these days, there’s a lot you can do to improve the feel of your application. Technologies like Ajax, Flex or Apollo let you get desktop-like experiences. That, and meticulously planned interaction with the page. Personally, I want to see more applications like the new Yahoo! Maps interface.

Jakob Nielsen has gotten us used to his conservative style when addressing topics such as usability or portal design. Two days ago, he published a new Alertbox on the 10 best intranets of 2007, and took the opportunity to do his typical web 2.0-bash. This paragraph pretty much sums the tone:

Star ratings and user comments have long been found on public websites — from Amazon.com to weblogs — but they become much more useful on intranets, where they’re not degraded by the Bozo effect. (…) For all these reasons, ratings and comments from colleagues are likely to be much more useful than those of random blog readers.

I guess over the years I’ve grown used to Nielsen’s style of depicting situations, but reading paragraphs like that one make me wonder whether his concept of usability is blending with his own conservative ideas. Sure, he’s a brilliant guy and makes great points more often than not, but usability and design (in the broad sense) need to take factors like participation into consideration.

In this article in particular, Jakob goes on and on about intranets that use Wikis, Ajax or blogging capabilities, never without mentioning how hyped or not some of those concepts are, or should be.

Sometimes, I wish Jakob would be the smart guy he is without putting on the Web 1.0 crash helmet and writing things like “Web Trends Without the Hype”, and richard seems to agree.

I’ve been looking at Apollo, Adobe’s new technology for the development and deployment of Rich Internet Applications, and I can say I’m pretty excited about the possibilities - and honestly, it’s good to see Adobe isn’t screwing up with Apollo as much as with the Creative Suite icons (which I talked about yesterday).

According to the people at Adobe themselves on their wiki, “Apollo is a cross-OS runtime that allows developers to leverage their existing web development skills (Flash, Flex, HTML, Ajax) to build and deploy desktop RIA’s”.

There’s already a few companies working on Apollo based applications, bringing the connectivity of the web and the richness of the desktop together. One of such companies is eBay, who’s working on a client for their service using Apollo (read about it here). We’ll most likely think about doing something similar for some of our own projects.

Fact is, RIAs are going to be all the rage next year, and Adobe seems to be pushing things in the right direction with this innitiative. I guess we’ll see just how much when I can get my hands on it, but I have grown high expectations since I built a client for Goplan’s ticket management system in under one hour using our API and Adobe’s Flex - oh, if only Flex Builder wasn’t that expensive.

Some Apollo resources

Looking around for some information on the technology, I found a few good resources. First, a video with Christian Cantrell of Adobe, demonstrating what Apollo is, and showing some of the applications built with it. There’s also a breeze demo with Luis Polanco and Mike Chambers that provides some background information on the platform.

And finally, Mike did a podcast with Kevin Lynch over at Talkcrunch that highlights the new capabilities Apollo brings to RIA developers, as well as some background information as to where Adobe wants to go with the Apollo effort.