Adobe AIR
By now I already have a couple of Adobe AIR applications installed.
I can't argue that they don't work, and when I'm in Mac OS, I don't think the UI of the applications seem terribly out of place either. Usability wise, I think that the applications seem like a step up from web applications.
I've never been a huge fan of web applications. While Ajax made the usability aspect of it a lot better, I still think they are a very subpar way to interact heavily with anything. The browser was not built as an application platform, and I think it is painfully apparent every time I accidentally hit reload or back, and a bunch of data is lost.
Coming from that angle, I should be thrilled about AIR. It seems AIR can do something to alleviate this problem, but I am concerned that there's a heavy cost associated with this. First of all, one of the main selling points for web applications is gone: The effortless ubiquity – no installation, just enter the URL and go.
There are also other things that make me rather conflicted about AIR.
If I thought it was just going to move a lot of current web applications onto AIR instead, I think I'd be more happy about it. But unfortunately I think there are going to be other consequences.
For example,
- The crapware that comes with your new gizmo will now be pawned off to GizmoCorps resident web guy, rather than be written by their geeky driver development guy. This might be a plus on the usability side, but I don't really want an AIR application spending 50 megs of memory to show me that I pressed the "volume up" button on my new keyboard.
- Many of the dubiously skilled developers that are currently writing web applications that are wasting their own servers cycles, will suddenly be writing software that wastes my computers resources. And these applications will usually have read/write access to my computer.
I find it insane that an application like Google Analytics AIR uses 80 MB of memory, and 400 MB of virtual memory to download some XML and show a few graphs. Snitter takes up roughly 33 MB of memory to display a twitter stream.
I am no doubt just an conservative old fart, but it irks me when the new hotness looks like it's going to be wildly popular, and that means that every little application is now going to crawl forth and happily waste ram like it's a new olympic discipline.
It's the same for me, when I notice that there are several application running that consume ~100MB of my memory for basically sitting in the taskbar notification area doing nothing. What the hell was the developer doing? Drawing bitmaps while the application idles?
Obviously, poor development will lead to bloated software but I agree that the Google Analytics should not be so large. The problem is, imo, the AIR platform. For example, in Curl you can write applications that are much smaller. You can also create hybrid applications in Curl called desktop applets (aka OCC) that reside on your desktop and have sandboxed access to local disk space, but are able to detect new versions from the source server and download those to use automatically – just like a web application.