I agree with you but unfortunately that doesn't seem to be happening in a near future. With this BigData thing where companies want to keep track of your data, likes, etc web is their way.
I do miss old times native and robust desktop applications.
This is just another webapp, please God please can we go back to making true desktop/native apps again. We have these powerful machines that are under utilized for what they are.
I just miss responsive desktop applications. I see USD10000+ tools running in the browser and I just wish we went back to how solid applications were built in 1990s or 2000s.
I really miss native applications on the desktop. I want to use something responsive, snappy and can work offline. Almost no productivity app beyond the usual suspects do this anymore; it's all web or mobile based. I'm fine with cloud syncing just give me my native apps on the desktop that I miss!
Some of those apps look pretty nice. Rather have desktop versions of them, though. I'd rather have some control over the personal information they're trying to collect.
Agree, I'll take a good desktop app over a webapp any day. Webapps disappear frequently, aren't as quick and most importantly you put your data in the hands of a 3rd party which can work against you.
There are so many apps that just do one thing really well, and don't really need updates unless they're to fix compatibility issues after OS updates.
"Web app" is now synonymous with the SaaS model, which means over time, the product becomes bloated with features designed to appeal to the next biggest segment the company currently doesn't have. And there's no way to opt out. Dropbox and Evernote come to mind, but everything falls victim to this eventually.
I like apps like Sketch. 1-time fee with 1 year of updates, which is fair. If I'm happy with my Year 1 features, I don't have to update.
So long as mobile data plans continue to suck in most places, I don't see the desire for mobile apps over websites going away.
On a different note, I don't see native desktop apps going away since things like games and editing software require serious focus from the hardware. Web versions would be painfully slow.
Web Apps do have advantages over traditional desktop software -- what I'm trying to get at is that we can take what we've learned about web apps, and apply that knowledge to 'traditional' software to get desktop apps that don't suck. It doesn't have to be about web apps vs desktop apps, or one catching up with the other. Within a few years I don't think there will even be a concept of desktop vs web apps, not because one killed the other, but because they will have been integrated.
> Some browers now automatically populate a home page with your most commonly used apps/sites.
This is exactly what I mean. Now? This could have been done years ago. Don't even get me started on the bookmarks system (offline and online both). There are innovative things that can be done with these simple aspects of web interaction that could have been done years back -- it's not like there's some miracle tech that is making new stuff possible. UI designers as a group (or maybe more fairly, the companies that employ them) have, in my opinion, been inexcusably lazy in regards to pushing forward the computer user experience.
We're still trying to find the balance of local and cloud. Desktop apps were great in the 90s because they leverage the local machine's speed and hardware (there weren't any mp3 or jukebox webapps in the 90s, games etc).
But as the browser and web got more powerful and we started moving around more and having more computers (work, laptop, home) the centrality of "the cloud" because a selling point and for many applications the "local power" of the desktop was less important.
Now however we're seeing new constraints play a role.
On mobile, again power in some cases is a bit limited, we have more data/sensors to play with and HTML hasn't caught up to complicated swipe interfaces too well yet. We have location and accelerometer sensors that haven't been too well integrated yet. And your phone is always with you. So we're seeing a swing to cloud data back local apps again. The 3 mobile apps I use the most are google reader (the new site layout is space wasteful in a browser on my netbook, good luck having fun reading on a mobile browser), a movie player and a music player. On my desktop I'm just as likely to use grooveshark or some other streaming service, but with still expensive mobile bandwidth having "locally cached" mp3s wins out over streaming.
If we want to move this back all onto the web, we need an html6 that supports swipe, mobile app like layout, local storage (I know, html5 draft kinda has this... ish)
It's all about device constraints and what is available.
This is just a signal we need to develop the browser some more if we again want it to be the platform of choice in this new space.
If you can't think of any companies that have built significant desktop apps recently, you're just not looking. I don't even get how this is an argument. "Well I haven't personally installed a native app recently, so obviously they're unimportant."
You know what's never going to go out of fashion? Performance. Especially since CPU speeds have stalled in the last decade. you will never get good performance if your design is: "embed an entire browser, and then use a small piece of it"
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