The Disappearing Desktop - It's Real This Time

[Alex Tweedly]

Geoff Canyon wrote:

>
> On Nov 16, 2005, at 3:28 PM, Dan Shafer wrote:
>
>> Not sure I see a connection here, Geoff. If my data's on a server,  
>> how I access it seems irrelevant to the question of its availability.
>
>
> I have all of my phone contacts stored on my computer. Some of them  
> aren't on my cell phone (admittedly not many). If my phone contacts  
> were stored on a server and I were someplace where I don't have  
> access to the internet, I have no access to those contacts to look  
> someone up and call them.
>
How would you have access to a phone without access to the Internet ?

OK, we're not quite there yet, but it's easy to imagine that basic 
"Internet" access will be a common phone feature, so phones will provide 
a (more or less) easy way to access your data on the server.


> That's just one example. I have many things on my computer that I  
> want access to whether or not I have network access.

I almost never lack access to a phone / cellphone (unfortunately). The 
distinction between that and Internet access will likely fade, if not 
disappear completely, in the next couple of years. Just because the 
cell-phone guys screwed up with the limitations of WAP, don't assume 
they'll still be failing at data access in a couple of years.

[As an aside, I've always wished that digital phone answering machines 
would "grow up" to provide facilities such as you get on voice-mail 
systems, like variable speed play-back and access to stored phone 
numbers - but that hasn't happened (at least, not in my price range). 
Maybe VOIP, with its potential to provide greater integration of Voice 
and Data will finally get some enterprising manufacturer to come up with 
a system that provides the features I've always wanted - including 
touch-tone driven menus + text-to-speech to make this feasible even from 
basic phone handsets.]

>
> Further, even after universal wireless access, speed can be an issue  
> if large files are involved. As Richard pointed out, downloading  
> 150mb worth of Photoshop each time I want to use it isn't a good idea  
> even at 802.11g speeds. Neither is downloading 30 megabytes of  
> Revolution stackfiles each time I want to edit them.
>
> For many applications, local storage is completely necessary until  
> wireless access is 1. Everywhere 2. Really Fast.
>
My browser caches the web pages I access on my local disk - so even an 
AJAX app that "doesn't have local storage" kind of does really; the app 
can't decide to store something, but the underlying browser can and will 
use caching to improve performance.

This would apply (pretty well) to the case of applications, where the 
Web-Photoshop would be (presumably) a set of  modularized functions 
which could be cached. I suspect that most users never need more than 
about 50% of the features in Photoshop (maybe that should be 10% :-), so 
simple modularization + caching would reduce the 150Mb problem to 
infrequent downloads of updated modules and the occasional pause when I 
access a new feature for the first time.

This might in fact lead to even more homogeneity of applications - when 
you use an Internet cafe, you can either use Web-Photoshop which is 
cached (either on the local machine or on a nearby WebCache) or 
Web-PicturePaint, the new innovative competitor which is not typically 
not cached, and therefore performs relatively poorly due to download 
delays.

-- 
Alex Tweedly       http://www.tweedly.net



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