Posted by brandonthedeveloper at April 8th, 2007
This started off as a comment to a great post over at The Universal Desktop discussing why some developers might not see the value in creating desktop applications.
I can see where Simeon Bateman is coming from but only when I put it in the perspective of ‘Is the cost/effort necessary to create a xPlatform desktop solution going to be a viable option?’.
With Zinc it was possible but Zinc never ever fully lived up to their xPlatform claims (not to mention the giant file sizes necessary to create a standalone application). Apollo changes that allowing developers to really write once, deploy on Windows and OS X.
The other thing I think developers are missing out on is understanding that the more communication vehicles you can use, the wider audience you will reach. Lots of companies post a website, add some keywords, submit to Google and wait for users to show up. Once they do, how do you keep them interested and informed? Well, you can use twitter, email, web, rss, desktop app. And if you do it right, can write new content once and push it through all of the listed mediums for no charge.
I’ve said this a million times now, Content Delivery and ‘Ease of Use’ are the keys to keeping users. You give the users multiple vehicles to get the information and you make it easy for them. Some folks like to look at twitter. Some like RSS. Some like email. Some like the web but the easiest way of pushing content back to the user with the least ‘click throughs’ is the desktop. If you tell the user ‘hey download our desktop application to get your information updates delivered and customized to you’ and all they have to do is open it to be alerted of new content, what could be an easier way of delivery?
That also brings up the goodness of the disconnected application maintaining state and synchronizing content when reconnected to the web. I know that doesn’t happen often anymore but from time to time we travel and may lose connectivity or just not be on. Imagine being an IT recruiter who travels a lot and doesn’t have 100% connectivity. Knowing that if a new TPS report has been uploaded to the server and will be downloaded to your desktop app without you having to worry about it is great in that the responsibility and accountability have been taken out of the hands of the user. Try doing that with a browser based application and tell me about the ‘Ease of Use’ experience for the user.
I think the best practice is to figure out what the best tool for the job is and go with that but not forget that everyone receives information differently and we as content providers need to take that into consideration.
