The Line Begins to Blur
I have written about them before and this month they have been featured in Sprout Magazine. I am talking about Dutch startup Wakoopa. For those of you who don’t know Wakoopa, it is an application (much like last.fm) that tracks what software you use. Admittedly, it is niche market but I find the stats very fascinating. However, what I found interesting was the fact that they plan on tracking web applications. It seems that the line between online and offline is starting to fade and within the next few years we might not even make a distinction between the two.
Another prime example of this is Mailplane, an application for OSX that connects to your gmail account and offers the same functionality and more from a separate window. The downside of these applications and the big advantage for their online counterparts is that changes aren’ t immediately effective. For example, gmail now has the fantastic option to “Filter messages like these”, something Mailplane doesn’t.
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I am currently working for the University of Applied Sciences in Rotterdam, at the Institute for Research and Innovation. I used to live in Berlin, where I studied Interface Design at the Fachhochschule Potsdam. - Find out more here
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peterpixel writings » Blog Archive » Interesting Times for the Browser Usability Says:
[...] Last week I came across two projects that made me very excited. First I discovered Mozilla’s Prism and a few days later Fluid. For more coverage about Fluid, visit Techcruch. Both these applications enable you to use your favourite web apps in separate, sovereign windows, kinda like IE6 does. Which is where it gets interesting. Most folks can’t seem to go without tabbed browsing after getting used to it. However, now we are actually going back in time. It seems, in retrospect, that the tab metaphor isn’t too handy for web applications. Jeff Atwood from Coding Horror also wrote an interesting piece about the tab metaphor. I too, find myself continually searching for the browser containing my gmail tab. The fact that I have more than one screen isn’t helping either. After a day of computing I usually end up with multiple browsers on both my screens, some of them containing the same tabs. I find myself checking (or rather opening) two pages/browsers at once. This type of browsing (although not commonplace) is definitely not suited for tabbed browsers. To top it off, Exposé and the Windows taskbar isn’t showing me what tabs I have open in a browser. So, are Prism and Fluid simply tabless browsers? Well, no, not exactly. They treat web applications like sovereign applications, clicking a link that is external will result in it opening in your browser instead of Prism. The browser chrome is also completely removed. This solves a few usability problems. The “broken” back button is irrelevant, the issue of lost tabs is resolved. Plus accidentally closing a browser containing a tab with a draft for an essay you are writing online won’t happen anymore. Will people start disabling tabbed browsing? I doubt it, but I definitely think that we will see a move towards more of this kind of browsing behavior, in which web applications will get a life of their own and where traditional browsing and using an application will get a different approach. [...]