infundibulum

Have you ever stopped to think about why Flash games are the way they are?

Thinking about webapps a lot lately has made me sensitive to this sort of thing. Flash apps are as capable as desktop apps, in many ways, but I can’t think of any “desktop-esque” Flash app that I use on a regular basis (aside from Flickr, a notable exception). I mean, when was the last time you used a Flash email client? Me neither. Flash is what it is, and what it is partially, now, is an aesthetic.

No one would ever, ever, ever write this in C. It just wouldn’t happen. Obviously bandwidth is a part of that, or at least it was when Flash first came out… but I think there’s more to it than that. There’s something about the web that encourages things to be “a la carte.” People talk a lot about how web apps are suddenly going to have practically all the functionality of desktop apps, and how that’s kind of dumb, because why start over from scratch?

To me the fact that web apps replace operating system woes and software download and installation with the comparatively manageable problems of cross-browser compatibility is justification enough.

But there’s also an element of the unknown in the webapp world. When Macromedia wrote Flash, they had no idea that it would spawn a world of cult comics and plastic bubble popping. Just so, no one really knows what web apps will look like.

The critical difference, in my opinion, is that on the web networking is available to everyone, and thus the nutty world of distributed effort and the long tail and all that. Nat Friedman’s blog is always interesting (er, when he updates it), and this post puts what I’ve been trying to say here in a 4 am blur much more clearly:

It’s interesting to watch the traditional application-and-platform developers (Apple, Microsoft, the Linux desktop projects) parade down the “web will never be good enough for real applications” path. Apple has Sherlock, MS has Avalon/XAML, we have Gtk/Qt/XUL/etc. Meanwhile you find more and more outlying app developers writing web apps. I wonder if, in a few years, we will look like withered old timers to the new armies of web application devleopers. Clinging to our dated ways. “I like my trackball just fine, sonny!”

Official title “more outlying app developer,” hmm, I’ll take that.