ShopTalk Blog

Our users frequently request a desktop client for ShopTalk. As with all feature requests, my response is to ask myself this question: what real need is prompting this request? They need ShopTalk to sit in their Dock. They want ShopTalk to visually and audibly notify them when new messages arrive. They want to be able to drag and drop files onto ShopTalk to share them with their coworkers. I think they want The Real Web OS. Let me tell you why.

Right now there is a huge divide in applications programming.

In one corner, we have native apps, the reigning champion. They are built with toolkits provided by the OS. They use standard interface controls and conform to a standard look and feel. They can harness the full computing power of their host machine using things like threads and systems-level languages like C. They get full access to the hard disk. They sit in the Dock or the Task Bar or the System Tray or the Menu. They can notify the user if anything interesting happens within the app. They can use sockets. You can press Alt-Tab to switch between them.

Glaring at native apps from the opposite corner is a formidable challenger called web apps. Web apps are the hippies of computer applications. Everything is free and open. They don't require any installation process or periodic updates. They give their creators nearly unlimited freedom with interface elements and look and feel. They are easily connected to the endless piles of data and vast computing power that live in The Cloud. They are easy to share with friends. They are easy to check out casually and move on if you're not interested. They can be accessed from your computer at home or your computer at work or a friend's computer or an Internet Cafe. They are built using open standards. They are taking over the world.

What does the current trend toward web apps mean? It means people want all that stuff listed in the previous paragraph. They need it. What's the current way that operating systems provide for those needs? We give people one native app, the browser, in which all of these web apps run. That browser is like the Great Wall of China. It protects the computer from these nefarious web apps, and it ensures that most of the resources within the wall are completely inaccessible.

The Real Web OS will tear down the wall.

The Real Web OS is not a suite of native-like applications that runs in the browser. It's an OS that runs web applications natively. All applications running on The Real Web OS will be developed like web apps. They will look like web apps. They will be shared and discovered like web apps. They will combine local and remote data and computing like web apps. However, they will have all of the resources of the host machine at their disposal. They will be able to use the disk and the graphics card. They will spawn threads and processes. They will receive notifications when their host goes to sleep. They will notify the user if they require attention. They will efficiently sync all of your data Dropbox-style so that you can access it from anywhere*. All of the capabilities now ascribed to native apps, which are protected by the Great Wall of The Browser, will be exposed to web apps via JavaScript APIs (for extra points, we could replace JavaScript with Python ;) ).

I read an insightful comment on Hacker News recently:

Desktop applications have shifted to the web. It's only a matter of time before mobile apps are also obsolete.

Actually, it's only a matter of time before the distinction is obsolete.

* If the Dropbox team, or anyone else, is ever game to build The Real Web OS, count me in.