

Box.net CEO: HTML5 could kill desktop software - ccarpenterg
http://venturebeat.com/2010/05/28/box-net-html5/

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lanstein
Only tangentially related, but a great article on debugging PHP in vim by one
of the other co-founders of box.net: [http://tech.blog.box.net/2007/06/20/how-
to-debug-php-with-vi...](http://tech.blog.box.net/2007/06/20/how-to-debug-php-
with-vim-and-xdebug-on-linux/)

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dthakur
Hope some of my most used software gets ported onto this new 'HTML5 thingy'
before it gets killed!

\- Matlab/Mathematica \- Photoshop \- Blender \- America's Army \- OneNote \-
LinqPad \- ...

(bring on the pain)

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nerme
Haha!

Well, I don't know how much we have to worry about production oriented
software disappearing.

From what I see, the web has caused a shift in the production of cultural
content, away from centralized media industries to something resembling
cottage industry. Wouldn't there be a rise in production oriented software to
meet the demands of creators needing better, faster, and easier tools?

Let's face it, the web is never going to take over for production oriented
software. People will need to be squeezing every last calculation out of their
hardware while they're making things and they need feedback without delay.

You couldn't work in Illustrator with a 50ms delay, so where do you draw the
line for what is computed client-side and what on the server? Sure, filters
could be processed server-side. But complex drawings, taking up lots of RAM,
constantly requiring a re-render?

We don't even need to talk about server-side audio production.

It's not that there aren't tools that work just as well or much better when
served in the cloud, it's just that there will always need to be tools that
demand to be run as close to home as possible.

It seems to me that the amount of people wanting to use production oriented
software is going to grow at least at the pace of consumer oriented software.

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sfennell
I think you are kind of missing what is going on with a lot of html 5
development. There is actually little need to communicate with the server with
a lot of web apps. Like illustrator, look at Aviary (I think they use flash
right now) but the application is in the browser but all computation happens
on the client, the only communication with the server would be to save the
file. I see this being the same way with audio/video etc. There is the
overhead and the performance issues, but not really a delay.

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VBprogrammer
I hate to drag this point up again, but the most advanced HTML5/Javascript
demos are a poor imitation of what could be done on the desktop 10 years ago.

My personal view is that the web is good at things which are inherently
communication centric. Nothing else justifies the restrictions that working
within the web browser brings. Flash might be the whipping boy of internet
technologies, but at least its reasonably write once.

I think the thin client architecture is a paradigm that will constantly cycle
in and out of fashion but never quite deliver on its promise.

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sraybell
This "death of desktop" talk has been around a long time, and we'll rinse-
repeat until we're blue in the face, but this just isn't the case at all.

HTML5 will be the death of Flash and Silverlight as we know these products
today. That doesn't mean the product by name won't exist (think jQuery-esque
like platforms for HTML5), it will just change forms.

That's my guess anyways.

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abstractbill
I almost never use drag-and-drop for anything because it only works if my
windows are arranged _just so_.

I'd be curious to know how normal this is. Maybe if a lot of websites
implement it, we'll be able to get some real stats on how often it actually
gets used.

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dchest
In Mac OS X drag-and-drop is convenient even with small screen sizes because
of "spring-loaded" folders and Dock icons, so you don't need a special
arrangement of windows. I often use it by dragging an item into a Dock icon,
pressing Space (or waiting a second), and then dragging on the window once it
opens.

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jonhohle
It works great with Exposé as well.

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run4yourlives
Just so you know, the major insurance company I'm related to is still using
IE6 as its standard browser.

