

No download apps. Real? or someone is testing the waters? - vidoss
http://nodownlo.kickofflabs.com/

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vitovito
I could imagine it being real. Some history:

When AT&T acquired ORL, makers of VNC, one of the projects VNC was applied to
was the "Broadband Phone:" <http://www.qandr.org/quentin/att/bphone>

This turned the desktop phone into a thin client with its entire UI served up
over the network via VNC, including the phone-number-dialing UI (not
unreasonable, since if your network is down you won't be able to make a VoIP
call anyway). This also means that there are no remote applications to upgrade
and features can be added and removed at will: no-download apps.

This is in contrast to the "no-install apps" movement pursued by ventures such
as Thinstall (an application virtualization system, now part of VMware) and
Zero Install: <http://0install.net/>

VNC is a pretty expensive protocol; RDP is much more efficient, but requires
the client to understand the high-level windowing system calls. But maybe for
mobile phone apps, a well-compressed VNC stream is enough. You already have
multiple web-based VNC and VNC-style codebases available as open source:

noVNC was discussed here a year ago:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1463395>

Guacamole plans to support more than just the VNC protocol:
<http://guacamole.sourceforge.net/>

But if you specialize you can get dramatic performance improvements, as
discussed by FX PAL with their WebNC paper and demo, optimized for remote
manipulation of web pages: <http://palblog.fxpal.com/?p=1653>

And a high-level windowing system like GTK+ is in a good position as well,
with their recent release of GTK 3.2, which includes their experimental
"Broadway" backend, supporting rendering widgets and windows to an HTML5
canvas. A startup could pitch existing web developers on using Seed, GNOME's
JavaScript binding, with Broadway output, or perhaps using one of the
fledgling NodeJS bindings, but I'm not sure there are any big wins there over
using regular web development practices.

The bigger win would be for allowing traditional desktop developers to write
web- and mobile- friendly apps using their known solutions. Quick, cheap
redeploys get the slower VNC-based solution, serving as a proof-of-concept to
the higher-ups, and then you sell them on the more expensive GTK-based system
(learning a new windowing system is easier than learning a new web- and
mobile-development paradigm) where you write GTK apps and deploy using
Broadway.

