Topic: Coding Horror: Are Web Interfaces "Good Enough"?

Coding Horror: Are Web Interfaces "Good Enough"?

I recently posted a thread from the CodingHorror blog about lowering your bandwidth usage. Here, Jeff Atwood explores the creation of web interfaces and whether they are good enough to carry full applications. We are all familiar with Google's recent webapp successess and he explores uTorrent's web interface.

He also points out something that I think would be eye-opening to the Asylum, "Eckel sees a world of JavaScript and DHTML that's inappropriate for large applications. I see a world of large applications that are inappropriate for most users. It's high time we scaled down and scaled back." Also, I think this is pretty deep: "Online applications may be awkward, but they do one key thing that local applications can never do: embed snippets of live content in a web page."

Have anyone made a webapp here that was successful? Are the UIs comparable in any way to production apps?

Web applications and interfaces definitely have their place.

Recent and ongoing developments in the web standards ( W3C and ECMA ) and "semi" standards ( WHAT ), along with Flash 9, extend the possibilities of web applications and interfaces. WebApps also free the users from ONE computer. It's possible to use them anywhere on any device/computer, be it at work, home, on your mobile, wii, ... they also ease collaborative work compared to most native applications.

The examples of succesful web applications are many : photo management/sharing, project management, time tracker, mail client, diagrams, spreadsheets, calendars, word processing, ...

Of course, although a few recent annoucements, some things remain exclusive to native applications such as video editing, 3D apps, advanced image editing, video post processing, ... but how many people actually need or use such tools ? Web applications are "good enough" to cover the needs of the vast majority.

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Have anyone made a webapp here that was successful? Are the UIs comparable in any way to production apps?

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Define "successful". Last year I worked on a pilot project of web based interface for mobile phone. It took over the idle screen and had quite a few functionnalities : location based searches and traffic informations, maps, news reader, weather forecast, subscription status look up, ... At the end of the project, it turns out that the users found our web UI easier to use than Windows Mobile. If not a great success it is a least one step forward.


Speaking of web based UI, it is no mistery that most of the interface of the browser on Wii is web based and it works pretty well. Mozilla browsers' UI is also web based and it is without a doubt a success and ease the cross platform development.

I was rather surprised by Vixy.net. I had no idea web apps like this one existed, though I haven't managed to get it to work (as suggested) with YouTube recently... Sorry if that seemed a completely pointless interjection...

EDIT: A little searching gave me mux.am too, so perhaps I'm just noobishly ill-informed. In fact, both these sites are listed at webapplist.com along with a whole bunch of others that I was pleasantly surprised by. It seems there's a greater diversity of web apps than I imagined.

Sorry again, for having nothing substantial to add.

(Edited by White Hawk on 03-20-2007 17:07)

White Hawk: I never heard of those sites. Thanks for sharing.