I just had a small taste of the kind of computing coolness we should all expect from our systems.
I needed to get an address for a family friend, so I popped open Karelia Software’s Watson, which I licensed as part of the “Beyond the Browser” bundle (along with Spring and NetNewsWire Pro) and used it’s “Phone” tool. Now, this isn’t the cool part — it’s nice, but not that much different from going to a browser-based white pages tool.
The nice touch was after I found the address I sought and was about to copy/paste it into the Address Book — then I noticed a little Mac Address Book icon with a “+” on it. Click on the icon and the address I’d found was pushed right into my Address Book, simple as pie. This is the kind of small functionality which desktop apps can offer but browsers generally can’t. It’s also something which we should be able to take completely for granted — after all, contact information is one of the things people push around the most on their electronic devices. The fact that there still isn’t a universally used data structure for contact info continues to frustrate me. (I know about vCard, but it’s far from universally used, and it’s just ugly to boot!)
I don’t dispute the benefits that we’ve gotten from standards-based cross-platform web browsers. But it’s also time for all the hype about Web Services to start delivering raw structured data that can be manipulated by creative application authors to provide the best possible user experience. There’s no need to pile all that on web browsers, and little likelihood that they could rise to the challenge anyway.
PS: I should note that I’m composing this with Kung-Log, which is another embodiment of this model — Movable Type provides a serviceable browser-based mechanism for managing a web log, but Kung-Log does it so much better!