Comments on: The Future of the Desktop

By: John

John — Wed, 05 May 2010 12:58:04 +0000

Thanks for your comment, Tarek. Lapsus is indeed similar. The main differences are:

1. Lapsus is a desktop based time tracker, rather than a web app.
2. Lapsus will only be available for the Mac – RescueTime is cross platform.
3. Lapsus is more project centric than RescueTime.

By: Tarek Demiati

Tarek Demiati — Mon, 26 Apr 2010 10:42:54 +0000

What are the differentiator factor beween lapsus and rescuetime.com ?

Rescue Time is a desktop app, that gather the activities on the desktop, and you check your analytics on the web

Is lapsus similar ?

By: reboltutorial

reboltutorial — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 06:08:38 +0000

Through Extensibility, you’ll be able to do the twitter client of your dream

Thanks for the interesting slide, have bookmarked it on Dzone
http://www.dzone.com/links/how_to_build_desktop_apps_that_help_your_web_app.html

By: John

John — Mon, 31 Aug 2009 18:03:40 +0000

Thanks Rebtweeter. I just checked out your project and it looks interesting. I also am not quite sold on any one of the myriad Twitter clients available – for instance, why must I remember the username of anyone before tweeting? Or click on a small Reply icon? Surely there’s room for autocomplete here? Yet noone’s done that yet…

Anyway, thanks for commenting. I’ll follow your project with interest.

By: reboltutorial

reboltutorial — Mon, 31 Aug 2009 17:48:52 +0000

Yes, I’m also sure the mix of Web and Desktop is a Winner, that’s what I’m doing with my Rebtweeter Project:

http://reboltutorial.com/blog/rebtweeter-firstproject-vision-draft/

By: John

John — Mon, 04 May 2009 14:50:16 +0000

Ian

Thanks for your comments. You make some really good points here. The counter argument that could be made is: “Things will get better and eventually everyone will have cheap, great internet access.”

These kind of arguments seem to assume that somehow the advancement of technology to a certain minimum standard everywhere is inevitable. I’d argue that although things will get better over time (obviously), certain areas of the world will always be in front of or behind the technology curve.

When making bold claims about the future, we need to remember that a massive chunk of the world’s population still doesn’t even have access to a computer.

By: Ian Turner

Ian Turner — Sun, 03 May 2009 05:40:22 +0000

I spent a large chunk of last year working in South Africa, a country that by African standards is very modern. Whilst I was down there there were some huge problems with the power supply, with rolling blackouts most days. The knock on effect to internet connections was huge, because even when the power came back on, the servers had to be re-booted before we could connect to the internet. The results was that for about half the working day we had no internet connection.
I can see many of the benefits of web based applications, but for huge groups of people in the world today it can not be the right solution because the infrastructure is just not reliable or cheap enough. These are the people who will be buying many of the new computers around the world in the future. Assumptions about software as a service being the only solution in the future really needs to consider the current infrastructure around the world.