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The rise of the Slim Clients 
There's lots of buzz around the Microsoft announcements at PDC (Not quite the Job's reality distortion field, but a buzz more or less) see Scobleizer for Roberts promised updates on this event. In particular I want to speak about Microsoft's new Gadgets.
| | First of all I'm not going to do the 'isn't this just Konfabulator or Dashboard' story far to obvious for me, and we all know that anyhow right.. |
| | No I'll be straight up with you, what I'm wondering here is if this 'slim client' thing is the new battleground, A.K.A Internet Explorer vs Navigator. Woah hold your horses before you gallop off, hear me out here.. |
| | Lets just look at a few things and roll forward to the future a little ways.. |
| | Imagine that both desktops (OSX and Vista) have three dimensions. That is the two normal ones (X & Y), plus some new ones : Layers (Gadgets/Dashboard) & Time (RSS anyone?). |
| | Lets ignore the Time dimension for now (Thats worth another post) and concentrate on the layers provided by the likes of Gadgets and Vista. These new dimensions to our interactivity (desktop experience) take much from the web (thin client) and mix it with some of the desktop app (rich client) feature set hence slim clients (I'm not the first to use that by the way). |
| | OK sounds logical but not enough, so here one of the other parts. We are moving into Web X.0 (Currently 2.0 and ascending) now this introduces web services (REST/XMLRPC/SOAP whatever) and a web offering both mark up based GUIs and loosely coupled API's. This is also Remix territory and social software where user participation is key. Now the old browser model was just not designed for this kinda two way, social participation and loosely coupled interaction. After all the browser is just a big fat desktop consuming window (maybe now with Tabs .. Ooohhh, big leap ;)). Hence the Widget/Layer thing, this is like having a whole bunch of light weight browserlets with added programming power to handle the web X.0 stuff brighter than the brightest whites. And it's Daz versus Persil in a fight to the death. |
Now I could be wrong, this is just a hypohesis a view of futures that could be. But if it is true we will have a new war on our hands : 'The war of the widgets!'
| Tags : Gadget Microsoft web2.0 Dashboard slimclients
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