Are PC applications set to die out?
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Hi, I use Chrome as my default browser and it just added some nice advertising on the home page: Google ChromeBook[^] Which is absolutely great to get unwanted advertising spam :) However, this makes one think - are PC apps going to be around in 10 years time? If I look at the mobile market, more development goes into doing apps and mobile websites than PC desktop applications. Everyone wants an "app" or at least a mobile site to interact with employees and customers. So are PC apps going to be a museum pieces soon? (ps. I can image my two year old son leaving University to 20 years time saying, you used to work on one one those? :omg: ) Cheers.
There are no PC apps that I know of. So they probably have already died out. Apps are thingies that run on weak processors and spend most of the time waiting for input, waiting for web requests or waiting for a database. And they have a shiny UI to make all the waiting more bearable. They are mostly fat and only very little muscle. As for programs and applications that actually do something except waiting for something: They will also need all the processor, RAM GPU and other resources they can get and will certainly be around.
And from the clouds a mighty voice spoke:
"Smile and be happy, for it could come worse!"And I smiled and was happy
And it came worse. -
GenJerDan wrote:
People who do actual work need a desktop machine with a keyboard and often a mouse.
That requires a PC, yes, but not a 'PC app' per se. I see a future where the 'Editing App' will adapt itself to the platform it runs on, allowing you pixel editing on your PC, while Edith Jones can simply crop her holiday snaps on her phone.
Any body remmember the Network PC? anyone? come on I can't be the only one!! (stands tapping foot) OK maybe I am the only one (least I didnt buy one)
You cant outrun the world, but there is no harm in getting a head start Real stupidity beats artificial intelligence every time.
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Any body remmember the Network PC? anyone? come on I can't be the only one!! (stands tapping foot) OK maybe I am the only one (least I didnt buy one)
You cant outrun the world, but there is no harm in getting a head start Real stupidity beats artificial intelligence every time.
Didn't that work to a small Cloud-like remote processing system? Just saying...
Ideological Purity is no substitute for being able to stick your thumb down a pipe to stop the water
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I spotted a week ago an article (which I can't seem to find now) showing a disk on key PC running Android 2.3 with dual core HDMI, bluetooth, WiFi b/g/n and microSD slot. A prototype that in its next version will run either that or Windows 8 and costs under 200$. Also check this out http://www.android-x86.org/[^] Does that answer your question?
Alberto Bar-Noy --------------- “The city’s central computer told you? R2D2, you know better than to trust a strange computer!” (C3PO)
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Any body remmember the Network PC? anyone? come on I can't be the only one!! (stands tapping foot) OK maybe I am the only one (least I didnt buy one)
You cant outrun the world, but there is no harm in getting a head start Real stupidity beats artificial intelligence every time.
I remember the "dumb" UNIX PCs we had back in studies days. We then moved onto Windows NT Server that connected a few hundred students a dumb terminals. We used it to learn the basics of threading but of cause connecting that many students together that were learning how to code meant that NT lost handles like crazy. We got a email every day from the admin guy saying that we must learn to code properly and close handles when we are done :) Nothing like rebooting a server every couple hours...
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Thanks - another low cost device that will probably run all those is the RaspberryPI[^].
Found it :) http://blog.laptopmag.com/usb-stick-contains-dual-core-computer-turns-any-screen-into-an-android-station[^]
Alberto Bar-Noy --------------- “The city’s central computer told you? R2D2, you know better than to trust a strange computer!” (C3PO)
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Hi, I use Chrome as my default browser and it just added some nice advertising on the home page: Google ChromeBook[^] Which is absolutely great to get unwanted advertising spam :) However, this makes one think - are PC apps going to be around in 10 years time? If I look at the mobile market, more development goes into doing apps and mobile websites than PC desktop applications. Everyone wants an "app" or at least a mobile site to interact with employees and customers. So are PC apps going to be a museum pieces soon? (ps. I can image my two year old son leaving University to 20 years time saying, you used to work on one one those? :omg: ) Cheers.
Yes. If it is up to microsoft, we will all be cloud computing by windows 10. If you notice windows 7 is rapidly moving the user to the cloud. They removed windows explorer so you have limited tools to maintain your local drives. They enhanced their web browser so you can barely tell if you are on your machine or in the cloud. They have nearly stopped development on C and C++ tools for the PC. Since they still own the PC space, they are moving users off the PC as quickly as they can. There will always be a place for the PC, just like there is still a place for mainframes. It just won't be where the masses are dumping their money. I don't own microsoft stock. I do own google and amazon stock. stevev
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Hi, I use Chrome as my default browser and it just added some nice advertising on the home page: Google ChromeBook[^] Which is absolutely great to get unwanted advertising spam :) However, this makes one think - are PC apps going to be around in 10 years time? If I look at the mobile market, more development goes into doing apps and mobile websites than PC desktop applications. Everyone wants an "app" or at least a mobile site to interact with employees and customers. So are PC apps going to be a museum pieces soon? (ps. I can image my two year old son leaving University to 20 years time saying, you used to work on one one those? :omg: ) Cheers.
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Yes. If it is up to microsoft, we will all be cloud computing by windows 10. If you notice windows 7 is rapidly moving the user to the cloud. They removed windows explorer so you have limited tools to maintain your local drives. They enhanced their web browser so you can barely tell if you are on your machine or in the cloud. They have nearly stopped development on C and C++ tools for the PC. Since they still own the PC space, they are moving users off the PC as quickly as they can. There will always be a place for the PC, just like there is still a place for mainframes. It just won't be where the masses are dumping their money. I don't own microsoft stock. I do own google and amazon stock. stevev
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The "app" will still run on your PC. Can you (realisticly) imagine every keystroke being sent to the "cloud" before it updates your word document ...?
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Hmmm ... yes ... creating "content" on little itty-bitty screens with litty-itty keyboards ... If you don't know better, you will buy into it. I feel sad for america. I'm glad I'm too old to see the end.
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Hi, I use Chrome as my default browser and it just added some nice advertising on the home page: Google ChromeBook[^] Which is absolutely great to get unwanted advertising spam :) However, this makes one think - are PC apps going to be around in 10 years time? If I look at the mobile market, more development goes into doing apps and mobile websites than PC desktop applications. Everyone wants an "app" or at least a mobile site to interact with employees and customers. So are PC apps going to be a museum pieces soon? (ps. I can image my two year old son leaving University to 20 years time saying, you used to work on one one those? :omg: ) Cheers.
I think there is a lot of development around mobile apps at the moment because it is new, not necessarily better. The convenience of mobile access has to be weighed against the limitations of those devices. My stockbroker offers an app with which you can look at some charts and trade on the move. Nice idea but the mobile app is crap compared to the advanced charts you can use on the pc, which uses java webstart so it's not tied to a particular pc. There is no way I could do anything substantial on a tiny mobile screen, assuming I can even read it, so I do need a laptop with a decent screen size, mouse and proper keyboard for that and for other things. Local processing power is a bonus as is the ability to keep some stuff local and decide what, if anything, you want to put on the cloud.
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Hi, I use Chrome as my default browser and it just added some nice advertising on the home page: Google ChromeBook[^] Which is absolutely great to get unwanted advertising spam :) However, this makes one think - are PC apps going to be around in 10 years time? If I look at the mobile market, more development goes into doing apps and mobile websites than PC desktop applications. Everyone wants an "app" or at least a mobile site to interact with employees and customers. So are PC apps going to be a museum pieces soon? (ps. I can image my two year old son leaving University to 20 years time saying, you used to work on one one those? :omg: ) Cheers.
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Hi, I use Chrome as my default browser and it just added some nice advertising on the home page: Google ChromeBook[^] Which is absolutely great to get unwanted advertising spam :) However, this makes one think - are PC apps going to be around in 10 years time? If I look at the mobile market, more development goes into doing apps and mobile websites than PC desktop applications. Everyone wants an "app" or at least a mobile site to interact with employees and customers. So are PC apps going to be a museum pieces soon? (ps. I can image my two year old son leaving University to 20 years time saying, you used to work on one one those? :omg: ) Cheers.
I think we are long ways from being 100% web because we still have a fundamental problem while reaching the web: The distance. Like it or not, best case scenario, data travels at the speed of light and they don't travel in a straight line. And distance means time for data traveling from one point to the other. Add to that band limitations on different locations (This is an infrastructure problem that can be solved). Desktop application can process everything locally, where distance is not a problem. The best example of applications that will be the last to move to the web (if they move at all), are the heavy 3D games. Imagine playing crysis and render heavy 3D frames on a browser or having 30 high quality images being downloaded in one second, using a remote data source: Completely nonviable for the near future. Since today's mid range desktops/laptops can handle most applications to make heavy processing locally very fast, many applications are not very suitable for the web. Having a powerful server farm to process heavy loads of data make sense on specific scenarios only. The great advantage of the web is the ability to host distributed applications that are easy to deploy for every user in a centralized way. But there are many applications that don't need to be distributed and as such, make more sense to stay local. I honestly don't see desktop applications vanish completely. But I do realize that this whole paradigm of desktop vs web apps might not even make sense in the future. It takes a lot of thinking to theorize what things might be 20 to 40 years from now.
"To alcohol! The cause of, and solution to, all of life's problems" - Homer Simpson
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Maybe. The app will be downloaded, used and then killed. The data will be cached locally,uploaded and then killed. The app will probably run in some sort of p-code that would be supported on any platform, It would not be a PC app. ...sound familiar?
Then, we'd still need a local interpreter that would be a PC app. I'd also want to see when running an application this way would work for apps like 3D Studio Max... I think we are long ways to go before that is even viable, let alone effective.
"To alcohol! The cause of, and solution to, all of life's problems" - Homer Simpson
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Hmmm ... yes ... creating "content" on little itty-bitty screens with litty-itty keyboards ... If you don't know better, you will buy into it. I feel sad for america. I'm glad I'm too old to see the end.
I think the end is as predictable as the Armageddon. If it ever occurs. I'm more into a new beginning, when none of this debate will even make sense.
"To alcohol! The cause of, and solution to, all of life's problems" - Homer Simpson
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Any body remmember the Network PC? anyone? come on I can't be the only one!! (stands tapping foot) OK maybe I am the only one (least I didnt buy one)
You cant outrun the world, but there is no harm in getting a head start Real stupidity beats artificial intelligence every time.
-
Hi, I use Chrome as my default browser and it just added some nice advertising on the home page: Google ChromeBook[^] Which is absolutely great to get unwanted advertising spam :) However, this makes one think - are PC apps going to be around in 10 years time? If I look at the mobile market, more development goes into doing apps and mobile websites than PC desktop applications. Everyone wants an "app" or at least a mobile site to interact with employees and customers. So are PC apps going to be a museum pieces soon? (ps. I can image my two year old son leaving University to 20 years time saying, you used to work on one one those? :omg: ) Cheers.
I do, in fact, think the age of the pc "app" is waning. With advances like HTML 5, I don't see the need for the kind of app that you have to physically install on your machine. I can see a model where an interpreter is downloaded and you can run the app and then kill all the processes associated.
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Hi, I use Chrome as my default browser and it just added some nice advertising on the home page: Google ChromeBook[^] Which is absolutely great to get unwanted advertising spam :) However, this makes one think - are PC apps going to be around in 10 years time? If I look at the mobile market, more development goes into doing apps and mobile websites than PC desktop applications. Everyone wants an "app" or at least a mobile site to interact with employees and customers. So are PC apps going to be a museum pieces soon? (ps. I can image my two year old son leaving University to 20 years time saying, you used to work on one one those? :omg: ) Cheers.
Lots of impressive web apps and web services coming out with HTML5. This is not going to stop. As a developer I still prefer my notebook real estate and desktop apps. I have used some pretty impressive web tools to do simple projects with though. I suspect that the desktop apps will become less frequent and more special purpose over the next 10 years. Maybe something like the DOS to GUI shift. I still use DOS for some special purposes I don't have and app for. Some installation packages and other utilities still use DOS as components. Some types of users, especially in business/office settings, may be hard to accommodate. For example, accountants and clerks who still need to pound on the keys to be most productive. They will have to have a lot different concept of their jobs to accommodate a web app and touchscreens. I am still a bit of a skeptic on the shift to the cloud. This was tried before (in part at least) and was called ASP (Application Service Provider). It tanked after a couple of years of marketing hype. Some companies I know lost truckloads of cash over it. Previous to that it was called a Data Center. That tanked also. Maybe the cloud will succeed because it is built on better technology by smarter people and the users are more capable/conditioned to adopt it. The security vulnerabilities with the cloud are still poorly handled, IMO. There is a lot more work to do there before I will be recommending the cloud as a first choice to my users. Some new technology ideas are needed. I read of more and more hacking on anything that is mobile each day. For now I am treating the cloud as a vehicle for special purpose apps. For example, Sales Management, Support Management, and other less critical supporting systems. Maybe I am too conservative, but ...
"Courtesy is the product of a mature, disciplined mind ... ridicule is lack of the same - DPM"
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Hi, I use Chrome as my default browser and it just added some nice advertising on the home page: Google ChromeBook[^] Which is absolutely great to get unwanted advertising spam :) However, this makes one think - are PC apps going to be around in 10 years time? If I look at the mobile market, more development goes into doing apps and mobile websites than PC desktop applications. Everyone wants an "app" or at least a mobile site to interact with employees and customers. So are PC apps going to be a museum pieces soon? (ps. I can image my two year old son leaving University to 20 years time saying, you used to work on one one those? :omg: ) Cheers.
RichardS wrote:
Are PC applications set to die out?
I hear this question every year. It's based on the "idea" from "management" that things that are old are being replaced with something new.
RichardS wrote:
So are PC apps going to be a museum pieces soon?
No. Visual Studio 2012 and World of Warcraft will not run on your mobile phone. No, those aren't even related platforms, they only compete in the eyes of management. No, you cannot have Sql Server Express on your android. ..and no, the iPad isn't going to replace any thin-clients soon - just like the Elsa logboard didn't do that, ten years ago.
Bastard Programmer from Hell :suss:
