Calling a web app wrapped in a system window does not make it a desktop application. The concept of AIR is great: write once, deploy anywhere applications that can combine the best parts of web apps with desktop. Too bad they all suck. I have yet to find an AIR application that’s useful for day-to-day serious use. They’re usually fluffy, heavy, useless things not unlike the all-Flash web interfaces of a few years ago (no coincidence there, the same people write them). They’re toys.
Not that I haven’t tried. I forced myself to use eBay Desktop for a few weeks, but had to give it up. All the latency and wierdness of a heavy, transactional web app, with nonstandard controls and mediocre interaction.
I tried again with TweetDeck, which has some really awesome features, but again fails for its half-assed system integration. Here’s the list of of things that suck about it:
- (Right now) 159MB of wired memory in use (While it’s idle!)
- No menubar (Mac)/notification bar (Windows) icon (see Google Notifier or Foxmarks for how to do a utility app right)
- Horrific Flash text rendering
- No Growl (or similar) integration
- No keyboard shortcuts
- Nonstandard controls for everything
- Built-in notification brings the fucking window to the front every time
Note none of these problems are specific to TweetDeck itself, whose developers have valiantly tried to shoehorn in things like notification. It’s all AIR’s fault.
Could you solve these things? I’m not sure; probably not. Until every OS manufacturer adopts a common toolkit for drawing UI (not bloody likely!), developers will have to rewrite things for each target platform. For now, I’m going back to Twitterrific and hope they beef up the feature set to match the almost perfect UI.