Acts of Volition

Web apps are becoming more impressive. I'm astonished that this Solitaire game is so sophisticated with menus, and Google docs is very advanced. You can even save the chart images ... !

All web apps are slow now. Of course they will be always slower but now they are noticeably slower than offline apps. Desktop apps cannot be competed with for most serious work.

However once the technology improves this will change. Web apps will become faster and work just like regular executables - almost. But you still need the internet to use them.

There is technology in the works (next firefox) to make web apps available offline for certain ones. I don't know how that will work but with faster apps and a better browser, web applications will approach real applications, and perhaps be competitive with them.

Then I ask - what's the difference between this web app of the future and OpenOffice, for instance? Not much except that there is an extra layer of programming (the browser) to make the app more resource intensive and slow.

So why are web apps being developed? It's easy and it's cross platform. Was this not the goal of Java? However because web apps have internet capabilities, this is why they excel in some areas.

The right tool for the right job though! Web apps will never replace offline apps in every instance.

Very nice, but I'm not sure what this app is trying to be. It attempts at fancy graphics, as per the animations, but it honestly isn't very aesthetically pleasing. The cards themselves are just difficult to look at. Granted, it's portable and it's got a spiffing selection of games on it, but I would have thought the most burdensome tricks for the Javascript to pull off is the graphics, and it would at this rate have been better to just use plain graphics.