What’s at the end of the browser rainbow?
March 28th, 2008 • Internet
I spent half an hour yesterday getting lost in Adobe’s new PhotoShop Express, undoubtedly the nicest surprise the company has handed to us mortals in many years.
The thing’s more than polished - it’s telepathic. It knows. You go looking for a trick, and it’s already there under your cursor. Someone spent a long time refining the thing, until there was nothing left to refine. Flickr, Picasa, look and learn.
Even better, it’s the right product at the right time. Today, I came across a little crystal ball-gazing from the Mozilla team, describing what Firefox 4 may have in store (Firefox 3 comes out of beta in June, for the record).
The biggest leap will come when on- and offline no longer matter - when you can work using an application within your web browser, regardless of network availability. Go sign up for the Adobe Express beta, then imagine being able to use with no signal - it simply synced to a server when a pipe became available.
That’s no big news, I realise - Google Gears is already laying that road, and Mozilla is doing its part with Prism. But nothing is quite seamless as of yet: you either need to install an extension, or run a separate application, or discover that the site you want doesn’t support Gears. The concept of the ‘web app’ is still largely that: a concept.
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