Portable Apps vs Web Apps

I'll make an assumption here and assume that you have not used anything except Windows-based computers.

Waaaay back in the 1970s and 1980s, DOS computers were the happening game in town, and the software was all portable. Everything was in its own directory and you had to be careful to have copies of important system files on the "path" so the computer could find them or you had to keep a copy in the application's directory itself.

Then when the original versions of Windows came along, programs used to use ini files to tell the program how to remember configuration and paths to important files. That was pretty portable, too.

More recently, configuration data got stuck into something called a registry, and now you couldn't just swap in a program's folder or delete it out. You had to install or uninstall the program (and hope that everything was kept straight.) And there were these things called dlls that everybody needed and instead of keeping the parts of each program in one place, the dlls were kept all in one place so we wouldn't need to have multiple versions of the same thing in different places. Unfortunately, we did put multiple versions of the dlls into the same directory and sometimes you have a "good" one overwritten by a different one, and the program that expected to see the other one ends up crashing. There was all of this stuff that Windows did behind the scenes, supposedly to help us or unburden us from having to know too much about computers. That was not portable.

Then along comes the "new" idea of having programs stay within their own folder and not stick information into the registry that was so complex that it was impossible to keep clean or orderly. These new kind of programs would keep all of their parts in one place. The programs could operate on their own without needing to be installed or uninstalled. Ah, back to portable again!

And now we have four copies of LAME if we have multiple audio programs, and several copies of UPX scattered around (are they all the same version?) and a handful of copies of 7-zip in program folders ranging from file managers, file extractors, backup utilities and who knows what else?

Is it progress? You decide.

Does it give a better sense of safety for those among us who feel that we are losing our privacy a little bit every day? It sure is.

And you know, I don't use those online file storage systems, or online bookmarks, or online password "safes" or online webapps. I have no intention of giving my personal stuff to anybody else for any reason. Do you trust everybody, or nobody?

And finally, of course they want to have webapps or "live" this or that. At the risk of sounding like I should wear an aluminum foil hat, these people want to control everything. I don't want to willingly give it to them.

Jim

10 years ago, when broadband became wildly available it was said that all apps would become web-based. Microsoft was (and still is) planning to make Office an online application. While this might seem innovative, it seems they plan to reduce the Personal Computer to a mere work station. Some of the 'problems' could be: People would have to pay a monthly /annual subscription fee, so they just cannot wait till the next upgrade. And how fast the Internet might be, its always slower than local apps... and with the possible saving of the data on the servers as well...

Of course there are free online apps like Google's, but they already offer 'professional services that will cost money. Eventually all commercial companies have to make money, one way or the other...

On the other hand, storage increases, Hard disks as well as portable storage will increase. And even Microsoft will come with it's own version of Portable Apps called StartKey. But StartKey will leave traces, that's just the way Microsoft works...

Eventually the near future of computing is all of the above, and it's just a matter of personal preference. But as long as we live in a world where your Internet provider might be go down, or as long as a single Internet line damaged might lose connection with the Internet itself (without backup lines like the internet was intended to be) there's always the chance we might have to depend on a local working application...

Another advantage of web based application is they are platform independent. While our applications up to this day are bound to one operating system. Mac, Linux, Windows, and so on need their specific binaries. The browser is a way all these platforms will use the same 'binaries'.

But on the other hand we might see Virtual Machines become a bigger part of the OS. So whatever binary is provided, from a C64 binary to a Amiga binary, From a DOS to a Windows 1.3, all would be able to work on any given OS because of Virtual Machines and Emulation. And while running a C64 or DOS binary might not be that interesting for some, this might be interesting from a historical view.

But for the next 5 to 10 years it's safe to say that Portable Apps have a valid place on our systems because not all applications provided are available as web based applications. And with the Open Source world getting up to par with Commercial software it's easy to predict that local applications are here to stay for the next 5 to 10 years. The biggest problem now is the different Operating Systems. But there is already a LINUX version that runs like a service under Windows, meaning it retains all the speed of a stand alone LINUX.

Long live Portable Apps!