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Are Web Interfaces “Good Enough”?
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03/14/2007, By Jeff Atwood
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After spending about a year interacting with µTorrent exclusively through Remote Desktop, I was pleasantly surprised to discover how good the web UI is. It aggressively exploits the latest Ajax techniques to replicate most of the rich GUI functionality of µTorrent in a browser. But the web UI is still a pale shadow of the full-blown Windows UI.
There are small but important details missing throughout, and part of the pleasure of using µTorrent was luxuriating in its intense attention to detail, its wealth of well-designed data readouts. Using the web UI is like drinking watered-down beer. It doesn't satisfy.
µTorrent, my favorite BitTorrent client, now offers a web UI. See if you can spot the differences between the Web UI and the Windows UI:
I think Eckel is too quick to dismiss the utility of browser-based JavaScript applications. Yes, they're painful to create and debug, but they exploit the path of least resistance. And if I have learned anything in my entire life, it is this: never bet against the path of least resistance. You will lose. Every time.
What Eckel neglects to consider is this:
The typical user only touches a fraction of the functionality in most applications. Switching to an online spreadsheet like EditGrid or WikiCalc is hardly a catastrophic loss when you only used 1 percent of Excel's functionality to begin with.
Online applications may be awkward, but they do one key thing that local applications can never do: embed snippets of live content in a web page. Instacalc may never be Excel, but so what? It's a completely different use case. Instacalc is ideal for embedding bite-sized, interactive nuggets of calculation next to a paragraph of text on a web page. It's the YouTube of spreadsheets.
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