My first post. I’ll be writing about Internet Desktop Applications, their development, and the technologies and problems surrounding them. As new technologies appear or old technologies get renewed, that target this new area, I will write about them.

One overarching theme that I will be using to constrain the scope of my writings is found in the weblog title. I believe that in an IDA, the browser should be optional. This is a crucial element and allows for application designers and developers to have full control of the user experience, and use established desktop UI conventions at their convenience.

Now, I am NOT anti-browser. In fact, I also would like to write about what factors should go into a decision of whether to develop an RIA in a browser, or an IDA out of the browser. Another exciting thought is to develop an application that can be ported to both, leveraging the strengths of each of the strategies, and reusing development resources.

Other attributes that I will be using to filter the technologies I write about, will be listed in my definition of what an Internet Desktop Application is.

So right off the bat, I have to say that I will be writing for sure about two platforms that I have experience in that are targeting this space. One is the Flash Platform, taking the shape of Adobe Apollo. The other is the Mozilla Platform, taking the shape of XULRunner.

So we’ll see how this goes!