Macromedia's Renaissance man
Published: 25 Nov 2003 14:45 GMT
But how fast can you progress with site design -- isn't there a gap between what developers can create and what consumers can intuitively navigate around?
I think the average person is smarter than they are given credit for. The application user interface on the Web right now is really constrained by the HTML component so you can't make it very clean. I think richness in design can make for much more understandable user interfaces.
One of the things we have seen on the Web is high degree of inconsistency across sites: you go to one Web site and it works one way, go to another and it works a completely different way. I think one way we could make things easier for consumers is by providing a consistent experience across applications. One of the things we are trying to do with Central is provide standard metaphors: standard components of course like buttons and scroll bars but also higher level patterns for design like when you use tabs, and how you display search controls. The more we all use the same patterns the easier it will get for people.
Central is a very different approach to interacting with the Web -- are you guys secretly plotting the death of the browser?
Not at all but it's a good question. I think the browser is going to live for the foreseeable future. For writing documents for the Internet, HTML and the browser are awesome and I don't think that is going to go away. Central we see as complimentary to the browser; it will work alongside it; you can link from Central to the browser. They will coexist, very much so.
Is it strange to create an offline application at a time when more and more people are continuously connected to the Web via Wi-Fi?
For folks who have lots of Internet connectivity it's not as obvious but the reality is that most people don't have very good connectivity. In the US the broadband reach is not quite 30 percent yet; a lot of people are still using modems and so they are not always dialled-up and connected. Also people who are travelling -- I travel a lot, and occasionally you get wireless access. There's supposed to be some here but I can't get it right now (the lobby of the downtown Marriott, Salt Lake City, Utah) -- I am now offline even though I am a pretty connected guy. If I wanted to read current blogs or look at the news I couldn't do that but I have Central and I am able to turn on my computer and look at current blogs because they are all captured on my machine.
It even makes things faster when you are connected to the Internet because your application is already on your machine, so when you visit that application you already have it; whereas if you visit a Web site it is downloading again onto your machine so you have to wait for it to arrive; the information you want is all on servers on the Internet and you have to wait for it to download. The revolution here is that even if you are online it's local so it launches instantly, the data is there instantly and the updates can come in over time.
Previous
Did you find this article useful?
155 out of 287 people found this useful
- Share this article:
