Andre Lewis on Tech

I have been thinking lately about ways to interact with web applications outside of the web browser. While I was at my last company (which built an intranet/KM solution for law firms), I built a proof-of-concept app to provide as-you-type search across the Knowledge Base right from the windows task bar. The contents of the intranet became more useful because they were more accessible. It was an interesting app for several reasons: 1) it blurred the line between desktop and web app, 2) it provided users with a much shorter "mental route" to the information they wanted, whether it was a document in the DMS or a contact in their address book.

I think lots of web apps can benefit from asking the question: is there better way to interact with the app? Does the browser provide the best UI to get users what they need? Here are some other options I've come across:

• Google Earth: If you have any geo-based data, it's easier than you might realize to expose your data on Google earth. I tried it with my Wifi cafes site, just because it's a convenient source of geocoded data. At the easiest level, all you have to do is produce an XML representation of your data in the KML namespace. You can easily get a proof of concept up and going within an hour, and you'll have fun with different kinds of markers, making your markers float into space, etc. If you have real-time geo-spatial data (which I don't), you can implement a kind of auto-updating live feed into Google Earth as well.
• Desktop presence:  Yahoo Widgets, Google desktop sidebars,etc. Got something so useful that you think users want to dedicate some desktop real estate so you can be all front and center? I would recommend Yahoo widgets first if you are Javascript savvy, since Y! Widgets are written in Javascript. I think there are a lot of possibilities here for small-business dashboard kinds of applications. What are the really important notifications and real-time metrics for a small business? Push them to the desktop with a Widget.
• Windows taskbar: bubbles.  I found this one through Richard White's slimtimer. When Richard first released slimtimer, I didn't use it because the extra browser window cluttered my task bar and kept popping up in alt-tab. Bubbles provides a dedicated browser-like wrapper for web pages, but lives unobtrusively in the task bar. It's less work to bubble-ize your app than to widget-ize it, since Bubbles reuses lots of the UI you created to display in a browser.
• SMS: Do you have data which 1) people would like to access on the go; 2) can be presented as text with relative brevity; 3) is useful spontaneously? Think about building an SMS query mechanism -- users send you an SMS with a query, you send results back via return SMS. The problem is that while it's easy and cheap to send SMS's, it's neither easy nor cheap to receive them: A CSC (the number users punch into their phones to text your system) will set you back $500 - $1000 a month, in addition to a $250 setup fee. Think about it though, because SMS interaction is only going to get bigger.
• WAP / Cellphone browser: Increasingly a viable option as cell phone browsers get better. Through my extremely non-scientific assessment, I think a lot more people use SMS than their cell phone browsers. Go ahead and check out your site through your phone -- it will make you rethink all that nifty Ajax you did.
• Information exposed via microformats:  microformats are the un-API. If you want to expose your data for remixing by others, Microformats are the hip new way to do it. Microformats facilitate access to your data by 3rd parties; if your looking to expose your data to clients or interoperating systems, you're probably better off with traditional web services.
• Firefox sidebars: I haven't tried this, and don't have a read on the level of difficulty. Judging by the quality of FF sidebars I've used, I am lead to believe that there's something fundamentally hard about writing firefox sidebars. Nonetheless, they could be an interesting middle-ground between a pure web interface and a Widgit- or Bubble-based interface.
• Hybrid command-line / web app: Chris Wanstrath created cheat, which is a wiki with very specific content (cheat-sheets for Ruby and Rails development), combined with a command-line script for retrieving cheats when you need them. It's a great example of a hybrid app: it uses the web as a centralized, collaborative datastore, and provides an intuitive, non-web way to retrieve the info when it’s needed most.

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