tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3998644802443249252.post985873320646051769..comments2011-12-26T22:04:20.946+08:00Su Sheng Loonghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02310290907155367547noreply@blogger.comBlogger2125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3998644802443249252.post-88810105831580757372011-03-10T04:59:15.996+08:002011-03-10T04:59:15.996+08:00I don&#39;t think anything is going to kill development of desktop applications. What you are discussing is the death of traditional distribution of those applications but not the apps themselves.<br /><br />Once that happens, the only deciding factors for whether or not an application is considered a &quot;desktop&quot; app is the machine being used to run the app (chosen by the user) and the needs of the application itself, such as input devices (mouse &amp; keyboard), memory requirements, etc.<br /><br />Since my computer can&#39;t process bits stored on another computer (a cloud server), those bits must be downloaded to my machine before use. This means that any application that has to process a lot of content (such as a game) must still store that content locally. The difference between downloading game content versus installing game content is nominal.<br /><br />The Doom demo shown above is a good example for showing off WebGL because the content for that game is tiny by today&#39;s standards and can be downloaded in moments. The very cool Fractal Lab application (http://fractal.io/) avoids this by having procedurally generated content. But modern games such as Crysis 2 will get no such benefit and players would still need to download gigabytes worth of art before they could play.<br /><br />WebGL won&#39;t solve the piracy problem because the majority of applications should still be able to run in a closed environment (not connected to the internet). Would anyone buy Angry Birds if you couldn&#39;t play while in airplane mode?<br /><br />Getting back to the development side of the argument, as a software programmer myself, I see one glaring flaw in WebGL and that is Javascript. Javascript is rather unstructured and is unsuited for non-trivial applications. Other initiatives such as Google&#39;s push to allow native code to run from a browser (see<br />http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/02/18/google_releases_first_native_client_sdk/) means that I will still be able to write my applications in C/C++ using OpenGL.<br /><br />And once I&#39;ve done that, I can distribute on disc, download, website, app store, whatever. If the application happens to require 10 gigs of ram and a beefy video card, then it isn&#39;t going to be run on a tablet, regardless of whether or not the app is hosted in a web page.Brandon Petershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04067121535848746278noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3998644802443249252.post-12656135523088695872010-07-15T22:45:13.643+08:002010-07-15T22:45:13.643+08:00This is almost definately the future. The only problem will be to find a good way of marketing the software we make. If this opens up, it would finally be global competition literally. Someone from ulan bator in a small hut can challenge a software house. So, start thinking how best to market using this sweet piece of techonlogy :DKanaghavelnoreply@blogger.com