Advanced search operators to use with Google.
Ok, what I really want is pine + Gmail. I get really tired of the little lags between pressing "c" and when the message is ready to type. Gmail is quite fast, but these little second long pauses between pressing a button and the action are getting tired.
I really don't see that we can have that super fast responsiveness with web applications, there are just too many steps between when I press a button on my keyboard and something happens on my screen.
I keep thinking about the next phase of applications: Web-aware applications that live partly on my computer, for speed, and partly on the network, for reliability. These are going to be difficult applications to build, you'll have to build both the full web application and then extend this to the client.
I wonder, could we do all the work on the client in Javascript? Is it going to be fast enough? Right now, it's not quite fast enough, but with the new work going into javascript on Firefox 3, it just might be.
If we can't do it in Javascript, it's going to be back to compiled applications for each different platform that will interact with the data on the web.
Now that I think of it, of course there will be a continuum. Some applications will be entirely on the web, some will have some persistance and functionality on the client with Javascript in the browser, like Gmail, and some, like Picasa will be a compiled application that interacts with data on the web.
Unfortunately, it's often very different toolsets that you would use to build each of these. It would be nice to have one toolset that you could more easily transition from one type of application to the next.
