February 14th, 2008
Zimbra's Prism client - a great use case for RIAs on the desktop
Matt Asay loves the new Zimbra Desktop client. They’re using Prism as the desktop client, the project from Mozilla labs that came out of Mozilla’s WebRunner. It’s great to see people like Matt get the need for desktop applications. More and more I think people are realizing that they just want to have access to their data wherever they are. Sometimes that means checking email from a web browser in best buy, sometimes it means having it on your phone, but sometimes you know you’ll be spending a lot of time inside of the email client and you want to have a separate desktop client for it.
And there are a ton of reasons. The browser is the swiss-army knife of applications and if you’re a multi-tasker like so many people on the web, you’ll be doing email, checking news, looking up information, so if it’s easy, why not create an email client that runs in a different memory space and has a bit richer experience. The key is making it easy, which is what Prism and AIR both do. It’s just web technologies on the desktop so you can quickly and easily port those browser-based applications that you may spend a lot of time in to the desktop.
Matt does a good job of showing why a desktop experience is still a great one. If we can combine the web and the desktop then I think it’s win-win for everyone.
Ryan Stewart, a Rich Internet Application developer and industry analyst, recently joined Adobe's Platform Team as a Rich Internet Application Evangelist. full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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