When the “always on” social network Velvet Puffin first launched, it seemed like a tough sell for users. They tied together the web, desktop, and mobile phone interfaces into one social network accessible anywhere, but you had to download a desktop and mobile application to do so.
Velvet Puffin is back and has shed one of the desktop downloads while keeping a presence on the desktop. However, they didn’t use one of the rich internet platforms (Adobe AIR or Silverlight) to do it. Instead, they’ve created a “quick launch” version that allows you to easily access their social networking/chat application on any system with desktop functionality. They’re using a combination of a java applet, Flash, and C++ programming to quickly launch their chat and content sharing application outside of the browser. How they are being used is a bit of a secret sauce, but Founder and CEO Chandrasekar Rathakrishnan says the java is used to ensure security integrity before session is established, Flash for the application, and C++ for maintaining the connection.
Now when you log in, the social networking program launches in its own window, providing the full functionality of the downloaded app. You can even upload photos to your account by dragging them on to the application. As we described during their launch, you can use the client to chat, blog, and share photos and videos. The chat application interacts with Yahoo, GTalk, AIM, MSN, and ICQ. It also sends messaging updates and grabs a spot on your system tray. A chat application like this really benefits from being on the desktop since you can still receive updates while your browser is out of focus. However, the first time you sign on, you do have the annoying chore of giving the java applet permission to run.
Velvet Puffin decided to take this “un-web 2.0″ route instead of siding with AIR or Silverlight because they utilize technologies already on people’s systems. We still have yet to see what platform decisions a lot of sites are making as they merge from the web to the desktop. Pownce and eBay have already sided with AIR. Silverlight is still waiting on some big applications like Popfly to come out of beta.
i don’t know. it sounds like twitter.
Just tried the application
Its really cool.
The fact that they can close the browser and have the client on the desktop, that’s mind blowing!
I dunno, I messed with it and I don’t particularly like the buddy list…of course, I didn’t explore too far, but not having it sorted by groups and stuff doesn’t work for me.
I didn’t get into the other tools, like the blog or photos. I have my own blog I guess.
All of this just makes it way too complicated. You don’t need C++ programming skills to “maintain a connection” with a server, and you don’t need Java and Flash together to put up a rich client side app that talks to a server. People have been doing it forever. First there were Java Applets (that still exist), then ActiveX.
Today, if you want to do this on a Windows machine, try .NET ClickOnce deployments. They work great, auto-update, have full web connectivity…. I don’t see the “problem” that Adobe AIR and these other platforms are out to solve. Its been solved by the platform provider (or is Microsoft not a valid development environment in this Web 2.0 world??)
in Java it’s called Web Start (6 years old now)
in .NET it’s called Click Once (been there since .net 2.0)
why you need to mash java + flash + c++ i will never know..
@#4 and #5
Who cares? As long as it runs, the end user really doesn’t matter. It’s the end result that matters.
Cool concept, but after trying out the desktop app, I’m far from impressed… it’s just not very user friendly. You can’t see all your contacts at once, and for the photos I didn’t see an option to just add my flickr account. In addition, it doesn’t support dual screens. IMO, it was a mistake going their own route instead of using any of the premade ways to create a desktop app.
For years, installing programs so easily, from a single .exe, was one of the things touted as one of the benefits of Windows. Now even downloading and installing something is too hard? (I agree that’s there’s a barrier to entry there,
And now the pesky web browser is too much in the way for web stuff?
You know, if you’re doing stuff on the Internet without a web browser, it’s not a “web application” anymore. It’s an “Internet-connected application”, a peer of the web browser, not subordinate to the web browser. You have an Internet application, one that you’ve figured out how to spawn from a click within another Internet application, the web browser.
I remember when we used to call these things “security holes”. Before that, we called them “helper applications”, and there was a dialog in Netscape where you could list them.
My guess is they use Java because it’s on all browsers and can fire up its own window sans browser chrome. The Java is just the frame. Flash is then used to make things easy to develop visually and animate (I’m a designer. Yes, Flash is easier to work with than Java and DHTML and has the benefit of being vector-based - read: small filesize). The C is employed because, well, it’s a great, powerful language and can be hooked into the Java applet that’s running as a frame.
Java is the gateway between browser & “desktop”*
Flash is the front-end.
C is the transmission protocol.
It all seems pretty smart to me. Maybe .NET has these things, but it wasn’t until I was curious about Live Maps did I even bother to have that behemoth installed.
* It’s not really running on the desktop, people. Check your running processes, I bet you see FF, IE or your browser of choice on there. Kill it, and watch this “desktop” app die.
It’s still very buggy. I’ve been testing it for a couple days and now what it does is load, then hang in the lower right corner frozen while alert messages try to open behind it. The only way you can close it is with Taskmanager.
blahhh…