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General Software Discussion / Re: Yet another application tapping into the "cloud" market.
« Last post by tranglos on September 07, 2010, 07:04 AM »I just don't like all this.-superboyac (August 31, 2010, 06:01 PM)
Another great rant! And really, cloud? I wonder what the real market is for all the remote access/share/sync services that have been popping up like crazy. The real market, i.e. the real need, as opposed to "let's just add this cool-sounding feature because we can charge more from subscription users". I mean, not everybody is traveling all the time, not everybody needs a mobile office, and it would seem to me that the number of those who do is rather small compared to those who don't.
With the proliferation of in-browser-only apps, which all charge annual or monthly subscriptions, I suppose the makers of plain desktop apps don't want to feel left out. If you can add an online service (probably spending much less time developing it than you do on the desktop side), you probably will, just to stay on the more profitable leading edge.
I don't have a data plan for my mobile phone, either, and in the last year there was exactly 1 (one) occasion when net access away from home was highly useful to me, though hardly critical. I was asked at the last minute to moderate a debate, and needed to double-check one fact to refresh my memory, so finally I found a use for the WiFi in my cell. Without a subscription, the brief connection to Wikipedia must have cost me 2 or 3 dollars, but that's nothing compared to what I'd have paid for an annual WiFi subscription. Thing is, I can't quite bring myself to believe that most working people in the world need this sort of service at all times - which is what the proliferation of cloud services and such seems to imply.
I should say I don't use MLO, because the properties pane on the right is quite unfriendly to keyboard-only use (and sliders must be the singularly worst UI for setting priority - I'll take a color-coded drop-down list every time). So I use "Swift To-Do List" from Dextronet instead, where I feel more comfortable with the separation of tasks and categories, and have RTF notes with attachments. Dextronet put the development on hold for more than a year though, as they launched their online service by the same name. Why would I want to put my to-do list on someone else's server? Google I can at least trust not to go away (although I wouldn't trust them in any other sense, and they too have been known to discontinue services), but a small company might disappear overnight. Just recently they've released a new version of the desktop app, with some nice additions, but rewritten from scratch in .Net (used to be plain Win32 Delphi) - now it takes 15 seconds to start and flickers like heck... A different topic, this, and a different rant, but the principle of staying buzzword-compatible at the cost of user satisfaction is similar, I think.
I've already tried Win7 once, then returned to XP (with some annoyance) and decided to wait until SP1. SP1 is already at the door, and I have the time now, so I'll be giving 7 another try. So here's where I'm looking for advice:
