Brent wrote about his upcoming changes to NetNewsWire’s Combined View, which apparently uses Javascript to communicate between the application and the web view. I know next to nothing about Cocoa, but at my old job I used to rely heavily on so-called hybrid applications that embedded web functionality in a desktop client, and his post stirred up a lot of old memories.
I’m really suprised that we aren’t seeing more hybrd applications out there. Sure, there are some notable ones (I use the Yahoo Music Engine every day, for example), but in the age of “Web 2.0″ the focus seems to be on pure web plays. They’re making great strides, and there are obvious advantages to being able to work on any modern browser, but how many times is the average person at a computer that’s not their own? I’d submit that hybrid apps are easier to create, maintain, and version.
Again, I know nothing about Cocoa, but if you’re curious, the in the Windows/IE world you’d use Javascript’s window.external combined with IDocHostUIHandler and GetExternal to talk to the application (details here). It’s a handy trick for “I can’t do that in a browser” kind of stuff. We used to use it a lot for inter-app communication and linking with legacy data access modules.
Now, going back to something like an RSS reader, which can’t exist without the internet at come point to get feeds, that’s a kind of hybrid app already, but with awesome caching skills. Kudos to Brent for picking up the other side of the puzzle.
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