Smart clients dress in grey
I’ve been working on several .NET Smart Clients recently.
A Smart Client is a hybrid application in that the user runs it from the desktop, but its data is provided by a Web Service.
I tend to avoid the dull marketing speak that Microsoft churns out. This kind of output is often a gloopy porridge with just enough acronyms and cool phrases sprinkled on top to hook management.
If I were to indulge in a bit of mimicry of that style, the gist of the Smart Client buzz will be that the Smart Client “leverages the best of both worlds: the power and flexibility of the desktop application with the currency of web data”. Even the Smart Client itself is downloaded from the Web to “consign rollouts to relic status”.
I know. I won’t give up my day job just yet.
Smart Client applications provide an ill-founded excuse to drag in some web designer resource on the grounds that the UI might have some vague relationship to the Web. In reality, however, Smart Clients are usually dressed in the same regulation grey apparel of any other traditional Windows Forms clients. So I find myself in a whole different realm of UI design. To be honest, I feel a bit of a tourist in an ancient land.
The .NET 2.0 controls are interesting, though. Rather than being unique inventions in their own right, most of them are supercharged versions of standard controls, with bafflingly huge numbers of properties. Several are like junk robots: existing controls welded together to create a new (presumably improved) one. A datagrid with comboboxes, listboxes whose options also have checkboxes, that sort of thing.
I’m mindful of the period when Flash MX first came out and we started to see some pretty complex custom components written by horribly clever people. Some were totally unusable for even seasoned surfers, of course, but others seriously looked like the beautiful dreams of Xerox PARC bods circa 1982.
The free flights of Flash were subsequently crippled by accessibility constraints and thinly spread expertise and you had Nielsen complaining vociferously about usability until Macromedia silenced him with a nice bit of consultancy. But the damage was done.
I naively used to believe that the creative multiplicity of user controls was a healthy thing - the cream would get to sit on top, ideas would come from freethinking, positive change would be effected and all ex-Soviet republics would thrive on democracy.
I enjoyed twiddling with Flash knobs. I worked on a few bits myself, a couple of bells and the odd whistle. But eventually I sobered up to the fact that, in the main, users didn’t want to be intimidated by bizarre navigation and, hey, forms are forms.
On the web, we’re still feeding on a diet of select menus, radio groups and textareas. Avalon (now known as the “Windows Presentation Foundation” - sounds like a charity) hasn’t been properly cooked yet and XForms is still raw like radish.
So .NET 2.0 controls are different without being, well, revolutionary. And I know what you’re going to say about evolution and revolution. There’s no need. Tell it to those republics instead.
