Geoff Holden

Internet Dependence (not to be confused with Internet Addiction) is something I’ve seen growing over the last few years, and I’m somewhat unsure what I think about it.

When I look back to my days in high school and early into university, getting onto the internet was a big deal. You had to make sure nobody was on the phone (or was expecting a call) and go through the whole dial-in, busy signal, retry, etc. until you finally got a connection. Then you quickly read and responded to any email, checked Slashdot, ran through usenet, etc. If you had to research something an encyclopedia on CD-ROM (or even in dead-tree form) was much more efficient and reliable.

Fast-forward to today. 49% of Canadian households have broadband internet access [Canada leads U.S. in broadband penetration], and I’d assume almost all businesses dealing in technology are connected.

That’s the background… everyone uses the internet, big deal, right? Well, next up is the dependence upon. The number of programs that depend on (or at least have some part of the functionality that depends on) having internet access is astounding. CD Players use the net to get track names and show you related info, office packages use it for templates & clip-art, calendar applications use it to find out which days are holidays. At last place I was working, we couldn’t compile the application without access to the internet. I know that in a lot of places if you were to shut down the internet access, you might as well turn off the power.

Is this all bad? Hell no. The internet is (generally) pretty fault-tolerant, and we can rely on it being there almost all the time. I, for one, am favouring web-based applications to desktop ones more and more. When you switch computers often (home PC, laptop, lab computer, etc.) it’s nice to have your programs follow you.

I’ve migrated to GMail as my email application. All my mail is now stored on Google’s servers and I can access any message from anywhere. (I really like the ‘Search, don’t sort’ way it works–labels are more powerful than folders when used properly)

I just started using Google Reader ass my RSS aggregator. I know Firefox supports RSS, but Reader will bring to my attention the things I haven’t read yet, and will stop me from having to check an ever-growing list of sites each day.

The program I haven’t yet found is a good online calendar program. I want something that I can read/edit from anywhere, as well as synchronize with my PDA. I’ve seen some good things done with the iCalendar format and WebDAV, maybe someone (maybe me, but no promises or even intent right now) just needs to write a program to sync CalDAV with a Palm OS PDA.

There have a number of been rumours in the last month or so about Google doing a word processor as a web application. There have been many people saying that this simply won’t work, I disagree. I think so long as it had the option to import/export an offline format like OpenDocument, which pretty much every office suite (except the most popular one, which doesn’t… yet) supports, and it had the ability to export to PDF for printing, it could really take off. The ability to read and edit your documents from any web terminal could be quite desirable.

I think AJAX is actually doing what Microsoft once feared that Java would do–make the browser the platform, and make the OS irrelevant. Can it replace all desktop apps? I won’t say yes, nor will I say no, I’ll leave it at ‘not yet’. Things like photo editing will require a large amount of bandwidth and storage space, but give it time. I’ve seen that some of the online photo-printing places will let you do simple things like cropping/removing red-eye. I think as bandwidth increases, we’ll see more and more apps turn web-based, but it’ll be quite a while for some other applications like video editing ones (massive bandwidth required there).

As a sidenote, I’ve decided to steal a little idea from Penny Arcade and start putting a song quote at the bottom of my posts. See if you can identify the song before getting the answer by hovering over the text.