Oddpost: Desktop-Quality User Experience
Posted by Julian Harris, 4/13/02 at 8:14:56 PM.
Recently Oddpost was launched.
To describe it as an online mail reader, which technologically is exactly what it is, would be missing the point.
Oddpost is the first practical online web application with a desktop-quality user experience. You click to launch; very quickly a real gui appears, with real menus, drag and drop, inline editing, multiple selections, all super quick. It's all real! It couldn't be much better if it were a local app. It's a superb achievement.
For me this is so key: they have not innovated in functionality; nor even have they innovated in user experience! All they have done is set a precedent for the user experience quality of web-based tools. Quite simply no one has seen this kind of quality before. This is the Internet Explorer for Windows Killer App, if in fact it needed it.
Web guis for web-based tools have been too long in the dark ages! Everything about using traditional HTML for user interface widgets has been fundamentally flawed due to its history. Don't get me wrong, there are some great workarounds, and it's set incredible precedents but HTML still is only good at what it was designed for: content presentation.
My feeling is that this is going to set precedents everywhere. The ante has been upped, and this has a profound impact on any other browser and platform. And I bet mail.yahoo.com and www.hotmail.com are quite interested as well. Can this app be ported to other platforms and browsers? If not, why? Remember it doesn't have to use the same technology; just has to present the same user experience; can this be done in Gecko? Why not? That's the big question people will be asking now. Welcome to Internet User Experience 2.0.
Kudos to Iain and Ethan!
Behind the scenes
How does it do this technically? Dave Winer has some notes after talking authors Iain and Ethan; on the other side what's fascinating is that on the client-side we're talking 172k of gzipped javascript with built-in (=no download) ActiveX components specific to Explorer 5.x, taking approximately 5s to load. Yes, this is a Windows/Explorer 5.x-or-greater app. But you know, someone had to do it. They timed it beautifully; the market can sustain this; there really are enough users out there with this browser profile.
PS 15 seconds after looking at this, my friend commented '$30 a year, I want encryption..." I agree. Privacy is important. Though I'm sure this can be added if it's not already an option.
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