James Robertson reports being underwhelmed by the recently open-sourced Laszlo. He's focused on the syntax, but I'm equally underwhelmed by the end result. The demo apps are all very slick and snappy and have nifty sliding animations in the UI, but Flash was designed to be looked at and not worked with: I can't even select any of the text to copy and paste it, for crying out loud. Except in very specific cases like Squeak, the key to a cross-platform application is not to be pixel identical on every platform, but to describe your application at a high enough level that any platform can provide all the native support you need (scrollbars, buttons, text widgets, spellcheck, copy/paste, drag and drop, whatever) directly. This is where the web succeeds and Laszlo fails, and given the choice, I'd pick the web version of an app every time.
I noticed Adam Bosworth saying something similar recently, in the context of Avalon/Indigo vs. the web:
My mother never complains that she needs a better client for Amazon. Instead, her interest is in better community tools, better book lists, easier ways to see the book lists, more trust in the reviewers, librarian discussions since she is a librarian, and so on.
....
I postulate, still, that 95% of the UI required for this world will be delivered over the browser for the same reason that we all still use a steering wheel in a car or have stayed with << < | > >> for so long. Everybody gets it.
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