I was following a Popfly breadcrumb trail this evening and found this gem among the comments of an Arstechnica review (annotations added by me):
Web 2.0 stylizations, whether its the design visualizations or the weak catchphrase tokenism, have truly “Jumped the Shark.”
The arrival of MS fresh on the scene with Web Apps like Popfly indicates that we’ll be having a Web 2.0 design hangover for quite some time. In fairness to Popfly its difficult to call it out as the tipping point when most of the recent MS web offerings (i.e. Wallop, Soapbox) seem to share the same design tenants. Don’t worry MS, I’ll be doing my part to contribute to the lameness, having only in the last few months gotten approval to target Flash 8 specific APIs, by shoving as much wet floor reflection down the world’s throat as I possibly can. :)
I’m hopeful the Web 2.0 “bubble gum” design mentality will be replaced by a more wabisabi like trend towards unpretentious simplicity. With an increasing emphasis on high-gloss software UI’s I’m a bit worried that the really important elements, simplicity and ease of use, in rich “experience” oriented applications will be lost.
One potential negative side effect of web inspired technologies such as WPF and Apollo is we may see less of the muted elegance of desktop apps like CS 3 (pictured below) in favor of trendy web “flava of the month” application stylizations.
Don’t get me wrong - I’m not one to underestimate the talent, creativity and vision so often exhibited by the Flash or larger design communities. Desktop applications desperately need the breath of fresh air brought on by new technologies like Apollo and WPF. It’s fantastic to be able to easily step beyond the defaults that toolkits like MFC and Swing provide, but we all better get used to the “trendiness” factor.
If you live under a rock and haven’t seen the wave that’s coming I’ve grabbed a few screenshots of some new-age desktop apps.
One of my personal favorites (simple and clean) is Grant Skinner’s DiggTop Apollo application:
From the folks over at Finetune we get this Web 2.0 desktop application stylization:
For Silverlight fanboys, here’s the obligatory conference organizer and networking app from Thirteen23 (don’t even get me started about the vapidity the company name implies):
