The Desktop Takes Center Stage Again

Rumors of the demise of the desktop have been greatly exaggerated. In recent years, bloggers, reporters, company executives, and others have exulted in the apparent obsolescence of the vast space on computers set aside for software. Why clutter a desktop with pricey programs for word processing, spreadsheet creation, and the like when many of those tools are becoming available, often at no cost, over the Web-or so the argument ran.

That view is being challenged lately, though, as a number of companies, including well-trafficked online destinations such as eBay (EBAY), are finding ways to take their services outside the confines of the Web browser and place them squarely within the domain of-you guessed it-the desktop.

And companies such as Adobe (ADBE) and Google (GOOG) have released or are testing products that let Web developers build desktop versions of online services and sites. Google launched a group of Web-to-desktop developer tools known as Gears in May (see BusinessWeek.com, 5/30/07, "Google Gears Up to Take Web Services Beyond the Web"). "Everybody wants to be on the desktop," says Martin Kay, chief executive of online music site Finetune, which recently introduced a way to make the company's music-streaming and recommendation service available on the desktop. "People tend to forget about Web sites."

Window-Shopping with eBay

In recent days, eBay released invitations to a new test version of what it's calling San Dimas, a desktop application of its popular online auction and shopping site (see BusinessWeek.com, 6/18/07, "Going, Going…Everywhere"). San Dimas resembles eBay.com in color scheme and character, but it runs faster and focuses more on photos when displaying search results, making it more akin to window-shopping than scrolling through links and product descriptions. It is also more customizable and lets users shop offline and set up bids or sales to go live at some later time. "There are some specific things about the desktop where you can go a lot further," says Alan Lewis, who oversees San Dimas.

Adobe is helping companies like Finetune and eBay build desktop applications with a system called Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR), which lets Web developers create feature-filled programs that can run offline but also sync up with information and sites on the Web (see BusinessWeek.com, 3/21/07, "Investors Anticipate Adobe's Ascent"). Since a limited release in March, AIR has been downloaded more than 100,000 times. "I don't think the desktop was ever quite as moribund as people said," says Pam Deziel, director of product management for Adobe's platform business unit. "The desktop gives you some additional benefits."

Among those benefits is access to files on the desktop. Typically, Web services in the browser can only gain access to what is uploaded to them, say, photos sent to a specific site. A desktop version could grab all the photos on a computer's hard drive, and then give users such options as sharing some on the Web and using the service to build slide shows that can be viewed only on the PC.

Fine-Tuning Personalized Playlists

Finetune's desktop tool reads music files on users' hard drives in order to better personalize the songs streamed from its music library to the user. On the Web version of Finetune, users have to enter their favorite artists and music genres. The desktop version can create personalized playlists simply by looking at the music a user has already downloaded. In the future, says Finetune's Kay, the desktop music player will integrate songs from the user's hard drive with Finetune's own library of streaming music to create personal music mixes.

Another advantage of parking programs on the desktop is that it can reduce some of the frustrations of having a service in a browser window. People like running Web services because they can easily multitask, jumping from Web window to Web window, says Adrian Ludwig, a member of the team working on AIR's release. But the more windows are opened, the more slowly each service tends to run, as the browser becomes increasingly taxed.

And if the browser crashes from the strain, the user can lose everything-from a half-finished e-mail in one window to the streaming music playing from another. "Flipping back and forth between a lot of things is not necessarily the way you want to operate a media player," says Adrian Ludwig, a member of the team working on AIR's release.

Getting an Icon on the Desktop

What's more, the desktop lets users retain a level of privacy that many fear is lost on the Web. Privacy was a major reason Adesso Systems opted for a Web-linked desktop application when designing its file-sharing product called Tubes, says Steve Chazin, Adesso's vice-president of marketing. The program lets users drag and drop files into folders, known as Tubes, that can then be automatically published to a Web site and shared among select Tubes users. However, the files are always live on the user's desktop, enabling them to be removed from other people's view at any time simply by dragging the file from the shared Tube folder and back onto the desktop proper.

Perhaps most important for developers, the desktop's advantage is that it is still the first thing users see when they turn on their computer. If your icon is there, it's more likely that a user will opt to use your product-rather than the myriad other programs on the Web. Says Kay of Finetune: "It's not in a browser window that might get closed."

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Man versus machine

source : http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/6966460.stm

Computers playing computer games may sound odd, but it's an example of the ongoing man versus machine debate.

To the outside observer, all games can seem pretty pointless. But even to gamers who know they're not, there's a whole subset of pointlessness.

To some, it's investing in a subtle, taxing game like Virtua Fighter and never doing more than bashing random buttons in the hope of a win.

For others it's buying a guide book to a Final Fantasy game and blindly following its instructions as you play, rather than the story or your own sense of adventure.

These ways of playing - staunchly defended by some - do seem to rob gaming of nearly everything it has to offer.

But there is an even greater level of pointless play that baffles almost everyone. These are the systems devised by people who are more interested in getting machines to play for them than in playing themselves.

It's a vibrant, but idiosyncratic, world, from the man who's hoping his genetic algorithms will eventually evolve into Dr Mario masters, to the frustrated Guitar Hero who built a bot - complete with a camera for eyes and virtual fingers - to complete the hardest tracks for him.

It's a little surreal, but watching both of these systems play is strangely compelling, and there's an odd sense of vindication to be found in their triumphs. It's literally a case of seeing something beaten at its own game.

So what's going on? Surely nothing could be more pointless than watching a machine play a machine.

Gamers have to put their faith in their heroes every time they play

The reality is that it's not as alien an idea as it might at first sound. Gamers are used to watching games try to beat themselves.

Arcade games have always traditionally had "attract modes" that demonstrated how the game should be played, and ever since it's been possible to see games play themselves.

Even stranger, most gamers are used to games which do their best to help you win while they try all-out to beat you.

Many gun-based games have an auto-aim option, which means the game is busy processing how best to swing your reticule over the target at exactly the same time it's trying to process how to get enemies to pop up in corners you didn't expect.

Puzzle games take a few precious cycles out from relentlessly crunching the numbers on winning strategies to offer you helpful tips. And, we, weirdly, are totally at ease with this schizophrenia.

Why on earth would we trust a machine that seems to be playing both sides against the middle?

Why don't we ever wonder if the game is using a slightly dumber AI to proffer tips than it is to guide its own moves?

Genetic algorithms are being used to "teach" computer to play Nintendo games

Can we be sure the so-called auto-aim isn't doing the software equivalent of jogging our elbow every time we shoot?

We can, but only because there's an instinctive understanding that - despite all the indications to the contrary - the games aren't trying to win.

They aren't machines determined to beat you, they're machines determined to entertain you. And it's reasonable to put your trust in them, because it's not them you're really trusting.

It's tempting to see games as the front-line of the great man versus machine debate. As the quest to build computers than can outsmart humans marches on, games remain the high-profile acid test.

A decade on from Kasparov's famous defeat by Deep Blue, computer programs such as Rybka can routinely beat players at Grand Master level.

Human intelligence, refusing to be put on the back foot, is taking refuge in creative ingenuity

Human intelligence, refusing to be put on the back foot, is taking refuge in creative ingenuity, inventing games like Arimaa, which are specifically designed to be easy for humans but hard for artificial intelligence.

But for most people, and for most games, that sense of pitting the human against the artificial isn't what you're aware of.

When you play, what you're doing is going up against the men behind the machine.

That's why watching bots and algorithms get the best of a game is so satisfying. For years, the machines that game developers build have been getting the better of us. Now our machines can, if only occasionally, get the better of them.

But at its best, gaming isn't about our machines or their machines.

At its best, the machine disappears, becoming instead an invisible conduit between you and these dozens of men and women who've spent years bending their immense imaginations and arcane skills to creating something designed purely to make you happy.

You put your trust in their instincts, and in their sincerity in trying to build an extraordinary, satisfying experience for you.

It's one of the ways in which game players have a much more intense relationship with game creators than is true of consumers of most other artforms.

Directors, writers or musicians can let you down, by making something you don't like, but they can rarely betray your trust.

Gamers have to put their faith in their heroes every time they play.

It's perhaps part of what enables game companies to engender the kind of fanatical loyalty that Nintendo does amongst its fans, and what accounts for the viciousness of the vitriol that unpopular products can produce.

Indeed, when you read the kind of hate-mail some studios are subject to, you have to wonder if they wouldn't prefer to be making games for bots and genetic algorithms. You rather suspect they might have better manners.

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