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Adobe Wave pushes web notifications to your desktop and noms your ram
I don't have a problem with Adobe Air. There are a lot of great applications built on it, like TimesReader and Destroy Twitter (which I use to run the DLS Twitter account from time to time).Adobe Wave, on the other hand, leaves me a bit puzzled. Who wants to blow 50 megabytes of ram on an application that only pushes notifications to your desktop from select websites (currently nine with five more sites coming soon)?
Who is Wave targeted at?
By now, most of you probably have a favorite Twitter client or RSS reader that you've got configured just the way you like it. And it likely doesn't use a heck of a lot more than 50Mb ram (DestroyTwitter is currently using 90Mb on my system).
On top of that, Twitter clients and RSS readers are capable of doing heck of a lot more than tapping us on the shoulder whenever a new item makes waves on Digg.
Now, I also understand that this is an initial Labs release and is anything but a finished product. Additional features could be added and the amount of memory consumed could be remedied. Even if you take those possibilities into account, would you bother installing a standalone notifier like this?
Comments
3
Subscribe to commentstechpopsJul 23rd 2009 12:02PM
The memory usage wouldn't bother me but the tool itself is a bad idea. If this is Adobes first step into social networking, it's a pretty poor one. If this were targeted at Adobe customers it would make a lot more sense. A sort of twitter for designers with some incoming from selected places you want to keep track of, say various colleagues IM clients, blog feeds and work mail.
This random dollop of nothing is a waste of time. I can imagine some Adobe manager in a meeting "It's all about the social now, like in that Zune advert, twitter is where we need to be, I want code on my desk by Monday and lets blow this market wide open!"
ryanJul 27th 2009 5:35AM
they basically trying to flip current twitter desktop apps that check for updates and waste your bandwidth every 5 minutes and instead get twitter to simply push those updates to you when they happen... makes sense to me...
John ShapiroJul 29th 2009 2:43PM
Lee, thanks for taking a look at Adobe Wave.
Ryan is right: instead of polling, we have a push (real-time) connection between our server and the desktop app. Obviously, there isn't a ton of content available yet as the beta just went up on Labs last week, but we are making Wave available to publishers and websites to stay in touch with their user community. We've already seen a lot of interesting uses (e.g. someone set up a Wave feed to monitor the Flex public bug base for updates: http://bugquash.com/wave/badge.html) and are eager to see what else people come up with!
While you and Download Squad readers have a "favorite Twitter client or RSS reader that you've got configured just the way you like it," it's a much different story when you look at "average" internet users ;) We put out Adobe Wave as a project to see how people want to receive communications and notifications from websites and content they care about. We'd love to get your feedback, suggestions, and thoughts. There's a forum set up at http://wave.adobe.com.
Best,
John Shapiro
Sr. Product Manager, Adobe Wave