Zoho’s recent blog post about why they used JavaScript and not Flash when building their offline version of Zoho Writer has led to some interesting but somewhat predictable responses [1] & [2]. I could have fallen into a predictable (but not necessarily interesting) response myself, but didn’t. Until I saw Ryan Stewart post the following:
I don’t think it’s an accident that Zoho and Buzzword have such different design goals or that Flex applications generally tend to look more sophisticated than Ajax applications.
That quote (and the post) seem to suggest that AJAX webapps are less usable, less sophisticated and, generally, not as pretty as their Flex counterparts. Likely not Ryan’s intent and I did say “seem to suggest” right? I usually don’t define usability based on how an application looks, but on how productive I am using the application or how easy I can learn the application. Unfortunately, some applications try to get by on looks alone. I try to see the inner beauty.