Your article was an excellent read, so thanks for the link. I generally agree with a lot of what you're saying.
My potential audience is pretty targeted - mainly research scientists and possibly some government workers. They'll likely be more computer savvy than the average user (on average, at least - some scientists I know are just as bad as Grandma.) What I worry about in considering a web app is:
1 - People want to be able to run the software anywhere, any time, without a connection to the internet.
2 - When entering large amounts of data, which is potentially sensitive, into an application, it seems like people would trust a desktop app more.
Number 2 is subjective, but as a scientist myself, I would feel better about a program running on my own machine.
The latest version of HTML has the ability to do offline apps. i.e. you write your application in Javascript as a webapp, and it can run offline. You can store data locally in the browser and get javascript notifications when you are back online so you can sync.
My potential audience is pretty targeted - mainly research scientists and possibly some government workers. They'll likely be more computer savvy than the average user (on average, at least - some scientists I know are just as bad as Grandma.) What I worry about in considering a web app is:
1 - People want to be able to run the software anywhere, any time, without a connection to the internet.
2 - When entering large amounts of data, which is potentially sensitive, into an application, it seems like people would trust a desktop app more.
Number 2 is subjective, but as a scientist myself, I would feel better about a program running on my own machine.
Any thoughts?