I downloaded eBay Desktop yesterday to get a feel for how this approach would work for an online marketplace, using Adobe Air. The product has a nice look and feel and has some functionality that is not in the eBay website. All that said, the extra functionality does not make up for the fact that this really isn’t a good application for the Adobe Air product platform.
The reason I say this is that for a website like eBay, which is a marketplace with thousands of products, the website itself is a much more productive environment. It is way faster with returning results for example. When you use the desktop product to look for something it literally has to do the same search plus download the results to the desktop application. That is a massive use of bandwidth and a massive waste of time and resources. In my environment with DSL, an eBay search completely freezes the desktop application for minutes at a time.
IMHO, totally the wrong environment for using the Adobe Air platform. Better suited would be a scenario like this: For software development a development team uses eclipse IDE and SourceForge for Project Management and collaboration. In this case,we would integrate the eclipse IDE with SourceForge using AIR. Doing this would allow us to provide the developer with a dashboard within his environment where he could deliver or receive code, update mail lists, bug reports, patches, etc, without ever having to leave the development environment.
There are many possible approaches like that where we can show some real productivity increases using AIR. The eBay one just isn’t one of them.
Open Office
The speed results that you experienced are curious, and they contradict the experiences of other users and our own product testing. The amount of data that is sent from eBay servers to eBay Desktop is about 10 times smaller for a search than doing the same operation in a browser. This is because only the data needs to be sent down, vs an entire web page. Also, your statement that eBay Desktop “literally has to do the same search plus download the results to the desktop application” is wrong. Whether in a browser or in eBay Desktop, the results are “downloaded” — they have to get from the servers to your computer somehow!
Alan Lewis
Product Manager, eBay Desktop
Alan, Thank you for your comments and concerns. Please understand that I am a huge supporter of Adobe AIR Platform and eBay in general although certainly not a power user of either.
I have to believe that I cannot possibly be the only person experiencing these results. This must be a huge concern for you and your group. I will try to set aside time to do some testing on my own to figure out what is going on.
In the meantime, I am running an Acer Aspire 3000 series, XP, 1 GB, Zone Alarm Suite, 3 system LAN connected to AT&T DSL. I was running a search for a MACBook Pro for which it said “too many results to display”. When I did finally narrow things down to where it could display, after a few product views the system simply “locked up” for over 1/2 hour, after which I have to manually intervene and shut the application down. Almost like it was waiting for a handshake or something?
Let me know if I can help further.
Ken
I have since done a little more research, this time shutting down Zone Alarm completely. It must have been slowing traffic or causing timeouts. The product seems to perform much better now.
I still do get the :too many results to display message” when searching for MacBook Pro. This is not a feature :/ that I think the users want. Further, as a desktop application, it should never “lock up” regardless of what is going on with communications. The entire idea of the AIR approach is that the application functions seamlessly whether connected or not. Hopefully I’m not missing something here.
I do happen to like the interface and other features, which are probably quite useful to eBay power users.