Oh please let this be the start of the end of web-enabled everything.

I'm excited about Avalon... err Windows Presentation Foundation. The advent of Ajax has and will continue to go a long way toward deadening the pain of web-based interfaces, but I'm still clinging tenaciously to the opinion that there are way too many web apps out there that have no business being web apps.

The New York Times has the perfect excuse for being a web site, and they never really tried to be a web app, but they've done a beautiful thing with the NYT Reader. Go check it out, even if you don't care for the paper. There need to be more apps like this. Good for you, NYT. Sorry the bottom is falling out of your business model.

And here's the beauty of the system. It requires "stuff" on your system to be installed for it to work. And it will handle it automagically and securely.

(Okay, "stuff" is the dubiously-named .Net 3.0 framework. But grandma doesn't need to even know that "stuff" is required. It "just works".)