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Forgive me if there is vagueness in this question. In a nutshell, I've built websites for several years, working with PHP, Javascript, JSON, AJAX, HTML, CSS3 and ASP-(many years ago when I didn't know better).

Lately I'm coming across projects where the clients prefer the app on their desktop (offline) rather than on the web.

Is it going to be a long road ahead to learn this? I can't get my head wrapped around going from web to desktop. Could someone give me a 50,000 ft overview of what I need to research? No details needed.. just an overall approach.

Are there packages out there I should read into which give tools for running a system "offline" so to speak? I'm not sure of there terminology or even where to start.

One of the main reasons is that features like Imagemagick seems too slow to process images online. The client would like tool where they don't have to rely on the speed of internet. Go Daddy is useless when it comes to upgrading their tools and I hope to do a standalone system for image processing.

Also, I'd like to get into making desktop widgets like time tracking tools, or anything that can be self-contained and running from a downloaded program that I would create.

Is this a really bad idea?

LITguy
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Try Auto it, it has a tiny foot print and it is great for writing small tools. It does have an GUI editor.

example of auto it widget

auto it widget

Other than that you could use industrial strength Microsoft Developer studios for either VB or C# . You can even do apps in VBA excel.

ozmike
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  • Thank you. This is telling me that my PHP learning will likely be of no use and VB and C# is a new language I'll need to tackle. Which is great to me - I love learning new things! – LITguy Mar 28 '13 at 02:18
  • if you know js then look at this thread you could compile js to exe? or just run in a broswer window http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5742128/javascript-standalone-compiler-or-interpreter-for-windows – ozmike Mar 28 '13 at 05:05