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Comment by wtallis | Hacker News Reader

"there's no browser-native way for a website to launch a program on your PC."

What happened to file type associations? Even with the Adobe Reader plugin disabled, my browser gets enough information from the OS to offer me the choice of saving a PDF or opening it in the standalone Adobe Reader. Why can't that work for OneNote files?

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When you open Office documents from SkyDrive or Sharepoint, the goal is to open the remote copy, not to download it. This enables such niceties as letting multiple people edit the document at the same time, etc. while still using the full Office clients.

So just download the equivalent of a bittorrent tracker file, containing all the information necessary for the standalone client to connect. Sure, it adds another filetype to the association database, but that's not a very big price to pay.

That was my first thought as well, and I still think it's a decent idea. The main drawback is that Bob Someguy might not understand that the file he's got is just a link. If that's the case, he's going to be confused about why it's updating online when he's editing his 'local copy', annoyed when he can't work offline, and possibly lose data when he edits an actual local copy thinking he's got a link.

Those problems can be mostly solved without much trouble. First, if the user chooses to open the file instead of saving it to their downloads folder, then it will be downloaded to a temporary folder and you don't have to worry about the user finding it again and trying to re-open it. Either way, it makes sense for the standalone program to remove the downloaded file the first time it is used to successfully establish a connection, and instead store the connection information in an internal library, presented to the user in a way that makes it clear that the files are online.

Deleting a user's file without their understanding is generally a bad idea. e.g. Bob saves the file to his Downloads folder and opens it. The next day he wants to open it again only to find that it's missing. He eventually learns that he has to re-download every time. Microsoft gets blamed for the 'bug'.

If you design your app's UI properly, it will disabuse the user of the notion that files that are not stored on the computer should be accessible through the local file browser. When using the Amazon MP3 downloader, I doubt people expect to have to re-open the .amz file every time they want to listen to that album. They learn to find their music in iTunes or Windows Media Player. This model should work just as well for OneNote, which already handles most file management internally.

Does Amazon actually delete the amz file?

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