First off, I don't know if anyone is working on a desktop CiviCRM application and I've pinged Lobo and Dave Greenberg on the subject and they haven't any knowledge of it either so this is all just conjecture unless someone is currently working on a desktop based CiviCRM connected application.
Background
The other day as I was thinking about some of the projects we are doing with CiviCRM, it struck me that the web server request/respond bottleneck can be a real problem for some of the day to day tasks a CiviCRM administrator tends to do. Nobody complains about the massive administrative feature-set that CiviCRM encompasses but I do hear complaints about the speed it takes to do various searches, import/exports or updating contact records on a per-contact basis. For me the speed seems pretty typical for a website based application but I suppose if you're used to using Act, Filemaker, Access, Excel or whatever desktop solution was used before it can seem a bit time consuming as you wait for the page to load with your results.
One Workaround
On occasion our clients have used Filemaker Pro for their contact/membership needs so to help ease them into CiviCRM, we've tied a Filemaker Pro front end into our MySQL CiviCRM database (using a Filemaker ODBC plugin) and mapped it so that some common activities can be managed through the Filemaker Pro interface. This isn't an ideal solution and doesn't provide access to all of CiviCRM's capabilities but it has helped a few of our clients make the leap to CiviCRM and as a side effect it provides an efficiency improvement for the many contact record related activities providing the computer it's running on has a decent network connection.
A Better Solution
While thinking about the pros/cons of bottlenecks and workarounds it struck me that the real solution would be to have CiviCRM on the desktop. An application that provides all of the CiviCRM goodness but it lives on your workstation as an application and connects to the CiviCRM data source.
Beyond the idea and looking to see if anyone has started a project like this, I haven’t pursued it any further but I’m interested in hearing other people’s ideas and opinions. Who knows, maybe we can start a working group and make this a reality. Let me know what you think.
Cheers,
Andrew