Web Apps Good Enough (For Developers)
June 13th, 2007Michael Tsai spots an especially good contradiction in Steve Jobs’s dismissal of browser apps during his interview with Walt Mossberg last week, followed by his celebration of browser apps in the WWDC keynote on Monday.
Glad I’m not the only one who is in a cranky mood about Apple’s flimsy iPhone SDK spin.
To be clear: It’s (kinda-sorta) OK that iPhone 1.0 doesn’t come with an SDK. What’s annoying is jumping through hoops to try to convince an audience of experienced developers (OK, and press) that web applications are a suitable alternative to a real SDK.
Silence on the matter would have been preferable.
For more on exactly how I feel about this, read Paul Kafasis’s excellent analysis.
June 13th, 2007 at 9:07 am
While I do agree that this seems like a very convenient solution for Apple, I am not certain that this is in any way a bad thing for the iPhone. While developing real cocoa apps for the iPhone would be cool, I think this having a real browser on a phone and being able to run web apps is a good thing, and that it opens a lot of opportunities. Different opportunities than being able to run Cocoa apps, but opportunities none the less.
What Apple at least could have done though, is some way to save a bookmark in the home menu, which accesses the page without an address bar.
June 13th, 2007 at 9:31 am
Apple’s really blowing it with the iPhone. Sure, it’s “sexy”… but I’m sure that I’m not the only one who was ready to buy one in an instant until finding out that it wouldn’t be a REAL handheld, á la Palm/Newton. Not for $600.
June 13th, 2007 at 9:46 am
Totally agree, Dan! Whilst I was out of the country during WWDC, it seems to me it’s a slightly below-par alternative. Web apps on the iPhone are great, don’t get me wrong, but arguing them as a replacement for local apps on the iPhone seems weak to me.
June 13th, 2007 at 9:52 am
Has all the iPhone fever and furor obscured any interesting WWDC news relevant to development on the actual Macintosh? What I look forward to with each new system revision is not necessarily the glitzy keynotable features but the incremental introduction of new tools under the hood (APIs, scripting languages, libraries, etc. — things that provide useful services and resources for professional and amateur programmers). I suppose Core Animation qualifies, but is there any other information about what we create with Leopard that has emerged free from NDA?
June 13th, 2007 at 11:29 am
Let’s hope Apple just drop Mail from X.5. Not only will that protect us from their HTML stationery, GMail is faster and more reliable anyway…