With Apple’s market growth, everyone’s talking about what the company will do next. Daniel Eran Dilger makes his own predictions over at Roughly Drafted, and while we’re skeptical as to some of his points, we can’t help but be excited as to their prospects. From Bonjour discovery for mobile Safari (to control a variety of devices from the iPhone), to self-contained web apps, we love the idea of these possibilities.
Additionally, the company appears ready to deliver a mechanism for creating and syncing self contained web apps. I assumed this would appear before Apple released its Cocoa SDK, but the pressure to deliver high performance apps that would differentiate the iPhone (and iPod touch) clearly impacted the company’s priorities. Being able to create simple offline web apps that can work on the iPhone even without an active network connection would result in a flurry of HyperCard-like development of simple, useful applets built using HTML and JavaScript, taking advantage of the HTML5 support Apple has built into Safari and WebKit.
At present, iPhone development is relegated to the more hardcore developers, who are either seeking to obfuscate their code by compiling it, else make money on their products. The process for getting an application into the App Store is not for the casual developer, as quickly realized when we decided to take a look at the process. Writing web-apps, on the other hand, is much easier to do, since it requires little more than a rudimentary knowledge of HTML and JavaScript, and the ability to host one’s code online. The problem here is this latter limitation: users of a web application need to be online, and sadly, we’re not quite at the point where wireless internet access is ubiquitous.
Being able to prototype, nay, develop an application in HTML and JavaScript without requiring the user to be online means targeting a development audience that isn’t a dedicated coder, as well as people who simply aren’t coders but have the basic yearn to learn a language with a quick design-to-product life-cycle. In other words, self-contained web applications means anyone with the desire to write a reasonably simple application can spend a minimal amount of time learning how to code (using HTML and JavaScript) to bring their visions into the real world.
For this idea to really be worthwhile, however, Apple needs to include some sort of database framework for self-contained web applications to truly shine. For example, with PHP and mySQL, the possibilities for easy-to-develop applications on the iPhone really come to light. More importantly, mechanics can be established for such applications to attempt to access online servers in the case of connectivity, which means that developers can design applications for both online and offline use, just as Cocoa-based applications can.
While Apple hasn’t boasted much about iPhone web applications recently, it’s unlikely that Apple will ignore this arena in light of the industry’s slow creep towards Cloud-based applications. With this in mind, Apple would be smart to target developers on multiple fronts. Just as the console wars are greatly dependent on which platform boasts the best library of games, he who controls an application library controls the platform of the people.
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Yea, I don’t understand why they didn’t do this right out of the bag. All they really needed to do was, effectively, following the Dashboard model and let folks install “widgets” as applications.
When you add in the current ability for folks to use Web Database features (basically, exposing SQLLite to Javascript), and you really have a slick platform with a lot of power and readily available.
Especially true given the availability of OS X widgets. Apple could have standardized the format such that people could buy widgets for use on the iPhone (via the AppStore) that could also run as an OS X widget. That would also support the idea of getting users hooked on the idea of using their favorite widgets on a mobile platform.
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