Pre SDK thoughts
Just before Adam Bosworth left BEA for Google I remember standing in the hallway at Moscone West outside of some keynote and watching while he showed Tim O'Reilly and Dale Dougherty what he'd been working on. He'd been arguing that the best way to deliver and support applications was through the browser.
The argument is compelling. IT departments will prefer browser based applications - there's nothing to install or maintain. You just point your browser at a web site and it works. Upgrades, bug fixes, security ... all of the usual headaches for your IT staff all happen at the server end. No need to figure out what version you are running or to look at your environment variables.
At the time, however, there were certain things that browser based apps didn't do. For me, Google Maps changed all of that. That was the application that explained to me that without upgrading existing browsers, you could change the way a browser based application looked and felt.
So as Apple prepares to announce the iPhone SDK in a couple of hours I'm torn. Haven't people been trying to convince us for years of the advantages of browser based applications? And Apple has put the browser on its list of strategically important pieces of the puzzle to own along with hardware and the operating system. Owning its own browser is very important to Apple. And that browser now works on Mac OS X, on Windows, and on the iPhone. We can even clip parts of a page and create an icon on one of our iPhone home pages so that going back to that page is almost like starting up an application.
And yet developers want their own applications. Despite arguments to the contrary they don't want to be restricted to the browser. As much as Google Maps showed us the power of working through the browser, Google Maps for the iPhone showed us the advantages of not having to. We can take advantage of special navigation to get to the features of the application in a more user friendly way than a web page could offer.
Developers looked at Google Maps and whined "how come they get to and we don't".
The answer easily could have been, "when you have an app as compelling with as many users as Google Maps come talk to us." In fact, the answer might still be a variation on that theme.
In a little over an hour we'll see.
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Mac
Comments (3)
Read More Entries by Daniel H. Steinberg.
The mistake is to ever think it is all or nothing. “Browser-based apps are all we ever need” is just as wrong as “browser-based apps aren’t good enough”. The truth—as usual—lies somewhere in between.
Thanks Paul - it's funny I had another couple of paragraphs in this post that I deleted because I thought that I'd wandered off topic. Bosworth also spoke in his keynote address at that conference about just this issue. He wanted browser based apps that continued to work well enough when you aren't connected.
I think his example was getting on an airplane and continuing to work with your email using a mail client. You can read the mail you downloaded while connected and you can compose email that gets sent when you are connected again.
Also: on mobile devices, network latency is still an issue. Ta-Da Lists is a great web app, and works great on the iPhone—except when I try to check items of my shopping list at the supermarket. Then it’s irritatingly slow.
A native app that works instantaneously, and syncs later if necessary, would solve that.