Hard to offer details from NDA-ville, but one thing that has surprised me over the last 24 hours of WWDC is my sudden appreciation of iPhone webapps.

As "Objective C Guy" in Dion's "Scripters versus coders" cartoon, I pooh-poohed the webapp-only "SDK" when Steve announced it last year, and only dove in with both feet into iPhone when we got the "real" SDK on March 6 (which, as I explain to my Java friends, is "the day I started hearing "All Along the Watchtower" a lot"). I've generally assumed that anything cool requires writing a real Cocoa app, building it with IB, etc. Browser apps, while they have their advantages, such as not needing an explicit installation, are always going to be an if-you-must option.

Well, that's what I thought.

In a well-written iPhone webapp, it's hard to tell the basic elements like toolbars and navigation controllers from their native equivalents. You can see this in the Apple Design Award winners from last night, like Remember the Milk and the Associated Press news viewer. In the latter case, the AP demoed a native app in the Stevenote, and while it's very nice, it's not that profound an advance over the webapp version.

As Dion notes in the blog mentioned before, iPhone WebKit recently got 3D CSS transforms and touch events. I'm writing this after a session showing that stuff off. Because of the NDA, I can't say anything of course, but maybe a subjective opinion will be OK:

Daaaammmmmnnnnnn!!!

Next time someone asks me about developing an iPhone native app, I'm going to at least consider if it would work as well or better as a webapp. They're a lot more capable than I'd originally assumed.

Even if, yes, JavaScript still sucks.