Apple announces 3rd parties can write Web 2.0 apps for iPhone

Apple won't treat iphone like a mini-computer, they're going to treat it like an ipod. Which means a new generation every year or so. They cannot afford to worry about alienating some 3rd party app every time they release a new product, hence the decision to sandbox everything in safari.
Overall, I think this is a good thing for 3rd party app developers because it drastically lessens the distribution model for your applications.
I hope they are able to provide the following to make this successful:
1. support for flash
2. support for technologies like gears (allowing ajax apps to run without a network)
3. a rich api to access native features (think apple's dashboard widget api)
4. an extension of the ipod games api to be able to create and play games on the iphone distributed through itunes.

Ultimately, if you're trying to build an app that requires more than these things, you are probably building the wrong app for the wrong platform.

Its obvious why they did this. Cingular does not want skype running on their phones. They probably forced Apple's strategy to remove the skype possibility since it is a wifi enabled phone.

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i know that web2.0 and ajax cant handle any hardwear specific operation.
i did a whole webpage using ajax, www.ursulahuerlimann.ch using the same framework apple did on their homepage, the Script.aculo.us.

and most possible, the whole "integrates with the whole phone" is more like a special link syntax.
ie: href='call:5551234' or something like this.
its nothing worth wasting a minute on a WWDC.
if apple cant make a real SDK, they should at least do some sort of advanced javascript commands, where you can read the phonebook, or make a connection to the hardware.

but the whole WWDC was just pitty.
what happend to steves reality disortion field?

This is a lame "solution". Even Steve Job's reality distortion field can't make this seem like a good thing and he never should have tried, given the silence of the keynote during the entire demo. It doesn't have the look and feel of all the other apps, you have to open Safari to use them. People don't think of bookmarks as applications no matter how robust they may be. I want to be able to add some icons to the home page of iPhone that launch apps that don't require a connection to the internet!

to 18. No, you can't. Web 2.0 doesn't suppose an interaction with any kind of hardware.

as far as i read, you can access the phones ability.
but only making calls, showing a point on a map and the basic things.

but what about accessing the adressbook? can an application access the adressbook? or can it only add a contact to the adressbook?

what about the camera? can an app access the camera? or do you have to take a picture and upload it then to the webapplication? is it even possible to upload files? that would need an access to the files, ergo a filemanager for the iPhone.

which leads to another question. can the app save something on the phone?

so, the whole applications runs on the server of the creator?
so after all, if you cant store the ressources often used, this means a lot of bandwith for the developers, which equals costs for their server.
therefore, i guess many applications are going to cost if they'll cause too much traffic.

another thing:
airplanes. looks like you cant use any "3rd party" application in an airplane.


is this 3rd pary support or "3rd party support"?

if you can save some applications on the phone itself, like say a flash game, whats the deal with it?

So wait, if I'm a low-end freeware/shareware developer, I now need to pay for a server to host my little app? And if the app takes off in popularity, suddenly a) I go bust, b) the server host closes my account, and c) all the happy users suddenly have their little app die?

This decision seems terrible both for the high end (TomTom, Skype) and the low end (freeware/shareware). Yuck.

I'm still thinking it's a cop-out. I mean, users EXPECT all their web sites to work properly under mini-Safari. So it's not developing for the iPhone, it's developing for the web. It's a good idea to actively support AJAX, but AJAX isn't a solution for everything.

I'll twist an adage, all you have here is a hammer, but not everything is a nail. If you are between WiFi APs, then you are stuck with a web app that loads like a turd over EDGE.

I think the "Web 2.0" meme for iPhones apps is a clever way of opening the closed platform that is the iPhone.

First, it's clear that Apple really never wanted an "open" iPhone, for all sorts of reasons. Mostly channel control.

But the Web 2.0 app mechanism need not be spectacularly limiting.

For example, all of the major browsers (including Safari, I think), now have a mechanism for persisting data on the client side from run to run. And there is a pending standard to support this persistence.

Google "Gears" is a more sophisticated client side persistence mechanism, which will obviously not be in the iPhone, but points in the direction of offline "web" apps.

Via Javascript, and its leveraging of the Ajax mechanism, the modern browser is become the rich client development platform of choice. While in the past we've had "some Javascript embedded in HTML pages", that tide is turning around toward "some HTML embedded in to Javascript programs".

The Safari 3 announcement for Windows is interesting for its 2x Javascript speed. In the past, that wouldn't have been that important. But today, it's getting more and more important.

If Apple provides hooks in to things like Core Animation, and other OS X services to Javascript via Safari, then that just empowers the developer even more.

The true key will simply be what Apple will allow the developers to download, and keep, on the phone. If they let them download and store most any kind of resource, the do not underestimate the power of a Javascript application with some nice backing utility functions. In essence, that's all Firefox is, and that's what many of the Dashboard widgets are as well.

But this means tens of thousands of existing apps - written in HTML, Javascript and Ruby on Rails - will work on the iPhone.

It's very forward-thinking of Jobs et. al. to acknowledge web apps in such a significant way. Countless developers already know these languages, so they can start writing apps immediately. This is a good thing.