The line between web and "real" apps on the iPhone

But remember that Google Gears is coming to Safari's Webkit! See http://castfortwo.blogspot.com/2007/06/future-of-mobile-apps-google-gears.html

I'm sorry but it seems what ppl will successfully do w this phone is scroll up + down their photos + mp3s. And listen to the mp3s. More and more details sound either limitware or uncomfortableware. Let's wait for v.2 or the competition...

I think the iPhone is going to herald in a whole new era for Apple. I haven't read this anywhere, and I don't have any inside information, but I'm just connecting the dots.

What I think will happen is that .Mac is going to be completely revamped. (Jobs has alluded to this in interviews already.)

Anyway, I think that the next version of iLife will be fully written in AJAX (or at least use it to a great degree) and available via .Mac. This allows it to run on the iPhone and also in Safari. They pretty much already have .Mac mail set up in AJAX, so that was a test.

Next thing you know, Apple is in the subscription business, selling every manner of great, intuitive software for Mac AND windows users, all available to be hosted on their servers, downloadable to iPhones and Safari around the globe.

Remember, you heard it here first!

-mmmmark

Guilherme:

You are very, VERY wrong here...sorry my man :)

The *UI* for widgets is made from css/html..this much is true. However, widgets have access to the full system...cocoa, foundationkit...embedded code, whatever.

12 of the 19 widgets that apple themselves ship have hooks into the os. Widgets can run applications in the background and receive data from them. They are very much Applications; the simply use a different api for the user interface.

Ask yourself this one question. Which is more fun and way cooler to use....

Google Earth ?
OR
Google Maps?

Rich clients with back end server clouds are much more interactive. You are always limited with browser based technology. I have to use Salesforce.com every day. It is a piece of crap. By the way, Safari does not support everything in Salesforce...... Which his Steveness took the time to mention.......

Hmmmmm....

Chuck


Chuck

I don't think it's "bad" per se. I just think that it shows a large amount of misuse of power and cost. If they wanted to make a phone that could do all this and run webapps, they could have made one that costs far less than what this phone costs.

That, and the fact that it requires an Itunes Music Store account is why I'm not getting this phone. I run Apple/Linux at home, and Apple/Microsoft/Linux at work. This type of variety puts me in a very odd position.

I think you people who are cynical about "Web 2.0 apps" and how you will need to load Safari and be on the Interweb to run the application, etc. should take a look at how Dashboard widgets work.

Dashboard is just a HTML renderer, built on Safari. It does not look like a browser, though: applications are not constrained to a browser viewport, and you are not as restricted as on a web app. In fact, Dashboard widgets usually do not look at all like "web" apps. Your application can run locally, and store files locally, and access some system resorces that a browser normally wouldn't allow. I assume you will be able to control the iPhone's Telephony API for instance, which you can't do from a browser, as well as the APIs to Address Book, iCal, etc.

Dashboard widgets are distributed on a special package. End users don't really know it's HTML and Javascript. They won't know the difference.

It's not like real native apps, but it's not by any means as bad as the less imaginative posters here are assuming.

Let's not forget about Google Gears, which is Google's developing technology for taking web apps OFFline. That means the iPhone would be able to use these apps without having to be "online." And since Apple and Google have been working closely on the iPhone, I suspect this is where it's going.

Touché :) But the same click sequence applies to all web apps, not just notes. It's just a terrible, terrible way to interact with a mobile application.

I'd just click the "Notes" app that's on the iPhone's main display, but, hey, that's probably just me.