Pie Guy: A web game for the iPhone

You know, Jobs wasn't wrong. I would step out on a limb and say that 60% of the App Store could be implemented as a just-as-functional Web App. The sheer capabilities of the WebKit engine and HTML5 capabilities in the iPhone is unreal. It's better than most DESKTOP BROWSERS nowadays. Not as good as fully fledged Safari, but that goes without saying.

I suppose it goes without saying that some of the more ... "media rich" applications (it's a nice way of saying a fart app with tons of fart sounds) take significantly less time to load as an application, but there's something to be said for seriously optimizing your media, and lazily-loading it.

No, a static GPS app (think: GMaps East, GMaps West) couldn't be done well as a web app unless your connection doesn't die at all on the drive.
No, Rolando would NOT be a good Web App (nor would Eliminate).
No, SSH, VNC, RDP, or any other network utility app would not make for a very good Web app.

Conservatively speaking, looking at my own list, I'd say at least half of them could make a great web app. And I'd have that much more space on my phone free if they were :P.

The iPod Touch makes a great gaming machine, and games are a GREAT reason for a dedicated application interface. With some other things that definitely fit the category of app-inclined programs. Google Earth, Air Sharing, qStatus (even if it's not as fast when not jailbroken), and of course, Skype.

The App Store is necessary, and here to stay. But there's a whole class of people that could make things better if they could do it as a webapp instead of having to learn Obj-C, Cocoa Touch, and pay $100 in order to enter.

Personally the game I use to show people the potential of webapps is SpaceWar:

http://www.apple.com/webapps/games/spacewar.html

Looks nice but it's pretty unplayable ... was able to move left and right some of the time but never up and down.

A for effort and T for nice try.

I made my first web recently. It is just a Tic-Tac-Toe game, but I'm really proud of it. Try it out:
http://iwebapp.site90.net/Tic-Tac-Toe/

It is pretty obvious that Apple was playing its cards very close to the chest about the upcoming App Store and native Apps. I don't think Jobs or anyone else "in the know" at Apple was doing anything more than misinformation by saying web apps would be the delivery mechanism.

Look at how massively Apple leapfrogged the industry in terms of App development, deployment, payment. That kind of thing didn't just happen in a year or two ...

I love how often you guys "quote" Steve Jobs as saying things he never actually said (without the quotation marks, but then going on to say something like "of course, he was wrong," as if it were a direct quotation). Can I get a citation, please? I don't see one in your self-link.

Please. Let's not use the 'F' word. I would hate to see Flash on the iPhone.

The game works pretty good on my 3GS, but not something I would normally play anyway, so...

It’s a great idea and nice demo, but it works so clunky on my iPhone 3G, it isn’t even playable.