The Irony of iPad: A Great Day For Open Technologies

http://yehudakatz.com/2010/01/27/the-irony-of-the-ipad-a-great-day-for-open-technologies/

by wycats • 16 years ago

206 61 16 years ago

daleharvey• 16 years ago

the amount of effort going into pushing browser technology has always confused me with apple, unless they never aimed for the appstore to be a permanent thing.

but its a pleasant surprise, im excited by the type of applications we can build these days using very common web standards

mbrubeck• 16 years ago

The success of the internet and web keep Apple's computers relevant in a still-Microsoft-dominated world.

I was a Mac user starting in 1989 (and since then switched to BeOS and then Linux). Once everything started moving onto the internet and then the web, alternate operating systems became far less like neglected ghettos. Now as long as it has a good web browser, even the most marginal platform is pretty useful.

bad_user3• 16 years ago

Yes, and what bothers me with this scenario is that things can always go around ... what do people think it will happen when Apple is the one dominating?

I can tell you one thing ... the Microsoft era will seem something like a golden-age.

iamwil• 16 years ago

No market is ever permanent.

Native apps will usually reign in the beginning life on a device. In addition, in the current environment, wireless is still not everywhere and fast. Because of that, web apps still are at a distinct disadvantage for free roaming devices. But I think that will change in the near future.

dfischer• 16 years ago

I like this viewpoint.

tdavis• 16 years ago

I actually tweeted about this exact thing after catching up to the announcement:

  Despite iPad propriety, higher res + HTML5 make web apps   
  much more relevant and far cheaper/faster to develop & iterate.

I think this is absolutely awesome for web apps. The only thing that's missing is the ability to sell "icons" on the app store that merely subscribe one to a web app and stick the link on their home screen. This would meld the ease of development and deployment of web apps with the ease of payment processing the app store provides. I don't see this ever happening because Apple couldn't control the ability to review subsequent changes before they were live, but it's a nice dream.

rodyancy• 16 years ago

"The only thing that's missing is the ability to sell "icons" on the app store that merely subscribe one to a web app and stick the link on their home screen."

The thing that is really missing is iTunes accounts, i.e., the ability for your prospective users to pay you with the touch of a button and a password. Although, on a larger display, Amazon payments and Google Checkout will be more relevant.

elai• 16 years ago

You can do that now effectively.

Many apps today use a base webapp that can be changed at any time and a thin iphone shell over top of it. And change the app all the time. And don't get any problems from apple.

Also in app purchase would be fairly easy to integrate with a webapp json api and an an iphone app wrapper to handle purchasing.

WilliamLP• 16 years ago

The elephant in the room is that no matter how much Douglas Crockford apologizes for it and tries to brush the fact aside, JavaScript the language, the browser DOMs, HTML, and CSS make an absolutely terrible platform on which to develop large, complex, and well performing desktop-style apps.

I can't be the only one who thinks this, and it seems like Google is the only one to have any success at all in doing this on a large scale.

vais2• 16 years ago

Cappuccino and Objective-J nicely abstract all of these away: http://cappuccino.org

old-gregg• 16 years ago

You are absolutely correct but you picked the wrong venue to express this view, hence downvoting.

From a purely technical perspective web platform is approaching DOS circa 1990 accelerated by sheer amounts of open source libraries available today. But it still provides pretty much DOS experience albeit on a high-res screen.

I am not sure it's a bad thing though: when you give developers absolute freedom over your hardware they will quickly turn your PC into a typical popup-ridden WinXP box with tray area half-screen wide :)

bretthoerner• 16 years ago

"The Web is the most hostile software engineering environment imaginable." - Douglas Crockford

nimrody• 16 years ago

The iPad/iPhone helps with one aspect of the problem: There is only one platform to handle. No need to support broken old browsers.

[by the way - I haven't seen any statistics but it seems Apple users are more likely to update their OS/Apps to their latest version. So supporting old versions is less of an issue]

10ren• 16 years ago

Like the first Apple, the iPad is a miracle of tightly integrated design, giving maximum power from minimum hardware. (e.g. custom A4 processor for 10 hours of HD playback.)

Web apps will be too slow.

Eventually, hardware will catch up, and less efficient but more modular designs will be fast enough (as with the first Apple).

loire2802• 16 years ago

The iPhone 3GS has very fast javascript performance.

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/06/24/iphone-3gs-javascript-p...

I don't think I'm making a big leap to speculate that this means the iPhone runs javascript comparably to the consumer-level (read: cheap Best Buy) desktop running some version of IE that most people have.

Considering the iPad's processor is significantly faster, I see no reason why web apps wouldn't run perfectly well on it.

idlewords• 16 years ago

Propriety (n.) - The quality of being socially or morally acceptable.

I don't think that word means what you think it means.

baguasquirrel2• 16 years ago

I also wonder why more people haven't mentioned the A4. Intel seriously needs their asses kicked. The A4 isn't going to be open tech by any measure, but the fact that it was possible may mean we will get more attention/innovation in that area-- not open by a direct technical standpoint, but openness in terms of market options/competition.

pohl• 16 years ago

Aren't the terms for licensing ARM pretty liberal by CPU standards?

baguasquirrel2• 16 years ago

Sure, and if the iPad succeeds, we will hopefully see more of them being fielded. This would be an opportunity for them to break the choke-hold Intel has over the processor market.

edit: I mean seriously, do you think Apple is going to sell the A4 and become a chip producer? This move is a win for ARM.

gchpaco• 16 years ago

98% of smartphones use at least one ARM CPU. Intel is and has been for a long time a joke in the embedded scene. The only thing that's been propping them up in laptops has been the need to use Windows, IMHO; as such they're in trouble.

joneath• 16 years ago

I was wondering what Samsung(current manufacture of the 3GS's A8 processor) was thinking during the announcement. With the iPad using in-house silicon I will bet the next iphone will as well. This is going to hurt any future ARM manufacturer that Apple might have used.

tesseract• 16 years ago

I'm hearing quite a bit of speculation that Samsung is the fab for the A4. If so, they are still getting a slice of the action.

passingthrough• 16 years ago

What happens when this device becomes ubiquitous and Apple decides to support the features in HTML5 "they" want and not others, or to stop supporting it altogether. Will you switch to another browser on your IPod/Pad/Phone?

n8agrin• 16 years ago

I whole heartedly agree with what Yehuda is saying here. If you're not writing a game and don't need direct access to the hardware (i.e. camera support on the iPhone/iTouch) I find it very hard to understand why you would _want_ to write anything other than a highly optimized HTML5 app. Wanting aside, I totally understand why people _do_ write native apps, both for reasons of integration-feel and for speed, but I'd like to think most app developers would rather have a highly optimized Safari and a robust / optimized Javascript API to write their apps with instead.

sandGorgon2• 16 years ago

One area in particular where iPhone web apps fall short of native iPhone apps is scrolling. This friction might make sense for regular web pages rendered on the iPhone’s small screen, where by “regular” I mean “not optimized specifically for display on the iPhone”. But it just feels slow — stuck — on iPhone-optimized apps.

That was the Daring Fireball page on PastryKit

wycats2• 16 years ago

Did you read to the end? It's possible, with pure HTML, JavaScript, and CSS, to solve these problems. Apple has, and we don't need them to release "PastryKit" for us to get the same powers.

callmeed• 16 years ago

Weren't similar things said about the iPhone pre-App Store? (that mobile safari supported HTML/CSS/JS/etc)

Still, I don't think there were any groundbreaking iPhone web apps that didn't eventually become iPhone Apps.

swannodette• 16 years ago

I dunno, mobile GMail on iPhone Safari is pretty impressive.

dantheman• 16 years ago

That's only because apple won't let google release a mail client.

mrshoe• 16 years ago

I fail to see the irony here. Apple is not trying to stifle innovation and control absolutely everything we do with their devices. As he points out in the article, Apple is the biggest driving force behind open web standards and their implementation in WebKit.

The motivation for the App Store is simple: consumers want an easy way to buy apps, and developers want an easy way to sell apps. If you want to take advantage of the payment processing, bandwidth, store interface, and marketing provided by the App Store, you have to adhere to their ToS. I'm sure Yahoo! Store has ToS as well.

However, if you want to roll all that on your own, go right ahead. As pointed out in this article, no one has done more to support you in that endeavor than Apple -- including a lot of support in WebKit and iPhone OS specifically for web apps on these devices.

It's not just a question of web vs. native, either. Even if all iPhone apps were HTML5/CSS/JS, you'd still have to adhere to Apple's ToS in order to sell through the App Store, and you wouldn't have to adhere to them if you sold through your own store.

bad_user3• 16 years ago

> However, if you want to roll all that on your own, go right ahead

You can't do that with native apps. You really don't have that choice, and while the browser is really capable, it means some precious functionality is out of reach ... like being able to handle the web-cam.

> Apple is the biggest driving force behind open web standards and their implementation in WebKit.

Oh, please. They took KHTML and invested some resources into it. Then it became a defacto standard for mobiles, because it remained LGPL, because KHTML was LGPL.

Surely Apple is doing his part, but to call it "the biggest driving force behind open web standards" ... Jesus!

Speaking of that, I guess you're not using Linux and have never encountered a page filled with Quicktime screencasts. And on Windows you have to buy a license to get full-screen? WTF is that? Sorry for the expression ... but driving force, my ass ;)

ezy2• 16 years ago

Wow, do people think if they say this enough times, it'll be true?

Apple doesn't give you access to the same experience from the web as from a native app, and simulations of such have up to this point been second class and will remain so. End of story.

A netbook-ish device with no way to put software on it except thru a proprietary corporate censored app store is a big loose. Beyond the hype, I think this device will be everyone's wakeup call. Noone cared too much about the iPhone app store problems because of its limited form factor. Truly, there's a limited number of things you can do with it in a reasonable manner and they were all covered generically about 6 mos after launch.

This device can do much more, but there's a lot you won't be able to do because everything must be vetted by Apple.

wycats2• 16 years ago

Wow, do people think if they say this enough times, it'll be true?

Apple has been spending gads of time, energy and effort to make the web experience as close to native as possible. This includes giving access to hardware accelerated CSS animations, access to GPS, and access to offline storage (I outlined a bunch more in the article).

For instance, there is no reason the New York Times app they demonstrated today would not have worked fine as ipad.nytimes.com.

code_duck• 16 years ago

I don't see what possible motivation Apple would have to make the web experience as close to native as possible. They don't get a cut of sales on native apps, and they can't control the content, style or functions to the same extent - are these issues not important to Apple? Seems they are from how they act about app approval.

ezy2• 16 years ago

The NYTimes app is truly trivial. In fact, I expect it actually is a web app with some native stuff around the fringes for transitions, popups, etc. And it fits in the genre of a webapp, where you sit and read pages. That is not a good example.

For truly interactive apps, that are about content creation or the interactivity itself, the web is second class to the native experience. Just the fact that an address bar pops up when you tap the top of the screen should tell you that.

A really good example is gmail. This is the AJAX posterboy, and it has a stellar interface for the web. But it is frankly still second class, even on a desktop. It wins on the desktop because it's free, convenient and because it's good enough, not because it is a paragon of usability compared to the best native mail app. On the iphone, they've tried even harder -- but it's even worse. It feels nowhere as smooth as the native Mail app. It's got features, but it's a crappy experience.

jawngee• 16 years ago

Except the iPad simulator in the SDK Beta doesn't ship with Safari. You can sort of fake it with S4, but only sort of. Just like you can sort of fake a native app with HTML5, but only sort of.

I've commented before how this is a disaster, and will be even more so as we become even more mobile. The precedent has been set and it's only going to get bigger and more ubiquitous.

That said, I'll still be getting an iPad. But mostly because I write apps for myself and the iPad is something I've been waiting for to fulfill a specific purpose that the iPhone only sort of takes care of.

abdelazer• 16 years ago

Why in the world is Safari not on the iPad simulator?! I'd like to believe they'll fix that during an update, but I hesitate to think that Apple would do anything I find sane...

whughes• 16 years ago

It doesn't matter how open HTML5 itself is. Going "to the cloud" is still a step backward for openness. I'd much rather be stuck with .doc files than have everything stored on Google Docs and transmitted using open Web standards. Openness is more than just file formats. Moving to the cloud is just as big a step back, if not more, than the App Store.

patio11• 16 years ago

You know how there is the free-as-in-beer versus free-as-in-speech distinction? I think we need an open-as-in-I-can-build-stuff-without-your-permission versus open-as-in-consumers-theoretically-control-their-own-data distinction. I kind of like having the first type of open around. The second type, meh, whatever.

I make toasters for people who like toast. They pay me to make toasters so that they don't have to deal with the freaking breadcrumbs. The word breadcrumb sort of scares them, anyhow. They don't need open breadcrumbs. (Influential people, including many present here, think open breadcrumbs are a moral imperative. None of them buy toasters. I optimize accordingly.)

On the other hand, as a toaster maker, it is very handy for me that I don't have to apply to a Central Toaster Authority for a Certified Toaster Maker Certificate which will let me check out The Black Arts of Toaster Manufacturing from the library and use my Genuine Toaster Tools (cost $100,000 per set)) to start cranking out toasters.

aminuit• 16 years ago

I get where you're going, but the toaster analogy doesn't work. If you want to sell toasters (or basically anything that takes mains voltage) en masse in Western markets, you'll have to fork over several large to Underwriters Laboratories and go through their approval process.

vais2• 16 years ago

Apple has finally made a netbook - and they did it on their terms. Bravo!

Devilboy• 16 years ago

Related news: Apple now allows VOIP apps with the new iPhone / iPad SDK

http://www.engadget.com/2010/01/27/apple-lifts-voip-over-cel...

mark_l_watson• 16 years ago

I agree with Yehuda that any good browser platform helps promote web apps, and HTML 5 makes this even better. One point of disagreement: I think that it is awful to not have a sandboxed Flash implementation so the device could access hulu.com, conference videos, etc. This rules out my wife and I buying one of these because I would not by a web browsing device that could not access quite a bit of web content.

robermrangel• 16 years ago

The studio execs behind hulu.com bought into this:

http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flashmediaserver/articles/digita...

If you're going to stream Hollywood content, you'll need Flash. You'll find that Hollywood content on YouTube is delivered in rtmpe:// only, while all other content is MP4 downloaded via http. Hulu is pure rtmpe.

And you'll need adaptive streaming.

Here's a good proposal Apple put out:

http://developer.apple.com/iphone/library/documentation/Netw...

Now someone convince Hollywood this is secure and incorporate into HTML 5, and you'll kill Flash.

loire2802• 16 years ago

I agree that in the short term, not having Flash will wall off large sections of web content.

However, if the iPad takes off we will have to either provide alternate content or abandon flash on our heaviest flash sites. The web design company I work for will probably switch to standards-based Javascript animation and HTML5 video with the usual fallbacks for IE6. We already use JS for many things that used to be flash, like menus, slideshows, galleries, and animations.

When it was just the iPhone/iPod touch, with their relatively small browsing traffic, it was easy to shrug it off when a site didn't work properly. Expectations will be different with this device. My clients will be asking why their site is broken on their iPads.

The big video sites will implement an HTML5-powered player for the iPad because it allows them to go around the iTunes / App store model. Smaller video players will probably make the switch sooner.

Apple may be doing the developer community a favor by giving us a reason to leave flash behind. The runtime is fine on Windows but sluggish on OSX and slow and buggy on Linux; it's frequently using more CPU time than anything else on my system and often has terrible video playback performance.

noonespecial• 16 years ago

If the only thing we get out of the ipad and its ilk is a large installed base of flash free devices, it will all have been worth it. I don't like Apple's closed everything attitude, but I like adobe's even less. The enemy of my enemy...

thomasfl• 16 years ago

Sell accounts on sites like Dropbox, Basecamp and 37signals on iTunes Store? Not a good idea for Apple, but maybe a good idea for someone else?

c00p3r• 16 years ago

Yeah, finally a 4chan-compatible device! =))

AndrewO• 16 years ago

It's ironic that Steve's much criticized initial suggestion of "why don't you make web apps?" in lieu of an SDK when the iPhone first came out is now more and more acceptable. Certainly Safari advances and all the negativity about the approval process have played a part in that.

I just find it funny that Steve had to be "wrong"* about something just to show how right he was about something else...

[*] open to interpretation of course, depending on how you feel about the SDK and the AppStore.

The Irony of iPad: A Great Day For Open Technologies

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