Dan’s Blog (2.0)

Since upgrading my iPhone to the 2.0 software, I’ve dived into Apple’s app store and I’ve been making a point of trying out apps from across the store but focusing on content creation tools (such as the excellent Wordpress app which I’m using to write this post). At the same time, I’ve continued to make use of all the great iphone webapps and mobile Web sites I’ve come to know and love. Increasingly, across many platforms (not just iPhone) application developers and content providers will  face this choice: to build a webapp or to build a native app. There are advantages to both approaches, and some work that’s just getting started that I believe will significantly change the face of mobile development over the next 2 years.

The rush of content and application developers to develop iPhone apps has been impressive and somewhat predictable. The app store is the next big thing. Google, Microsoft and others are now jumping on the bandwagon (probably much to the dismay of the folks at Handango who can rightly claim they’ve been doing an app store since before app stores were cool). Many of the apps in the Apple app store are really good and could not (currently) be written as web apps because they either take advantage of device capabilities (such a location) or because they need direct access to graphics or sound capabilities (3D gaming) not available to the browser engine. However – discounting this need to access the platform functions, there’s nothing about, say, the iPhone Facebook App that couldn’t be written as a webapp. Indeed, if you visit iphone.facebook.com, you get a webapp version that gives you more features, has better usability (in my opinion) and benefits from more frequent updates (but does not, for instance, give you access to the camera so you can automatically take pictures and upload them to your profile, because the browser doesn’t have access to the camera API). Hahlo is another good example of a Webapp that currently beats out all the native application options as a Twitter client (except for its lack of access to the address book, camera, or location). This is the crux: it’s easier to build, update and maintain a webapp than an app (for cases such as the Facebook offering) but native apps give you access to platform features (and other capabilities such as local storage) that webapps can’t.

Enter a new class of webapp: a mobile browser based application. These applications are built using Web technologies (the so-called Ajax platform), can either be deployed as a standard Web application or as a “widget,” and can advantage of platform functions through some ingenous software layers currently being built. Google’s Gears Mobile, Nokia’s Web Runtime platform and upcoming versions of Opera Mobile all are making a start of it, but right now these efforts are all highly fragmented and incompatible. The OMTP, through its BONDI initiative, is attempging to bring some focus to this area, by coming up with a common set of industry requirements for enabling secure access to platform APIs and then driving some work forward in W3C’s Web Applications working group to help to make this an industry standard.

I was interested to read that in all the discussion of the iPhone app store, Apple has also quietly made it easier to write webapps and to surface these webapps to the user as if they were native apps. Essentially, the “web clipping” mechanism allows you to put an icon on your screen to represent a webapp, and with the release of the latest firmware, it is now possible to launch these webapps without the normally associated “browser chrome” (which mirrors the approach Apple has taken with it’s latest beta of Safari on desktop). This approach further blurs the lines between webapp and native app.

In the short term, it means more confusing choices for application developers. But in the long term, at least for an increasingly large class of application (for example, social applications or any app that doesn’t require direct access to platform features like 3D accelerated graphics), it’s clear that the Web will prevail.

Filed by Daniel Appelquist at 15:00 under London, Mobile Web
Tags: Ajax, BONDI, iPhone, Mobile Web, Opera, W3C

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Apart from MobEA V (and meeting Dick Hardt — my quote: “Hey. You’re famous!”), the other highlight of the event for me was the panel I got to chair on Mobile Ajax. Now — this is an interesting topic, and we had some great speakers on the panel (the inset photo is Arun from AOL being his usual irreverent self) with a lot of interesting things to say. We also had Mark Birbeck from x-port, Rhys Lewis from Volantis, and Song Huang from SoonR. The panel kind of explored two alternative visions of how Web Apps will be built and deployed — declaratively (such as with xForms) or (as they are now) through script and currently deployed Web standards. This same conversation is playing itself out in the regular Web world, but one twist that Mobile adds is the issue of processing power and battery life on the devices themselves. If you want to create a Web application that runs on the phone using Ajax, that will eat up your battery pretty quickly. Now that may just be an issue of optimization of the underlying engine, but the fact remains (especially for applications that you want to sit there and poll periodically like … say … widgets that sit on your phone’s screen and provide glance-able information) it’s just not practical to do it in Ajax right now.

Song from SoonR gave a great opening presentation and demo of that product which really opened peoples’ eyes to the possibilities of Ajax on the mobile device – in this case, both Opera Mobile and the Series 60 Open Source browser. I myself has been shopping a video of this application in action around various conferences and events and it never fails to draw gasps. Most people don’t actually believe it’s running in the browser, it’s so slick. (It does.) What SoonR have done with Ajax on the mobile is truly revolutionary.

Filed by Daniel Appelquist at 23:21 under Mobile Web
Tags: Ajax, mobileajax, www2007

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On Sunday I head off to Banff, Canada for the WWW2007 conference. This is going to be one busy week — I’m attending and giving a “lightning talk” at the W3C Advisory Committee meeting, then co-chairing a workshop on the role of the Mobile Web in the developing world with Rittwik Jana from AT&T research, then speaking at the conference itself on the progress and future of the Mobile Web Best Practices working group and finally chairing a panel on Mobile Ajax before heading back home. In between all this, I’ll be trying to soak in some of the raw innovation and excitement at the WWW conference. The thing about WWW is that it’s not a glitzy place where you go to mix with rockstars and digerati. It’s where academia and industry meet to hash out the future of Web technologies. I am really looking forward to it.

Filed by Daniel Appelquist at 19:10 under Mobile Web
Tags: Ajax, banff, canada, developingworld, mobea, mobeav, MobileWeb, W3C, www2007

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