The Irony of iPad: A Great Day For Open Technologies

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.

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.

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.

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).

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

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.

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.

That was the Daring Fireball page on PastryKit

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 ;)

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.

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.

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.

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.