Ask HN: Where's the outrage? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Where's the outrage?

13 pointsfjabre23 comments

Anyone else making web apps concerned that they'll now have the iPad to contend with in just a month or two?

A lot of your web app's UIs/UX will have to be overhauled for finger touch instead of point & click. Many web apps will still work of course but they certainly won't be optimized for the iPad - its display or its method of input.

Sure, Jobs showed off the New York Times iPad optimized website during the presentation but where were the web apps at? I wonder if web apps will be a side note in the coming iPad revolution..

It seems we may all be forced to write native iPad apps to stay competitive.

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A standards compliant mostly-open-source web browser? No outrage at all.

Just think: Everyone who brings an iPad to work is that much less likely to use Internet Explorer.

Outraged? Not really. As a webdev I'm glad the display has a standard 1024x768 resolution and not something weird. (As a consumer, I'm disappointed that it's 4:3 and not widescreen.)

The iPad display's 132dpi is what I'm more worried about. Most images on the web are 72dpi.

My larger point was that web apps will take a back seat on the iPad as they have on the iPhone. If you want something that looks great and performs - you have to go through the Apple ecosystem. I think that's pretty clear.

This is in direct opposition to the upcoming Chrome OS netbooks where web apps will be at the forefront and central to the device's operation, being given better access to the GPU and so forth...

I actually think that web apps are almost perfectly suited to the iPad. With HTML5's local storage engine and users locked in to Safari* there should be some great innovation in this space. The line between native app and web app may even start to blur with this technology.

* I agree that user lockin is usually a bad thing, but knowing the full and unchanging specs of the machine should allow developers to do some really interesting things.

Just wanted to add that you can create an icon for a web app that on the home screen and it will look and act like a native application (e.g. the mobile safari tool bar and address bar won't appear).

Compiled C on a local device is always going to be faster than JavaScript interfacing with a web site. I don't see what they could be doing that they aren't in terms of performance for web apps.

Yeah true.. It's nice to code once though. I feel immense pressure to make a native app for the iPad b/c it's the preferred method of interfacing with the device for obvious reasons.

With the iPhone the pressure is a little less b/c people aren't expected to interact with a web app or any app for hours on end on a small mobile device like that.. For the iPad, a laptop replacement in some sense, users will be interacting with it quite a bit more.

Regarding 132 dpi (well, ppi--displays have pixels, not dots), 132 is pretty dense, but 72 ppi displays are not the standard anymore. In fact, a 15" diagonal display with 1024x768 resolution has 85 ppi, and I think that's about as low density as you'll find. Netbooks are around 120 ppi or more. A cheap 15" Dell LCD is 110 ppi. I'd guess the average is now closer to 100-110 than 72. And all the higher density means is that your images will appear physically a bit smaller, but since the detail is exactly the same (a 300x400px image is 300x400 regardless of your display's pixel density), I'm not sure it matters much.

I thought the dimensions and aspect ratio sounded a little weird at first, until I realized that they were almost exactly the same as the marble-covered composition books that pretty much everybody who has ever held a pencil has used at some point.

I've been carrying one around since the announcement, and I gotta say that aside from video, it's probably the most perfect size they could have picked.

DPI does not mean what you think it means. At all. DPI metadata is completely irrelevant to the web.

It's a piece of metadata about an image that says how densely it should be when formatted for print. Unfortunately that's almost completely useless, because you can't just tell someone to give you an image at $X dpi, because what you actually care about is how big you can print it, so you end up specifying 3 pieces of metadata: W x H @ DPI. It's always much better to just ask for an image at a specific pixel size.

Even programs for a print workflow have to essentially ignore most DPI metadata, because it's usually set to bullshit values like '72' and '96' by asinine applications doing their best to perpetuate irrelevant platform-specifc details. It's marginally better when new Photoshop documents default to shit like 5" x 7" @ 300dpi, but that's still a pointless artifact of people insisting on using a bitmap photo editor for digital painting.

Here's a little list, not from a web developer's perspective, but from the perspective of someone who really wanted to write apps for the iPhone OS but is turned-off by the AppStore. Did I say turned-off? I meant outraged. Offended. Disgusted.

1. Neither the iPhone nor the iPad are going to replace full-blown computers. They're neither powerful enough nor comfortable enough for serious work. Of course, the situation could change dramatically a few years from now, but I'm sure we'll figure something out when the time comes. For now, get a Mac and have a blast hacking it :)

2. If you think Apple's touch devices have taken the world by storm and everything else pales in comparison, I humbly suggest you come to New Delhi and count the number of iPhone/iPod Touch/iPad owners. Most of the world just can't afford to spend cash on shiny entertainment devices. People are still going to buy and use computers. You can still write apps for Mac OS X/Linux/Windows. The world has not yet ended.

3. Most of the apps you find on the AppStore could conceivably be written as webapps. Why bother with ObjC and Cocoa when you can just use JavaScript+HTML5? A large percentage of apps just pull data from a server and display it in pretty boxes. On the other hand, if you're writing a game, you're already a "special case" and have to play by Apple's rules -- which are not different from what Microsoft/Nintendo/Sony impose on their developers. So, for most of your programming needs, JavaScript+HTML5 should be enough.

4. Have we forgotten that these days, Apple are an entertainment and content distribution company who just happen to make computers? Apple are not marketing the iPad as a general-purpose computer; they want to sell it as an entertainment device. Since it's a niche device, in the grand scheme of things, the closed nature of the iPhone OS doesn't really matter.

This list doesn't do much to allay the major concerns of the tech community: the iPad is, in fact, a full-blown computer that is hopelessly locked-in by Apple and their delusional policies, that it could be much more than just an entertainment device, that we have something radically different from the traditional model of computing but cannot exploit the thousands of possibilities this gives us. This list is just an indication that we mustn't lose hope yet. Let the guys in Cupertino figure out when - if ever - they want to loosen their grip on the iPhone OS ecosystem. In the meantime, we'll just write web apps :)

EDIT: In a previous comment, I mentioned I don't want to write JavaScript. It's true. But I can put up with JS if it means I don't have to sell out to Apple.

No outrage here - and honestly, no overhauling necessary for most of my work. Touch-enabled devices have been with us for years, so most companies writing software, sites, and web apps to be used with them have long since adapted. Over-reliance on hover states is annoying, anyway.

I develop on a Mac and use an iPhone, but I have no strong feelings toward Apple's new product and don't fully understand those who do. Perhaps you'd be happier if you took the announcement less seriously?

But yeah, no outrage here.

Outrage.... why, exactly? Technology is always changing things. This is just one more example. Adapt or die.

I am way too excited about the possibilities to be outraged that I'll have some interesting work to do.

Offering iPhone optimized sites is important because there are 75 million iPhone/Touches out there give or take. I'd be surprised if there are more than 3-5 million iPads out there by the end of 2010 so it's probably nothing to get too bent out of shape about.

Making an iPhone or BlackBerry app or version of a site is usually a no-brainer, as you can assume that anyone who owns such a device is a pre-qualified customer. It'll be the same with the iPad - anyone who owns one can be assumed to be a high-spending consumer, therefore desirable as a customer, therefore worth producing original content for.

Likely Apple designed the iPad to work with most of the existing web, and wasn't naive enough to believe that the web will design itself around Apple's iPad.

EDIT: The iPhone was one of many mobile devices, so it warrants sites having mobile versions.

Yeah I agree, excellent point!

I write a general-purpose web app, so I don't need to worry about what new devices are on the market in order to "stay competitive". If you tie yourself to a single device, you have to accept the consequences.

Doesn't seem like a big deal to me. If there's a multitouch api available from JS (is there?), you could do pretty much everything demoed in those apps.

I think the outrage hinges on how popular you think the iPad will be. Hence, my lack of outrage. :)

It's always possible it will be irrelevant.

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