Ramble

Yesterday’s keynote was rather underwhelming for me. The “secret” features we were promised turned out to be rather tame. The most interesting new changes to OS X were already revealed, like Time Machine and WebClip. But, I am glad that Apple has finally decided to update the Finder. The current Finder is pretty bad. If I wasn’t so cheap, I would have purchased one of the replacement Finders vendors have made over the years. Spaces is really just a form of multiple desktops and thats been around for a long time on *nix systems. I’ve been using Desktop Manager for years on my iBook.

There looks to be some nice eye-candy additions to the OS and Core Animation might be a lot of fun to play with once I upgrade to a new Macbook (assuming it works with Macbook hardware), but I wonder just how easy it really is to use. Apple is not exactly known for their clear and concise APIs.

The thing that struck me was the iPhone SDK compromise. Robert Scoble laments the lack of native code apps in his No Java, no Flash, no .NET/Silverlight for iPhone? post. But, I think it is a mistake to knock the iPhone for this apparent limitation for two reasons.

First, this is a 1.0 product and a real SDK may be forthcoming in the future. But, more importantly, I agree with Jason’s post on the 37Signals blog. This is not just a cop-out on Jobs’ part. This is a pretty bold step. I think Scoble may be overselling the value of these other, “richer” environments. By making the SDK for the iPhone the Safari browser engine and allowing developers to use AJAX Web apps as iPhone apps, Apple is opening the door to a wide swath of developers who may never have programmed on a Mac and don’t want to.

There are a ton of developers working on Web apps today. My project at work is a Web app. Everything seems to be going online and while there is value in richer, more thick-client like interfaces, these are not always better and certainly not for a mobile platform that has a lot fewer resources than your typical PC. By pushing for hosted Web applications as the model for iPhone development, I think Apple has actually opened the door for more powerful apps than can be done with Java or Flash, for instance. Maybe the interfaces will be more limited, but we are already working with a limited architecture. At least with a hosted app, the processing power is offloaded from the phone. And, while this is obviously also how native apps on the iPhone can work (i.e. Google Maps), if a Web app is used, we don’t have to worry about compatibility issues, complex debugging, many performance issues, and stability. I think there will be a quick uptake in apps made available for the iPhone within the first year of launch simply because so many Web apps already exist and can be easily modified to work with the iPhone.

We’ll just have to wait and see. Unfortunately for me, I won’t be able to try my hand at iPhone development for a while as I can’t possibly afford the gizmo. But, I’m definitely excited about the direction Apple is taking with the iPhone.