All Articles Tagged webapps

We’ve asked this before: do iPhone WebApps have a future? Sure, Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft, Facebook, Amazon, and even Apple to some degree are all racing to own what many think will be the next paradigm shift in platforms: the cloud.

But when Steve Jobs announced WebApps as the first iPhone development environment back at WWDC 2007, the silence was deafening. Sure, many innovative games, utilities, and optimized RIA (rich internet applications) emerged — and Apple keeps track of them on a completely non-iPhone optimized directory, but the moment the iPhone SDK was released, the momentum shifted near-instantaneously. (Even the Facebook 2.0 App managed to trump their previously dominant iPhone WebApp).

TiPb uses the WPtouch iPhone Theme to present a better experience to iPhone browsers. After all, even in light of Apple’s “just the internet”, they have encouraged these types of sites through their developer guidelines, and have snuck in code into iPhone OS 2.1 to allow full screen WebApps that hide the “chrome” (interface, including URL and search boxes, buttons, progress bars, etc.)

One of our readers, Christopher, also sent in word of his iWebKit tools, which seek to make it faster, simpler, and easier to develop and deploy iPhone websites.

So is there’s still a time and a place for both? Is that time shortening and the place getting smaller for WebApps on the iPhone? Or will they ride the same tide as Microsoft Office for the Web 2009 (or whenever it ships) and surge ahead again, allowing native Apps to enjoy only transient dominance?

TiPb loves answering your emails, but we also love sharing our answers with the community in hopes that more people will benefit, and even better answers will present themselves (hey, that’s why we have them forums!). Today’s question comes from Jozsoo:

Is there an iPhone-friendly version of the web apps section of Apple’s site? Seems odd to me that the iPhone maker has no such tailor-made service on its site. Or am I missing something? Maybe you could cover this on your blog for others, too, to know.

TiPb answers, after the jump!

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Good news on the Facebook front: their native application is due to get an upgrade in September. The upgrade should actually make the app reach some sort of feature parity with the web-app version of Facebook, which right now is far superior to the native app.

New features include a revamped profiles view, viewing all notifications in the home tab, friend search and approval, the ability to view your full inbox, and more.

Joy!

Read: for iPhone’s Notes

If the next great future of computing in the Cloud, as many pundits — not to mention Google — think, then the next great race is delivering that future via Rich Internet Applications. Right now, there are two major ways of doing this. The first involves using a proprietary, locked in technology (admittedly with increasing “openness”) like Adobe’s Air/Flex/Flash trifecta, or Microsoft’s .Net/Silverlight double team. The second is with truly open standards such as HTML, CSS, and AJAX (Asynchronous Javascript and XML) like Google, Yahoo, and many others use.

With the iPhone Apple has squarely planted itself in the second category. They even promoted them as a pseudo-SDK for a time! (And maybe gave up too soon?)

Flash-free, Silverlight-less, but full of interactivity and cloud-based applications, Apple just unleashed .Mac upgrade MobileMe complete with “desktop class” mail, calendar, contacts, and photo gallery web apps.

And according to this year’s WWDC buzz, they used SproutCore’s Javascript frameworks to do it? Why?

SproutCore not only makes it easy to build real applications for the web using menus, toolbars, drag and drop support, and foreign language localization, but it also provides a full Model View Controller application stack like Rails (and Cocoa), with bindings, key value observing, and view controls. It also exposes the latent features of JavaScript, including late binding, closures, and lambda functions. Developers will also appreciate tools for code documentation generation, fixtures, and unit testing. A key component of its clean MVC philosophy that roots SproutCore into Cocoa goodness is bindings, which allows developers to write JavaScript that automatically runs any time a property value changes. With bindings, very complex applications with highly consistent behavior can be created with very little “glue” code.

Check out the read link for more on Apple’s use of SproutCore, and how it might just be part of a growing trend for open standards-based web interactivity.

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