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October 17, 2007
Device-native apps vs device-neutral apps
Device-native apps vs device-neutral apps: Steve Jobs says "We want native third-party apps on the iPhone." People have been asking Apple that question for a few months now, so it's good to see the recognition and the commitment. But applications which are iPhone-native seem like they'd only be able to run on the Apple stack. Isn't that like a web page which only works in the Apple browser, or the Microsoft browser, or the Mozilla browser, or the Opera browser? I haven't received any guidance or advice from other people inside Adobe on this, but I think it's long past time to answer the question about supporting OS-neutral, device-neutral applications on the Apple mobile device as well. When Steve Jobs say "I/we want native apps for the iPhone", shouldn't he first say that he and his employees want the world's current web and mobile applications on the iPhone too? When you create and tend a garden, it may not always need a wall....
Two other notes:
Yes, I'm still on sabbatical. ;-) But after waking up in Beijing I was browsing the news on my Nokia N800 Internet Tablet (courtesy of an Apple Airport Express), and saw the big Techmeme cluster on Jobs' announcement. Frustratingly, all the links on Techmeme were to republications of the Apple news, and none linked to the Apple mini-press-release blog itself. Teleread proved to have some original commentary, and when I clicked through I saw that Apple didn't provide permalinks to individual "blog" items. I'd like to see Apple disclose who actually wrote each item, as well as the review process for each item (so that we can know who is actually speaking, and under what authority), as well as providing the usual permanent links to individual items. I'd also like to see Techmeme change the algorithm a bit to actually reveal source news, rather than ad-laden republications of snippets of that news.
Techmeme also hipped me to today's announcement by Nokia of the N810 Internet Tablet, which adds a slideout keyboard and GPS, and the new 2008 operating system, which apparently switches from a default Opera browser to a default Mozilla browser, and improves Flash video support. The mini-keyboard would be a great boon, to eliminate screen redraws when showing either the stylus-sized or finger-sized touchscreen keyboards. I touchtype, so I'm happy using the separate fullsized Bluetooth keyboard from ThinkOutside -- no buyer's regret here! I hope the new OS adds support for USB hosting, so that I can connect a digital camera directly to the device for photo/video uploads. More info on the differences between the Nokia tablet models, as well as a general backgrounder on the technology, is at Nokia forums and maemo.org. I'm really happy with this device, and would like to see the same applications work on both Nokia and Apple tablets.
Posted by JohnDowdell at October 17, 2007 3:21 PM
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