The Bigger iPhone Picture
When Steve Jobs took the stage at WWDC this past month, he delivered to Mac OS X software developers the news they wanted to hear: Yes, you'll be able to develop applications for the iPhone. Then he threw them a curve ball: Safari is your new best friend. Apple's stance on third-party iPhone development - the basis for which being a hotly-contested topic - is that developers can create apps for the iPhone, but they'll be accessed exclusively through the device's built-in web browser. Safari, which recently made news for its debut on Windows, has been the de facto standard web browser for Mac users since Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger was released April of 2004. The subsequent rumbling was the sound of hundreds of developers groaning in unison. They wanted native access to the iPhone hardware. They wanted a button on the home screen dedicated to launching their apps. "We're not web developers! We're software engineers!"
What Apple really announced on June 11th was an acknowledgment few in the industry are ready or willing to accept: the age of the monolithic operating system is not the age of the Internet. Google has proven conclusively that full-fledged applications can be built for and accessed through a web browser. With notable exception - games, A/V software, etc. - there aren't many kinds of applications that need to run locally on an end-user's computer. Whether you're running Mac OS X, Windows Vista, some flavor of *nix, or something else, most of us still consume the majority of our daily data through applications called web browsers. Indeed, many believe that Windows Vista will be the last of its kind. Suddenly Microsoft's insistence on proprietary interpretations of established standards makes a whole lot of sense. I've been accused of being an Apple fanboy on more than one occasion, but as a web developer this announcement comes as a particularly welcome surprise. It's also a little unnerving. The mobile web browser has always been something of a red-headed step-child, and has never been a viable target platform. We have an overwhelming variety of mobile devices capable of accessing the web, but almost every single one of those devices contains software that attempts to scale down the experience so that it works on a tiny screen. Doing this requires the person writing the mobile web browser to make certain assumptions about how to treat the content you've requested, and more often than not those assumptions just don't work. Even best-of-breed apps in this category consistently fail to deliver what Apple is calling "the real Internet." This is what makes Apple's approach so revolutionary: rather than trying to dumb down the experience so it displays well on a portable screen, Apple has instead attempted to deliver a mobile web browser that performs like its desktop counterpart. That means it doesn't try to linearize the content on the page, an attempt at avoiding horizontal scrolling. That means it has a powerful Javscript engine, so that all these nifty AJAX apps perform just like you'd expect. That means web developers need to develop apps that rely on open standards. This has groundbreaking implications, many of them difficult to handle, but rather than look at this as another hill to climb it behooves us to consider this an opportunity to confront head on. There's a whole lot of complaining on sites like digg about how many stories there are on the iPhone. Many people - particularly technology enthusiasts - are tired of hearing about it. They ask questions like "What's the big deal?" and say things like "Device X already does all this and more." The writing is on the wall; the release of the iPhone ushers in a new era in mobile computing, where constant access to our information while on-the-go will no longer require toting a laptop, and no longer be relegated to maniacs called "road warriors." It's also a profound reminder to consumers that the pieces of plastic their wireless providers give them - at little or no cost - can be better; and what's more, that you can expect that in the very near future companies will be developing applications that target that device. The game has changed when guys like the Co-CEO of Research in Motion, makers of the Blackberry family of products, start complaining about it. From here on out the mobile device will be a first-tier platform for which we must design from the ground up, and that's a really big deal. You can be damn sure OMA will be a part of it.
About the Author: Joseph Jaramillo
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