Owen Densmore wrote: > The reality distortion field surrounding Jobs may actually consider > webapps good enough. IMO, Apple has a hands-down superior mobile web browser with the iPhone and that's enough of a reason for buy one compared to competing PDAs. Supposing that Windows Mobile, etc. soon catch up on the usability front, by the time the next generation iPhones come along, that they are limited to webapps doesn't need to mean HTML driven by a server. It can also mean richer markup like XUL/XBL or SVG, or a native components driven by scripts or the DOM (e.g. Flash, Silverlight/XAML, Google Gears). XUL/SVG stuff is already in Safari, for example.
Mobile devices have terribly slow data communications, so forcing developers to invent concise application protocols seems a reasonable approach to keep the mobile devices from getting bloated and slow. Even on the desktop, projects like Adobe's Apollo or the Pyro desktop or Apple's Dashboard Widgets seek to use web markup as an organizing principle. Pyro defers to Firefox to be a window manager! http://www.pyrodesktop.org/Main_Page Marcus ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
