rowan.depomerai

Just about anyone who knows me will know that I want an iPhone, and that me getting one as soon as I can is about as inevitable as the sun rising tomorrow morning. But I’m not stupid – I know it has flaws. Personally, I don’t care that much about the lack of 3G, but I see why it would bother some. To me, the lack of MMS is a big downside (seriously Apple – issue a software update to add this feature!). Then there’s the thorny issue of 3rd party applications…

When iPhone was announced in January 2007, just about every Mac developer was wondering if Apple would open up iPhone for 3rd party applications. Apple basically said no, but there was quite a backlash, and the Cupertino company seemed to realise that they had to do something. At WWDC, His Steveness proudly announced that they had found a “sweet” solution; web apps. That’s “applications” which are basically just websites. Yes, they can have some nice interfaces using technologies like AJAX, and yes they can have access to iPhone functions, for example including links that initiate a call to a particular phone number. But they’re stored on a web server, which means (a) the user has to have an internet connection to use them (so has to be within range of a network signal) and (b) the developers have to run a web server capable of having all these iPhone users accessing it all the time. Suffice to say, not everyone thought this solution was “sweet”.

Being the genius that I am, I always thought there was a middle ground to be had. It’s probably OK to only allow applications to run as websites using HTML, Javascript and so on. That provides a fair amount of functionality, but does, as Apple says, help keep the device secure. But why do they have to be run on a web server? Surely, let a user download the applications to their device. It does, after all, have 8GB of storage in it! Apple could quite easily make this work and keep it secure by preventing the apps from accessing the rest of the memory.

Next step is allow them to have links on the home screen. Yeah, sure, they might actually get rendered by Safari (since they’re written like webpages), but allow them to be launched as if they were standalone. Making a user fire up a web browser and select a bookmark in order to access an “application” isn’t exactly intuitive, now is it?!

So there’s my solution. It’s not rocket science.

In the Apple world of course, rumours are rife. And today I saw one which sounded very familiar and very promising. According to a Mac Rumors article, the latest word from inside Apple is that they are doing pretty much exactly what I suggest. I really hope this is true – here’s looking forward to the iPhone SDK…

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 3rd, 2007 at 7:08 pm and is filed under Personal Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.