Dennis Forbes is a Toronto-based software architect. While focused primarily on the .NET and SQL Server worlds, Dennis frequently ventures outside of this comfort zone into game development and image processing. He has been published in several industry magazines, has been quoted in the Wall Street Journal and has been interviewed by NPR.The iPad represents a great opportunity for HTML5, with many large web properties already shifting gears to ensure that they take advantage of the platform. The iPad as a web consumer is all about modern, open standards that empower and enrich the user experience. It has one of the best mobile web experiences going.
This is expected, really, as Apple's very existence hinged upon an open standards web. There was a dangerous period in the late 90s when the web almost got Windowsified — look to South Korea as an example of this happening — and if that came to fruition Apple would have been dead in the water. Thankfully a few who saw past short term interests rallied around keeping the ecosystem open for innovative companies like Apple to thrive.
yafla is finally going to be born into a remarkable web application that exploits the rich functionality of the iPad and iPhone's web platform, along with Android, the Blackberry webkit browser, and virtually any other modern HTML 5 consumer, from big to small. I'm putting my actions where my mouth has been (this includes architecturally on the back-end, with decisions that I will document and explain along the way).
The arguably proprietary Flash platform has rough times ahead. While the actual numbers of iPhone and iPad users combined represent a small percentage of the web consumer ecosystem, it occupies a disproportionately large area of the mindspace.
While the iPad supports HTML5, that isn't the primary focus of content providers: The vast majority of them are rolling out solutions that target the walled garden of the iPad. Video content, books, magazines, or newspapers, you're entering the land of made-for-the-iPlatform solutions that nothing to do with the modern web.
And of course it isn't just big media. Many web sites — like Engadget, Digg, and so on — are rolling out apps for the platform as quickly as they can. In most cases those apps do nothing that can't be done as well or better as simple web apps, but such is the return-to-mistakes-of-the-past era that we're in. In the cases mentioned they also built Android apps (others, including Big Banks, are far more myopic about this), but there's still the question of why they built anything platform specific at all, beyond the obvious explanation that they're hoping on the bandwagon.
Everything old is new again.
John Gruber argues that the iPad represents a more, open and innovative ecosystem than with the Atari 2600 circa 1978. Hard to argue with that. But what about the 32 years in between, John?
It's a clear sign that there's something seriously wrong when you have to base your comparison on an early home game machine from three decades ago.
For the past 20 years we've had a computing market where anyone and everyone could build applications for the vast majority of devices. Since the incarnation of the web, those creators have had the ability to have just as much presence as makes like EA. There is nothing new there. The only "advantage" that the iPhone cum iPad offers the little guy is that the market was so nascent and novel that a million made-on-a-weekend apps could sell thousands. That early ease is quickly disappearing, and the natural size advantage of shops like EA is coming to fruition. Small-shop, single-trick apps are going to very quickly get crowded into an unlit corner.
The Apple app model is horribly, horribly broken, though they have enough goodwill, and still get by with many deluded into thinking that they're the underdog little company, that they'll be able to float with it for a while longer while apologists continue to present their questionable defense. The iPhone and now the iPad are not simple game machines (whether from 2010 or 1978) — comparisons with the Atari 2600 or even the Xbox 360 are highly deluded — but represent a serious movement into the domain of general computing, and against that they should be compared. Pretty remarkable how Apple has managed to retroactively turn Microsoft into the good guys.
The Apple web model is brilliant, with it representing a fantastic web appliance of the best kind.
Let's just hope the web survives through this, and there isn't a rush from open standards to the opposite-of-open-standards walled garden.
