Ajax Girl

We see the birth of the second baby when it comes to building and running apps on the iPhone. People have already spent almost $100k in the first few hours of the AppStore not being open, so tomorrow is likely to be a great day for Apple, and developers, as people run around clicking on buy without thinking of the price.

I spent some time running the applications, and thinking about how different they are to Web versions. For example, when I launch Twitterific vs. a web based Twitter it actually was faster for the Web page to load Safari up with everything. Twitterific also had a strange feature for loading images. As I moved up and down the list the images looked like they were being pushed out of cache which made for a weird experience.

What if the iPhone offered the ability to aggressively cache “applications”. When you open the application it opens its own instance of Safari instead of just linking over to Safari. What if it had access to local storage APIs in WebKit?

The native applications do have benefits. They have access to the camera, addressbook, … well wait, those could be JavaScript APIs too.

There is the tool chain. You can have fine grained performance knowledge of your application with the Objective-C tools, but with SquirrelFish Apple is getting better and better there too. Other nice tooling could work well when constraining the Web interfaces to the iPhone form factor.

What about games? You couldn’t do super monkey ball, or could you if you had a really solid Flash, or feature complete canvas.

The native apps are great, but I am still betting on the Web as a great platform for mobile applications too.

Source: Ajaxian » Front Page
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ajaxian/~3/332746640/remember-the-web-apps-dont-forget-the-first-iphone-baby-today