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It's a trade-off. It's not very useful for real-time applications like games. However, web applications are becoming more and more popular, even on the

It's a trade-off. It's not very useful for real-time applications like games. However, web applications are becoming more and more popular, even on the desktop with applications like AIR. Whatsmore, people know HTML/CSS/JS tech (particularly compared to Objective-C), and that makes it easy for them to encourage people to develop applications on their platform, even if it remains a niche. Geez, iPhone criticism has now officially come full circle. Apple originally intended the iPhone to only support web apps, using a subset of HTML, et al, derived from their work with OS X's Dashboard. (Remember the Steve Note where his announcement of this was met with a stone silent crowd?) Apple was forced to relent and make the Cocoa API available after developer uproar and complaints about web app development being too limiting. And now this is considered a developer attraction point of the Pre? I've worked with development languages from C to VB to Scheme, and compared to the current stack related to web development, Obj-C and Interface Builder is cake, cake, compared with the amalgamated hodgepodge that is HTML/DOM/CSS/JS...

halo 17y ago
I was not aware of that - I'm pretty sure I didn't watch the keynote. My impression was that they were trying to encourage people to provide web services as their apps and that's why no SDK was available from day 1. I think creating a web-driven SDK would have been good thing, if nothing else to increase the development opportunities of non-Mac users.
- DLWormwood 17y ago
  You can still make web tech only apps for the iPhone... they just can't be code-signed or FairPlay stamped, hence, you can't sell them on the App Store. (The ones that were developed before the app store went live either were freeware or tried to resurrect the classic shareware model.) (Well, technically, you can, but you do it by creating a stub ObjC wrapper around a WebKit view and point it at your HTML content... but that's not satisfying enough for most users, since you lose some UI functionality, like multitouch and sensor detection that way.)

halo 17y ago

I was not aware of that - I'm pretty sure I didn't watch the keynote. My impression was that they were trying to encourage people to provide web services as their apps and that's why no SDK was available from day 1. I think creating a web-driven SDK would have been good thing, if nothing else to increase the development opportunities of non-Mac users.

DLWormwood 17y ago
You can still make web tech only apps for the iPhone... they just can't be code-signed or FairPlay stamped, hence, you can't sell them on the App Store. (The ones that were developed before the app store went live either were freeware or tried to resurrect the classic shareware model.) (Well, technically, you can, but you do it by creating a stub ObjC wrapper around a WebKit view and point it at your HTML content... but that's not satisfying enough for most users, since you lose some UI functionality, like multitouch and sensor detection that way.)