Comments on: Will HTML 5 Break Apple's Stranglehold on Apps?

By: Why Apple and Google Need Each Other – GigaOM

Why Apple and Google Need Each Other – GigaOM — Sat, 20 Mar 2010 16:01:39 +0000

[...] Just as people stopped downloading AOL’s software and switched to browsers, we may well abandon most of the apps on our phones [...]

By: Chris DeVore

Chris DeVore — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 01:00:09 +0000

This is an awesome move by Google. We’re so excited about the possibilities for HTML5 that we just shipped search + discovery for HTML5 apps at parity with our existing native app offering. We need help filling out our HTML5 catalog to give these developers a hand with distribution – y’all come! http://bit.ly/drg0NB

By: silicon beach training

silicon beach training — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 16:25:11 +0000

The exciting news for Flash developers is that the new Packager for iPhone due to be release in Adobe Fash CS5 will allow any application or game built using Flash to be exported for use on the iPhone.

see:http://www.siliconbeachtraining.co.uk/blog/whats-new-in-flash-cs5-iphone/

By: App stores are not the future – A Frog in the Valley

App stores are not the future – A Frog in the Valley — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 14:49:48 +0000

[...] Underscores the open, developer-friendly Web as key. See this week’s launch of the HTML5 version of Google Voice as a case in point… [...]

By: 10+1 Mobile Application Development Trends for 2010

10+1 Mobile Application Development Trends for 2010 — Fri, 08 Jan 2010 15:03:41 +0000

[...] that are made available to their phone users. For more information on this, you can check out Will HTML 5 Break Apple’s Stranglehold on Apps? For readers that are more advanced [than me], you can read up on how HTML 5 will change mobile at [...]

By: Breton

Breton — Tue, 29 Dec 2009 21:35:16 +0000

because now it's every browser except IE.

By: Joshua Issac

Joshua Issac — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 17:49:29 +0000

“…advanced graphics (to rival Flash)…”
DirectAnimation has been able to do this in IE6 for almost a decade now. How is it going to be different with HTML5?

By: Why Google Is Killing Gears & Pushing HTML5 – GigaOM

Why Google Is Killing Gears & Pushing HTML5 – GigaOM — Wed, 02 Dec 2009 00:31:42 +0000

[...] we wrote back in August, HTML5 is a good way to break Apple’s stranglehold, as illustrated by this Pie Guy variation of the classic Pacman game, which uses HTML5 to replicate [...]

By: Peter Cranstone

Peter Cranstone — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 20:05:34 +0000

No. HTML 5 is designed to run on all browsers. The issue is getting all the browser manufacturers to agree on a common spec and then integrating it. The irony is that the day after they all agree, new features will be available on mobile that HTML 5 won’t have access to.

By: mohsin

mohsin — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 18:58:39 +0000

HTML 5 is only for mobile browsers??

By: Breton

Breton — Fri, 14 Aug 2009 12:39:19 +0000

I mostly agree with you, but I believe you can do most of that without a shell app. There’s some special meta tags that apple has provisioned for this purpose. The main reason these shell projects exist (one example is phonegap ) is to get access to the more advanced apis like the accellerometer. But the direction seems to be that apple will eventually add them anyway. They’ve already added javascript access to multitouch gestures, and limited access to the accellerometer. The technical challenge to giving full access to the accellerometer is getting the javascript engine fast enough to deal with that firehose of data. As it stands, apple controls the fastest javascript interpreter on the market, and it’s only getting faster. It’s only a matter of time before the APIs you get in a webapp are virtually indistinguishable from the apis you get in a native app, and the speed of javascript now roughly comparable to unoptimised C, or java.

By: Breton

Breton — Fri, 14 Aug 2009 12:33:26 +0000

Sending it via HTTP is a stupid way to do it. The direction it’s going is this data will be accessible via DOM apis, which means it will be accessble from javascript. Javascript can elect to send this to the server, if it wants. But the client is getting fatter, not thinner. Webapps will be doing more and more without the intervention of the server.

By: Breton

Breton — Fri, 14 Aug 2009 12:31:02 +0000

This isn’t a problem for a properly coded iphone webapp. Apple provides apis so a webapp can specify that it’s downloadable, and from that point forward will not require a connection to the internet. New HTML5 apis that the iphone support means webapps can also store large amounts of data locally. These things are possible, it’s just so few developers know, or do anything about it that it seems like it’s not possible.

By: zahadum

zahadum — Thu, 13 Aug 2009 20:15:42 +0000

hey FUDster:

FYI: it was apple itself that invented the CANVAS feature in html5 – canvas is the core technology that makes html5 a viable alternative platform against the (proprietary) Flash gunk from adobe!

Apple is not “threatended” by html5: apple is a founding charter member of the consotrium that originated the spec (as a protest to the W3C’s glacial progress on XHTML etc).

maybe you should actually do some RESEARCH before you start writing!

all you have done here is made yourself look like a dufus – and embarrassed a brand (gigaom) that that is known for normally being tech savvy.

By: Michael

Michael — Thu, 13 Aug 2009 19:48:32 +0000

[Oops... This got posted in the wrong spot as a replay to an early post... Reposting it here... Sorry.]

As I side note regarding web-apps and native iPhone development…

It is very easy to create local* web-apps wrapped in a native iPhone application. (*By local, I mean web-based applications that reside in the device file system, not on a web server somewhere. Local web-apps are pure HTML, CSS, and Javascript applications, that do not require a web server for pre-processing. This would be akin to Palm Pre applications and OS X Dashboard Widgets.)

Create your web-app as your normally would, using whatever tools.
Create a basic “shell” iPhone project, that consists two objects, UIWindow and UIWebView.
Add the web-app to the project.
Upon launch, load the root page of the web-app into the UIWebView object.

Very simple, very few lines of native code, if any. Most of this can be done through Interface Builder. And because the native application can interact with the hardware and the WebView, it can pass data along to and get data from the web-app, through Javascript commands.

And there you have an HTML5 application running as a native application on the iPhone. The whole point of most of the new technologies in HTML 5 is to remove the need of having a server. The browser itself becomes a run-time engine that can replace proprietary RTEs such as Flash, SilverLight, Java, etc.

By: Michael

Michael — Thu, 13 Aug 2009 19:45:36 +0000

As I side note regarding web-apps and native iPhone development…