A Response to Meyer's "App Shopping"
I wrote this as a comment on a post over on Eric Meyers blog post App Shopping
I say lets build some things. I think your assessment of the web stack, HTML5 Apps, is dead on, but I would argue that people are thinking about web stacks, just not in a webby way, but an Obj-C way.
Checkout Neven Mrgan’s take on the fact that we need a good SDK for HTML5 Apps.
That is not the direction we should be headed. I think most web developers are comfortable doing large portions of there development in text editors. This is probably freaking out traditional app developers who are used to their UI layout editors. They probably wonder why you can’t just use Dreamweaver to export HTML5 Apps.
As far as frontend’s are concerned, I can’t seem to find many who understand that they can write HTML5 Apps for the iPhone. Very few are aware of the nice integration Apple has for HTML5 Apps. Even less know about things like the application cache.
If the web “pros” don’t know they can make nice, useful HTML5 Apps for phones, then I think its an information problem.
Lastly, I think there is to much focus on the iPhone/iPad. We need to bust out, and realize that a device with a HTML5 capable browser, is a place where a HTML5 App can live.
I am thinking about Chrome OS, Google TV, so fourth, these platform will more then likely have tight HTML5 integration.
Let’s keep making a ruckus, eventually we will beat enough web developers over the head, before the Obj-C guys ruin the party. Oh, and they are trying hard, check out the 280 North guys, with cappuccino, Objective-J, and Atlas, they are slowly building tools to make native app developers happy, but we web developers don’t need all these fancy tools. It all boils down the HTML, CSS, and Javascript.