PPK of Quirksmode-fame it at it again, this time badmouthing iPhone-centric web development. A lot of people seem to take issue with his point of view, but aside from the (typically Dutch?) in-your-face bluntness, I do think he makes some very valid points. The web is about broad accessibility, about allowing as many people as possible to access your information/ application and the same should indeed be the case for mobile web development.
Sexy as a iPhone-UI mimicking webapp (based on e.g. iUI or JQTouch) might seem, it does have a number of important shortcomings:
it is sub-optimal for the web, even on iPhones, as the context is very different (e.g. in terms of responsiveness)
the iPhone-UI-approach does not make a lot of sense on non-iPhone high-end touch devices
it will probably not work on mid- and lower-end phones at all
So yes, web-developers should try to build mobile sites that render on as many devices/ browsers possible, as we do on the non-mobile web. Unless you’re willing to invest in several sites for different handsets, building for one specific device is a bad choice, however good the browser might be (and Safari Mobile indeed is great).
It includes a mobile switcher to select themes based on the type of user that is visiting the site, a selection of mobile themes, extra widgets, device adaptation and a mobile administration panel to allow users to edit the site or write new posts when out and about.
When running the MobiReady test to assess how “mobile-ready” my blog is, I get a great score of 4.35/5 (page size being the main remaining issue). So thanks for ranting PPK!
My 2nd prediction for 2010 (the first one being ‘offline is the new online‘): the glory days of Flash are over. The reason for this is twofold; the mobile web and the strong advances “open web” technology is making.
Open web moving in, fast
Remember the days when everybody wanted to spice up otherwise dull websites with “a flash splash page” and “flash menu’s”? Now menu’s are built in accessible, SEO-friendly HTML once again, using CSS to add style and even behavior, adding some Javascript if magic dust is required . And splash pages, well, those were pretty useless to begin with. Adobe Flash’s stronghold now is video playback and animation, but they’re bound to eventually lose that battle as well.
HTML5’s canvas (cross-browser javascript-able 2D bitmap-based graphics) is gaining a lot of momentum. Check out the applications and games on http://www.canvasdemos.com/ to see just how much can be accomplished now, in today’s browsers (really, go check out those demo’s, some are mind-boggling)
Adobe’s answer; mobile banners & deploy to Appstore
So with a Flash-less mobile web and with strong browser-native competition for both multimedia and graphics on the “normal” web, how does Adobe see it’s future? Well, they plan to roll out “iPhone packager for Flash” in CS5, allowing any Flash developer to publish to the AppStore, but there’s still no news about in-browser Flash on the iPhone.
For non-Apple devices, Adobe is boasting a preview version of Flash 10.1 in a mobile browser (the Android 2.0 browser on Google Nexus One in this case) with this promo video;
I don’t know about you, but somehow a sub-par game, web video and banners don’t convince that Flash has a bright future ahead. Not on mobile and maybe even not on the open web as it’s shaping up to be.
But maybe you think Flash will remain in the spotlights despite all of this? Why? Let us know in the comments!
That’s the bad news, but let me share some good news with you as well; you can do cross-browser persistent data storage right here, right now! All you need to build a html5 webdb-alternative is old-fashioned javascript arrays and objects and related functions, some json and last but not least Paul Duncan’s persistjs (don’t download it there though, use the more recent version in the repository instead), a little javascript library that goes a long way to provide precious cross-browser persistent storage.
Simplified, your offline-enabled webapp would have to;
store data in an array (or in objects in an array)
do CRUD using your standard javascript functions (you could turn to something like jlinq to do more advanced things)
use JSON.stringify (native or from json2.js) to turn the ‘repository’ into a string
store the resulting JSON-string with persistjs’s store.set
close tab or browser
retrieve JSON-string when user returns with store.get
So there you have it, basic cross-browser (*) persistent data storage without html5 webdb. Just sprinkle some appcache-magic (adding Google Gears LocalServer-support is trivial) on top to store html, js, css, … in your browser and you have a fully offline-enabled webapp.
(*) tested successfully in Firefox 3.6b5, Safari 4.0.3, Chrome 3.0.195.38, IE8 and MSIE6 (with and without Gears), IE7, the Android 1.5 browser on my HTC Hero and in iPhone’s Mobile Safari. I’ve got some weird bug in Opera 10.10 that I can’t seem to iron out though, but feel free to tell me what stupid mistake I made.
Given the concerns about the enormous amount of data Google continuously collects about its users and because of the fact that their CEO seems to have a poor understanding of privacy (Schmidt stated “If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place”) and despite Google’s Jonathan Rosenberg recent manifesto on openness I decided to move some of my online activities away from the all-seeing eye of Google. After switching to scroogle.org for normal search, I now found an alternative for Google Reader as well in Tiny Tiny RSS.
Tiny Tiny RSS (or “tt-rss” for short) is an open source web application written in PHP with a PostgreSQL or MySQL database. The webapp is AJAX-based, multi-user and is offline-enabled using Google Gears (you can check out a demo here). There’s also a mobile version, a (deprecated) XML-RPC API and a brand new experimental JSON-API, which I’m playing around with, using XUI to write a minimal mobile version of my own.
For those who are not able to install and configure tt-rss or who don’t want to burden their server with it, developer Andrew Dolgov put up a hosted version (thanks Andrew!) where currently 8 more users can register.
After having switched about a week ago, I find I barely miss Google Reader, although tt-rss still feels a little rough around the edges at times. The only real limitation is that shared items (‘published’ in tt-rss) off course aren’t automagically shared with your Google friends. I now automatically import my tt-rss published articles and manually share those every few days in Reader. Because I wouldn’t want to disappoint my Google friends, now would I?
The fundamental problem on the iPhone is not Apple’s App Store approval policies, but the iPhone developers’ arrogant disdain for Web technologies.
[...]
After ten years I am fucking tired of the “Web development is not real programming” bullshit that the arrogant bastards in “real programming” are spouting because they’re too frightened to learn something new. Fuck those condescending, ignorant, self-important, stupid, blind, fearful pricks. Fuck them real hard. Where it hurts.
And fucking them real hard where it hurts is exactly what Apple is doing right now.
That’s why I changed my mind. That’s why I’m cheering Apple on. I hope the App Store approval process sticks around for a loooooooong time.
HTML5’s WebDB is one of the building blocks to create offline-enabled webapps. It allows web applications to store data in a local database and it is as such an important part in Google’s push for mobile webapps as an alternative for native mobile apps. The spec (although not finalized) is already implemented in Safari, Safari Mobile and in the Android 2.0 browser.
At opera, we implemented web db [...] it’s likely we will [ship it] as people have built on it
and Google’s Ian Fette joined in:
We’ve implemented WebDB … we’re about to ship it
So that’s great news, no? We can expect WebDB to arrive in Chrome and Opera! OK, so what about Firefox and MSIE? Microsoft, represented by Adrian Bateman, stated:
We don’t think we’ll reasonably be able to ship an interoperable version of WebDB
Well, that doesn’t really come as a surprise does it? No WebDB in MSIE, but surely Mozilla will support this great spec? But Jonas Sicking’s point of view might be slightly shocking to some:
We’ve talked to a lot of developers, the feedback we got is that we really don’t want SQL [...] I don’t think mozilla plans to ship it.
Sorry, come again? Does that mean that Firefox will never support window.openDatabase()? Nope, they probably won’t and they provide some valid concerns (see also Vladimir Vukićević’s blogpost) in a mailinglist-discussion between Mozilla and Apple-engineers shortly after the meeting minutes were published. Summarized and simplified their objections boil down to two issues;
in order to have a webdb standard, you also have to specify (and standardize) the SQL-language to query that database, the question is what SQL-dialect to standardize on.
as the current implementations are all SQLite-based (including Google’s and Opera’s), the spec would have to describe the very specific SQL-dialect that SQLite uses (and maybe even of a specific version of SQLite)
Although I doubt that web-developers don’t want to do client-side SQL at all, writing a spec that almost mandates the use of a specific version of a specific product (even if it’s open source) can indeed be hardly considered the goal of w3.org’s standards creation process.
So back to the drawing-board for yet another spec? Based on the webapp group’s meeting minutes, Web SimpleDB (or “Nikunj”, after the name of the Oracle-engineer behind the idea) is considered a worthy alternative by at least Mozilla, Opera and Microsoft. Let’s hope that a consensus, a finalized spec (it’s in draft now) and the first usable cross-browser implementations will arrive soon.
Af en toe loopt het mis in “the cloud” en dan durven nochtans doorwinterde digitale nomaden al eens klagen over de onbeschikbaarheidvan hun online tools, terwijl eeuwige web2.0-twijfelaars hun grote gelijk -dan toch tijdelijk- bewezen zien.
Misschien moeten die mannen en vrouwen toch eens kijken naar de offline-ondersteuning die bv. Gmail, Google Reader, Google Docs, Google Calender, Zoho, Mindmeister en Remember the Milk bieden? En misschien moeten de webbouwers onder hen hun klanten die mogelijkheden ook beginnen verkopen? Want ik voorspel: 2010 wordt het jaar van offline-enabled webapps, mobiel maar even goed in de desktop-browser!
That’s why I decided to switch from the iPhone-centric WPTouch (which I installed only 3 months ago) to “WordPress Mobile Pack” for this blog. WMP offers great mobile functionality out of the box;
Af en toe loopt het mis in “the cloud” en dan durven nochtans doorwinterde digitale nomaden al eens 
