Somehow my blog software lost this post. So here it is again...
Scoble made a post today about the Palm Pre. His basic point was that he was impressed by it. But in saying that he said this which made a light bulb go off in my head...
How Apple centric is the new Palm team? Well, Chris McKillop is director of Software at Palm. He worked on the iPhone team (showed me pictures of me and my son buying iPhones at the Palo Alto store). One of the PR people at Palm did PR at Apple. Jonathan Rubinstein, who runs the Palm Pre team and led off the announcement, was a key person in development of the iPod and lots of people followed him from Apple to Palm, I heard from several people today.
One of the things people forget was that Apple's original iPhone strategy was based on WebApps. As late as Oct '07 Apple was saying this...
Apple is working on solutions that will help developers get more face time on the iPhone, but there are currently no plans to offer a "true" iPhone SDK that would allow developers to create native apps, a source at Apple has told Ars.
But at some point they aborted that strategy altogether going so far as to completely abandon web developers. I've always felt that was a bit odd. I've made the case for the WebApp in the past so I won't rehash that but for the purposes of this post let me highlight two items...
1. To develop an iPhone app developers need to learn a "new everything." That means buying a Mac and learning a new OS (OSX to Develop), a new language, new platform, new SDK, etc... A web app allows a developer to use all their current tools.
2. It isn't that hard to allow web developers access to local resources. Things like offline storage, access to hardware (Camera, GPS) and all the other advantages of local apps can be solved by a few proprietary calls built into Safari. Apple just chose not to make those resources available.
I've always felt the decision to focus on a Native SDK was made when someone realized it would (a) sell more Macs, (b) tie people closer to Apple and (c) create an App store that would generate huge profits. Good reasons but none of them are technical ones.
Which is why I'm fascinated by the Palm Pre.
They appear to be taking the track that Apple left in the dust (a theory supported by ex-iPhone employees working on the Pre). Here's a description of the development environment from Ars Technica...
The name is appropriate; all the software running on the device is a combination of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.
Friday, Palm revealed a little more information about how developers will build applications on the phone, covering local storage and how messaging between applications and data stores will happen on the device:
- By leveraging the local storage capabilities of HTML5 so that data is available even when users are offline
- By using a JSON-based message bus to tap into a wide range of device services, including contacts, calendars, and location
That, to me, is what Apple should have done from the start and the fact that Palm is running with it makes me very interested in their platform. I've been experimenting with iPhone based applications and one of the big problems is the fact that it destroys a "one platform strategy" that I've managed to stick to everywhere else in my environment.
If Palm can provide a valid alternative to doing that I'd get very interested, very quickly.
Addendum: For anyone interested in the Pre's interface Mobile Crunch has a nice hands on video here.