Acidus wrote:

flynn23 wrote:

And boy, does it ever. How so? It abstracts the functionality of native iPhone and Android development through a Javascript API. So instead of using Objective-C or Java to create your app, you create the functionality with Javascript (including your favorite JS libraries like YUI or jQuery) and lay it out with CSS. In other words, if you’re comfortable developing a dynamic web page, you are 90% of the way there — you are about a day away from launching your first iPhone or Android app.

I can't wait to get Acidus' reaction to this.

This is actually pretty cool. Its like VB for iPhone development. Providing an easy JS abstraction for things like menus, events, etc seems straight forward. What I'm interested in is all the DOM stuff.

I think of something like Pocket God. Cool game, lots of fun. I think about how to write it in JavaScript/DOM/HTML/CSS. Still nothing crazy: a background image, some transparenly PNGs, some collison detection. It would not be pretty but it would be doable, and no need for a tag to cheat.

Now think of translating that into Objective-C! Ick! Obviously there are some limits to this. You will not be able to take *any* existing app. However I think this is a very cool idea and it makes a lot of sense. A lot of the best apps I use on Jill's iPhone are just iPhone interfaces to existing web apps. Mobile Safari is awesome, don't get me wrong, but even something as basic as a native interface to Wikipedia is excellent. This lowers the barriers and will make it easier for web devs to write mobile software. I'm a big believer in lowering barriers.

Of course, now you're gonna have 200 or so more Twitter clients flooding the App Store ;-) Have fun with that!

Well, that's not the response I figured I would've gotten. I see this as one big fat vector into the already abysmal iPhone security model. It's bad enough that apps are already allowed to phone home your contact info, and even make calls for you without you knowing. It wouldn't surprise me that out of 75K apps already available, one isn't spyware.

ObjC is annoying, but it's not obtuse. I would've expected a Java abstraction before a JS abstraction. I don't get it. Do we really need lower barriers of entry to develop on this platform? As it is, there's 50% too much junk anyways. We keep going like this, and the iPhone is going to end up like the Atari 2600.

RE: The doors to mobile app development just got blown wide open | Purple Raincloud