Watching the WWDC Keynote today, specifically the portion where Phil Schiller demos the Mobile Me web apps (about 1:08 to 1:18), I was struck by the richness of the interfaces. There's sizeable tabbed views, autocompleting search fields, iPhoto-like image grid scaling, Cover Flow style effects, drag and drop, Core Animation-type effects, and so forth. They're basically starting to look and perform exactly like native apps. With the large JavaScript acceleration coming soon, that should get even better.
So that got me thinking, what if all this is a prelude to Apple releasing their own web application framework/API/dev tools? The more of these apps they produce from scratch, and the more advanced they get, and the more they resemble native Mac desktop applications, the more Apple moves its producs onto the web and towards cloud computing, the more it must start occuring to them to roll some of this AJAX code into some formal APIs. And once that happens, why not let the rest of us use them too?
Could we see the rebirth of Web Objects as a more broadly-targeted, Cocoa-like web programming environment? I'd love to see it.
So that got me thinking, what if all this is a prelude to Apple releasing their own web application framework/API/dev tools? The more of these apps they produce from scratch, and the more advanced they get, and the more they resemble native Mac desktop applications, the more Apple moves its producs onto the web and towards cloud computing, the more it must start occuring to them to roll some of this AJAX code into some formal APIs. And once that happens, why not let the rest of us use them too?
Could we see the rebirth of Web Objects as a more broadly-targeted, Cocoa-like web programming environment? I'd love to see it.