Safari development for the iPhone
In yesterday's WWDC keynote (video, summary) Steve Jobs announced that developer access to the iPhone would be through Safari--not the OS X system that runs it.
Dan Farber called this a smart move stating that "it's a friction-free and secure way to get tens of thousands of developers working in an iPhone ecosystem." Ed Burnette called it a dumb move saying that the innovation was neither "sweet" nor "innovative" (the words Jobs used to describe it).
Burnette notes that applications running in Safari won't have access to Core animation, local storage, be multi-threaded, or run at native speed. Those are some big things to give up. What do developers get in return?
For one thing, a larger installed base. Now that Safari is also available on Windows, an application developed for the iPhone will work on any Mac or PC as well. With the Safari release for Windows, and iTunes already there, iPhones will be as usable by PC users as Mac users.
Suppose that Apple had gone the other way and delivered an SDK. Apple doesn't see the iPhone as a Mac-only kind of product. They'd want to enable Windows shops to develop applications for the iPhone as well. That's a daunting proposition and one that would be sure to leave out large populations of programmers who don't want to learn the intricacies of programming on OS X. How many people do you know who figured out how to write applications for the Palm? Exactly.
Now consider the course that Apple chose. On one hand, it looks like a cop out. "DENIED!" was how one programmer I know described it. On the other, it's a confirmation by a major computer company that the Web is a fine platform for developing applications--maybe the best platform we now have.
The Web as platform (more specifically Safari in this case) is an idea that is more democratic, more open, and ultimately more innovative than a mere SDK with the lock-in that that implies. It's not perfect--there are still too many browser incompatibilities, but it's definitely the right direction.