A little pre-history

When I was a kid, I had an Atari 130XE. You’ve probably never heard of it. It was an 8-bit, all-in-one box that booted straight into BASIC; a flexible, well-built, sturdy computer.

There was just one problem: it wasn’t a ZX Spectrum or a Commodore Amiga.

At the time, Britain was undergoing a low-budget computing renaissance. Bedrooms up and down the country were filled with skinny boys (and yes, it was mostly boys) noisily loading games from cassette tapes and dutifully copying down source code listings from specialist magazines. The two engines of this renaissance were the Spectrum and the Amiga, and as such, the games, the tutorials and the social infrastructure were built for these two machines. Perhaps this helped me become more of a creative self-starter: I wrote my own games and stories instead of consuming other peoples’.

Later on, 16 bit computers became popular, and everyone upgraded to the Atari ST: a home machine powerful enough for creatives and musicians, but cool enough for game-playing kids. Except, perhaps inevitably, we had a PC. Running DOS. With a black-and-white Hercules display. Great if you wanted to plug economic figures through a spreadsheet, but lousy if you were a twelve-year-old who was mostly interested in playing The Secret of Monkey Island. Not only was the wholly PC incompatible with the Atari ST, but the PC was actually incompatible with itself: a game that worked on PCs with an EGA or VGA screen wouldn’t work with CGA or Hercules. Back then, the parts inside your computer were at least as important as the operating system you ran or the software you bought.

Plug and Play

Through heavy force and heavy lifting, Microsoft changed all that. Windows 95 was the first widely-accessible operating system that unified hardware platforms. Sure, you had to have an Intel-compatible processor, and it took them a while to get it right (for a while the system was redubbed “plug and pray”), but you didn’t have to mess with configuration files to get your computer working. This was a Big Deal.

Today, we’re used to not having to tinker with our machines. Windows will adapt to just about any hardware you throw it at, and even Linux has become an easy-to-use operating system (relatively speaking).

Better yet, we have data portability: in my house we’re running Windows 7, Mac OS X and Ubuntu, and I can move my documents between them interchangeably. Thanks to the web, and Java before it, we even have applications that don’t care what kind of operating system they run on. For an end user, things just work. That’s exactly how it should be.

Finally, computing is simple, data is interoperable and consumers are in control.

Uh oh: enter the portables

So just as we get a unified computing platform that’s easy to use and relatively simple for consumers to navigate, in comes a new device market that’s as fragmented and consumer-unfriendly as the computing market was in the eighties.

Android. iPhone OS. Windows 7 tablet edition. Windows Embedded Compact. Windows Phone. WebOS. ChromeOS. Kindle OS. Whew! It’s like 1986 all over again.

As a publisher or developer, figuring out which device to build for is a headache. Each one has a different operating system, possibly a different app store (something nobody had to worry about in the eighties), and a different set of underlying technologies. Do you exploit the iPad’s current success and develop for the locked-down Apple platform? Do you take advantage of Amazon’s huge built-in market and write a Kindle app? Do you hold out and wait for HP’s exciting-looking WebOS-powered tablet (which caused a storm recently by publicly moving away from Windows)?

Plug and Play (again)

The truth is, market forces are going to apply the same pressures to the mobile market that the personal computing sector felt in the early nineties. This story has played itself out several times now: one platform will emerge victorious. Judging by the lessons learned by IBM with their Personal Computer architecture, and both Microsoft and Linux for operating systems, it’s likely to be one which is:

• Open: anyone can add it to their system for little cost, allowing hardware manufacturers to maximize profits by concentrating on the device itself rather than the ecosystem around it
• Sustainable: it’s powered by a solid business ecosystem that will ensure the longevity of the platform
• Friendly: it’s a system for everyone, not just hobbyists or developers
• Flexible: it can be used in multiple contexts, from living rooms to science labs

By this measure, Apple is condemned to be a niche player, operating at the premium end of the market. Sure, right now technophiles everywhere are salivating over the iPad, but that will last until someone comes out with something nicer. In any event, Apple’s grasp is limited to the wealthier western nations – there are far more people seeking more affordable devices waiting in the wings in other places. The third world computer revolution is very much underway.

My bet, of course, is on web technologies. But it isn’t necessarily on the Internet: it’s time we separated web technologies from the World Wide Web. Indeed, connectivity isn’t ubiquitous, and isn’t likely to become ubiquitous world-wide for a very long time. Therefore, the ability to download, install and run apps offline, as we always have with software applications, is incredibly important.

With its Chrome Web App Store, Google is leading the way, and showing that it understands what it takes to create a next-generation application platform. It’s also shown leadership over HTML 5, which it is clearly investing in as a genuine method for powering both content and software. The genius is this: anyone can build using web technologies, and web technologies can run on virtually any hardware. Google makes its money through value-added services, like advertising (to allow both device manufacturers and software developers to supplement their incomes), its app store and underlying logic via some powerful APIs. It’s not an operating system, but for most end-users, they’re making the operating system irrelevant: it’s simply the thing that runs the web browser.

My advice: ignore the hardware

Computers as we know them today will always exist, but they won’t be for everybody. If you’re developing for non-technical end users, the plethora of hardware devices available to you is a red herring. You should be thinking of the web as the platform your products will be based on. Make no mistake: you need to become an expert in web technologies now – or, of course, find someone who is.

Images:

• My ‘new’ Atari 130 XE by qnr, released under a Creative Commons license.
• HTC Tablet PC – evolve by nDevilTV, released under a Creative Commons license.
• Amazon Kindle & Sony eBook by jblyberg, released under a Creative Commons license.
• iPad & Friends by Yutaka Tsutano, released under a Creative Commons license
• Web browsers by smemon87, released under a Creative Commons license

Ebooks don’t cut it: everyone wants an app

NB (May 20, 2010): A lot of my suggestions for web-based apps are part of the Google Chrome Web App Store. In fact, the .crx file used there is a zip file with very similar characteristics to epub. (I assume, as Chromium is open source, that .crx files are also open source – so the web app store is not limited to Google.) This post can be reread as an argument for building for the Web App Store.

At Intersection: Publishing in London the other week, there was a lot of discussion from publishers looking at mobile apps as their mobile publishing solution. Rather than creating ebooks, there seemed to be a general feeling that dedicated applications presented more of an opportunity for richer content, while closing the door to pirates and ensuring that publications remained a paid commodity.

The piracy argument is kind of spurious: although app stores tend to be locked down, this presents a false security blanket for publishers. It only takes one person to crack a store for piracy to be generally possible; technology only ever becomes less secure over time. A cynical person might suggest that the piracy argument is largely spread by the people who own the app stores or provide related services. The people who will suffer are authors and publishers.

Why apps rock

However, there’s definitely an argument for using apps – not just for publishers, but for anyone who wants to create dynamic content. Anyone who’s ever owned an iPhone will tell you that native applications can still provide a smoother, more consistent experience than a web app, without the hassle of remembering website addresses or waiting for pages to load. Tweetie is a million miles better than Twitter’s mobile website – something they themselves acknowledged when they acquired the iPhone application last month.

Above, mobile Twitter is on the left; Tweetie is on the right.

• The app doesn’t need to load its interface from the web; only the underlying data is downloaded, meaning the app can appear instantaneously, loads data faster, and provides a better user experience.
• The mobile web app needs to sit within the browser chrome (URL and search boxes, browser buttons on the bottom, and in my case, a debug toolbar). The app, on the other hand, has a full-screen UI dedicated to Twitter.

Why the web rocks

The mobile landscape right now is a bit like the personal computing landscape circa 1985. There are a bunch of different platforms to code for:

• Apple iPhone and iPad
• Android
• Symbian
• Windows Phone
• Blackberry
• WebOS (now more important in the wake of HP’s acquisition)

Each of these platforms is different under the hood, and must be developed for separately. Most developers and publishers can’t afford to do this – there isn’t a way to write once and cross-compile to many platforms at once. In fact, Apple recently specifically forbade this: if you’re developing an Apple app, you’re doing so natively, or you’re violating that platform’s terms of use.

However, each of these platforms have one thing in common: they support the web.

HTML5 and ePub: a new platform for apps

As you’re probably aware already, the upcoming HTML5 standard revises the web platform to become far more suitable for apps. Improvements include:

• Methods for offline and cached usage (so interfaces can load immediately)
• Built-in databases and storage (so web pages can natively store their own data)
• A paintable canvas element and WebGL 3D graphics functionality (so web pages can display interfaces more like real applications; the 3D shooter Quake II has already been ported to native HTML)
• Native video and audio support (no Flash required)
• Websockets (a more efficient way to connect to Internet data from web pages)
• Built-in support for advanced functionality like geolocation

This is a big deal. Compliant browsers like Firefox, Safari, Chrome and even the upcoming Microsoft Internet Explorer 9 will be able to run applications that look and feel like native software but are powered by web standards. Between those browser engines, that’s most of the mobile platforms covered: those that don’t have an HTML5 browser built in by default should have one available to download. What’s more, both Firefox’s Gecko HTML rendering engine and the WebKit engine that powers both Chrome and Safari are open source, so anyone can pick them up and build software around them.

So sites on the wider web can be more like applications. That’s fantastic news in itself, but what about the app store model? A lot of people depend on that for revenue, and there’s no reason why that should be incompatible with using web standards.

Luckily, it turns out that ePub – the ebook standard – is really just a bunch of XHTML 1.1 pages drawn together in a specialized way and bundled up in a modified zip file. There are already established best practices for buying and selling ebooks.

If the ePub standard was updated to allow HTML5, it would evolve into a format for self-contained, multi-platform apps that could be sold in the same way as ebooks, music, videos, or apps in something like the iTunes App Store. Except app publishers would only need to build once to support many different kinds of mobile platform, thereby reducing the barrier to entry and allowing their budgets to be concentrated on building just one really awesome piece of software instead of spread across multiple devices.

This would be in a lot of peoples’ interests: app publishers, device manufacturers, browser vendors and consumers alike. There’s a lot of money tied up in a venture like this. The only question is, will the International Digital Publishing Forum, which controls the ePub standard, be foresighted enough to see this opportunity?

Update: Steve Jobs weighs in

Apple’s CEO has written a little about why HTML5 is the future of mobile apps (albeit in the context of his platform’s refusal to support Flash):

HTML5, the new web standard that has been adopted by Apple, Google and many others, lets web developers create advanced graphics, typography, animations and transitions without relying on third party browser plug-ins (like Flash). HTML5 is completely open and controlled by a standards committee, of which Apple is a member.

[…] Flash was created during the PC era – for PCs and mice. Flash is a successful business for Adobe, and we can understand why they want to push it beyond PCs. But the mobile era is about low power devices, touch interfaces and open web standards – all areas where Flash falls short.

[…] New open standards created in the mobile era, such as HTML5, will win on mobile devices (and PCs too). Perhaps Adobe should focus more on creating great HTML5 tools for the future, and less on criticizing Apple for leaving the past behind.

Make no mistake: HTML5 is the platform to bet on.

Just a quick post. The entire tech sector is ga-ga over the iPad; I’m pretty excited by it myself. But I thought I’d try and throw some realism on the fire by linking to a couple of interesting alternative posts on the topic.

Quinn Norton has some very smart comments about the blinkered vision of the wealthy middle class people who typically assess the impact of devices like this:

I live a really rich intellectual life and get to do lots of things most poor people don’t, and I appreciate that it’s because almost none of my social group are poor. But sometimes my social group kind of goes crazy and forgets that while they have a lot of power, my class is a whole lot bigger than theirs. And none of them will be buying iPads.

Dave Winer has been testing his for a day, and thinks the revolution is yet to come:

Keep dreaming if you want, but if you give the iPad to your mother expect the light to go on for you. At that exact moment you will realize how poorly prepared it is for that. [...] With the caveat that it’s after one day and I reserve the right to change it at any time: Today’s iPad, the one that I just bought, is just a demo of something that could be very nice and useful at some point in the future. Today it’s something to play with, not something to use. That’s the kind way to say it. The direct way: It’s a toy.

I think Dave’s comment – “a demo of something that could be very nice and useful at some point in the future” – is probably prescient. I am excited about the device, and I do want one, but I’m more interested in where this takes the computer industry as a whole in the future. Apple’s devices are famously locked-down (“The iPad is a LEGO set that can only be assembled into what’s drawn on the box,” as Jarek Piórkowski puts it), but the devices that follow it won’t be, although they will learn from iPad’s design decisions.. Specifically, it will bring about three things:

1. A new kind of smarter, easier, more intuitive portable computer interface
2. The death of Flash and third party plugins for multimedia content on the web (this is a big deal)
3. Tacit approval for the industry to innovate away from the traditional PC model we’ve been working with for decades, and create new information appliances that more easily fit into peoples’ lives and can be used in a more human way

Actually, my last point was kickstarted by the iPhone, but the iPad makes it legit: whereas the former was a “mobile device”, the latter is being marketed and sold as a computer in its own right. Many more will follow.

All these devices with different form factors, designs and operating systems will have two things in common: you can take them with you, and they will run HTML 5+ web applications. The future is going to be very interesting indeed.

If you pay any attention at all to the tech press, you’re probably sick to death of the iPad, Apple’s announced tablet device. I’m posting about it anyway, because there are two things that haven’t been discussed enough, which I think deserve a mention.

One: this isn’t a device for the tech community. I think Rafe Colburn hits it on the head:

It’s just an iPod Touch with a big screen, but that’s all that many people need from a computer. You can use it to surf the Web, read email, listen to music, watch video, or compose documents. That’s the personal computer use case for many people. And I think a lot of people are going to buy them.

He goes on to discuss the locked-down nature of the device, which I agree is a setback that may have a profound impact on the consumer computing industry. (On the other hand, as Yehuda Katz argues, this is a major win for standards-based web applications.)

Two: for me, the big news wasn’t the iPad at all. It was iBooks: Apple’s new iTunes-like store for ebooks. You may remember that iTunes pretty much revolutionized how we buy music, and this is the same; the books are stored in the open ePub standard, so they’ll play with other ereaders, and the experience is seamless. (You almost certainly won’t need an iPad to buy from iBooks.)

Mashable notes that some big players are on board:

iBooks is backed by big-time launch partners Penguin, Simon and Schuster, HarperCollins, Macmillan and Hachette, all publishing powerhouses in their own rights.

You can think about the iPad as a kind of $499 catwalk model, that other devices will slowly emulate over the next couple of years. But iBooks? That’s a store that anyone will be able to use right away, which just might change the publishing industry forever.

Photo by kennymatic, released under a Creative Commons license.

TI sees projectors as popular as cell cameras.

And they may well be right. The cellphone really is turning into the ‘portable multimedia computer’ that Nokia always talks about: an Internet connected device that allows you to download and play content, as well as record voice, video, photographs and documents and send them back into the cloud.

I think Apple and Google both see this; Microsoft seems to be a step or two behind, insisting on marrying its mobile operating system to its legacy Windows platform. I’m sure they’ll wake up eventually.