[nickbw]

Hey, look, another doom and gloom article about the iPad and the end of open development. Let's just try searching it for some keywords.

"web" ... not found

"browser" ... not found

"safari" ... not found

Yes, well.

When did native apps become the new vinyl records? "Sure, the web is great and platform independent, but there's just more soul in compiled code."

[dschobel]

No one gave a crap about applications on iphone before the app store. I have yet to hear one story written about the mad rush to develop web applications for the iphone.

The native app/app store combination is incontrovertibly the best way to deliver applications and have your product found.

To pretend otherwise is disingenuous or simply naive.

[nickbw]

No one gave a crap about web apps for the iPhone because they all wanted to develop apps that took advantage of phone features. (Which Apple has been making more and more accessible to web apps anyway.)

The entire scare here is that the iPad will make personal computing a closed ecosystem. But the web is already where most people spend most of their computer time, and Safari is an excellent and standards-complient browser.

No, you won't develop web apps for the iPad. You'll develop web apps, period. For the web. Which people will use on iPads and any other computer they please.

The battle that matters is keeping web standards open. Consumer operating systems can be as closed as they like, as long as they come with a compatible browser.

[dschobel]

I understand why this position is theoretically reassuring as some sort of an open portal onto the device but as a practical matter, web apps will be just as irrelevant on the ipad as they are on the iphone.

[nickbw]

What are you basing that on?

To gold rush developers, perhaps. I spend most of my iphone time in safari, and I don't think I'm alone. With a bigger screen I'd use it even more.

This thing is good for the web, which is what we all need to be pushing. It brings the web to the absolute front. This is "webTV" without all the stupid. A computer that gives you a modern browser and then gets out of your way. The fact that it also comes with a closed marketplace for proprietary apps is neat for a few lucky developers, but hardly matters to the "future of computing".

You're worrying about how we can make "the device" free. Why? All the good free stuff is, necessarily, device-agnostic, and this particular device gives above average access to it.