Last Wednesday I gave a guest lecture in the course “ICT Design: Valorization and mobile applications,” part of the ICT Management and Design Masters program at TU Delft. I talked for almost two hours on my perspective on the business of app development as a freelancer and independent developer. The students asked insightful questions, and I really enjoyed my time there. For those interested, I have uploaded the presentation.
I’ll be giving my Mobile APIs: Client and server should be friends presentation (sans Daniel this time) at GeekNight. It’s part of the Microsoft’s annual TechDays conference, and my presentation will be at 19:15 on Thursday in the Hague. The presentation should be a good intermediate-level overview of API development in service of awesome mobile apps, and it comes complete with an all new colorful Metro presentation style! =)
Tony Colley nails it.
Google says it very succinctly: “HTML5 and WebKit pave the way for mobile web applications.” HTML5 is coming and it has a lot of interesting features, from audio and video support to local storage. Combine this with the fact that web apps are a particularly attractive way to reach many mobile platforms and the WebKit browser found on the iPhone and Android platforms already implements many of the HTML5 standard, and you can see why HTML5 is so attractive for mobile apps.
With the ability of HTML5 web apps to store data locally and have the browser pass along the device’s hardware states, I believe that HTML5 wbe apps can do almost anything you could want an internet-using application to do. The only exception I can think of is high performance 3D graphics, as even great 2D graphics are possible with CSS3 and HTML5′s canvas tag. Already there are nice libraries like RaphaëlJS that work in the iPhone’s Mobile Safari.