What a crazy week in the mobile world. Android's tablet buzz continues to gain steam towards an imminent launch. Rumors of Apple's iPad 2 are starting to roll in. Rumors of RIM's BlackPad, uh, I mean PlayBook, running Android apps. Then some concrete announcements from HP on the rejuvenated webOS with some nice looking phones and tablet. And today the big Nokia/Microsoft Phone announcement. How does one keep up with it all while trying to do their day job :).
With all that's going on, it's pretty clear one thing in my mind. The rate of innovation in the mobile space is stunning. Why did it take these new platforms to unleash all this creativity. Why doesn't my desktop look as sexy as all these tablets? What a price we paid for platform certainty under Microsoft, the closed hardware ecosystem of Mac, and the lack of real investment into the usability of Linux. It's quite sad, really.
But I also sense opportunity. I've been closely following the progress of the android-x86.org project as they attempt to bring Android to x86 platforms, because I'm very curious about how the Android experience could scale to the traditional netbook, notebook, desktop. Frankly, it isn't very good. But with Honeycomb, and the focus on larger screens, I have hope that will change. We'll see when Honeycomb hits the AOSP.
And that thinking was somewhat validated by one of the most interesting announcements out of the HP event, at least in my mind. And that was the intention of HP to bring webOS into the PC space as well. Now all we got were words and almost no details, let alone a demo, but I am very curious about what they are going to come up with, and whether it will actually pan out or not (there was a sniff of vaporware in the air).
So we'll see where this all lands. I hope we find out soon as this thing is keeping me up at nights thinking of all the possibilities and how this will change app development. As I keep saying, it sure is a great time to be a software developer. The shackles of the past couple of decades have been released and innovation is rampant.
Doug, I very much agree with you interesting post. Just one remark:
ReplyDeleteIMHO it was Apple's closed i* systems which started the sexy new things. Albeit it might be considered 'open' in the sense that there was the strong focus on inviting developers to write and distribute apps. Clearly not 'open' in the sense of (F)OSS.
Very true. I was referring to the fact that I can't install Mac operating systems on my non-Apple hardware (legally). If Apple ever let it's OS free, they'd get more of a market share, but at the risk of cannibalizing their hardware sales.
ReplyDeleteGood reading!
ReplyDeleteAnother point is HTML5.
Similar to what mobile platforms (android and iOS) are doing to kind of compete with the usability of desktop, we also have the web space that pushes itself both to mobile and desktop.
In a sense desktop apps are in a place where no big company loves them.
QT got ditched a few days ago, GTK does not provide the flexibility and rapidness that web technologies provide, Java has a huge installation friction. Especially after java mac packaging was removed from the apple ownership.
Inside the java space swt has a long way to go to be comparable to the rapidness for building a smooth, sexy and fluid UI like we can do on the web today :)
Swing being tied into the core JDK has resulted in a commercial disinterest where strict control is not encouraging the community contribution making it the 1st choice desktop ui toolkit. Not considering the java installation friction mentioned beforehand.
To get things better there should be a way to make desktop apps commercially viable again. That would mean taking care of smoothing out the whole lifecycle from installing, friction-less updating, paying and removing.
We'll see if platforms like Adobe AIR will live up to their promises? :)
Great points @AhtiK. I am reserving judgement until I can see an HTML5 app that wows me with great usability and performance.
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