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Macworld Industry Forum: John Gruber talks about web apps vs. the web
News from Macworld Expo, all week at TUAW. This afternoon at the Macworld 2011 Industry forum, the founding editor of Daring Fireball, John Gruber, talked about the web vs. web apps. He likened the difference to that between the Newton and the iPhone, as the Newton was only able to hold information entered manually, while the web-enabled iPhone provides endless content. That's the main reason the iPhone hit big and the Newton didn't. John made a distinction between HTML, a markup language, and HTTP, which is a protocol that allows programs to use the internet. Without HTTP there would be no App Store. In that sense, Apple is a web company. The best browsers today are Safari and Google Chrome, both of which are based on Webkit, an open-source web engine introduced at Macworld Expo seven years ago. Gruber believes WebKit is the best framework to build a browser upon. Most mobile browsers are now using WebKit, including Android. The reason Apple created WebKit was not only to enhance Safari, before which there was no great Mac browser. Rather, it was to encourage the adoption of the web as a baseline common-denominator platform that people could build upon. When Windows was the baseline for the web, Apple was left out. With WebKit, Apple has the advantage of creating this new paradigm and letting others catch up. Most video plays on HTML5 devices in H.264, which uses the same format as Flash, but Flash is closed and proprietary software from Adobe (if it breaks, Adobe is the only one who can fix it), while HTML5 is open and has become an industry format that any mobile device manufacturer can use. The App Store is totally closed, and some think that it will extinguish the web, which is under no-one's control, in favor of the market being controlled by one company. This is a false fear. People want both the web and web apps, with one not precluding the other. Apple's apps use the best parts of the web and enhance the experience with enhanced functionality, which benefits everyone. This is not a real competition with another company, it's a competition with the idea that the web is all you need. Gruber's main wrap-up was that people like both the web and web apps, and this will improve both instead of being an either/or proposition.
Macworld Industry Forum: Jason Snell on how Apple does it
News from Macworld Expo, all week at TUAW. At the Macworld 2011 industry forum this morning, Jason Snell, the editorial director of Macworld magazine, talked about "how Apple does it." His first point was that Apple is not just Steve Jobs. Steve created a great management team that just doesn't get enough press. Regardless of what happens with Steve, Snell says, Apple will do fine. Apple has an uncanny sense of timing. It doesn't get everything first but, when it does, it does it right. The Rio was one of the first MP3 players, but it wasn't until the introduction of the iPod that the market took off. Apple knows to get rid of things when their time is past, like floppy drives, FireWire in some devices and optical discs (now on the way out, see the MacBook Air). A lot of people don't like these decisions when they happen, but Apple really doesn't care; the leadership of the company feels so strongly about it that it continues to make those moves anyway.
Macworld Industry Forum: Bill Atkinson on Interface Design
News from Macworld Expo, all week long from TUAW. Bill Atkinson, the developer of HyperCard and MacPaint (among others), spoke about interface design this morning at the Macworld Industry Conference. Not so long ago, Atkinson noted, users were quite separate from the computing experience. UI design evolved to the now familiar desktop metaphor, then stopped. This is going to change with mobile devices. Today, we edge closer to integrating the computer with ourselves, Atkinson said. "Pinch and zoom" is only a beginning, as physical contact with content increases, spawning good and bad ideas. For example, augmented reality fills your screen with boxes, and visual goggles suggest future wearable computers. We're far off from the "floating displays" of Minority Report and Avatar. Atkinson went on to discuss what he calls a "memory prosthesis," or the idea of a wearable earpiece that communicates with, for instance, an iPhone. The piece could work with a Virtual Personal Assistant that accepts data from the user's conversational speech. In fact, this assistant hears, sees, speaks and records everything you hear, storing that data in the cloud. That information could later be retrieved by asking questions of the virtual assistant. Of course, this hinges on natural language recognition, which has been the holy grail for some time. We'll get to see a good test of a computer responding to question-and-answer processing on February 24. That's when the IBM Deep QUA Project Watson computer (the same one that beat Kasparov at chess) will compete against champions on the TV show Jeopardy. It will spur the imagination of natural language work and put it in the spotlight. Atkinson believes this will be the nature of future mobile phone interface, probably between 2 and 10 years from now. It's inevitable though since he considers it the natural progression of the mobile device market with the device doing very little and the heavy lifting being done in the cloud. It sounds like the Knowledge Navigator is getting closer to reality, at least according to Atkinson.
