So it turns out the announcements were not as spectacular as we had hoped for. A lot of the keynote was in fact a repeat of last year’s. What was new was the disclosure that EA and id were developing new games for the Mac, Safari was going to be available on the Windows platform, and that XHTML/AJAX was the API for the iPhone.
Very underwhelming. Very un-spectacular. And very significant.
Gaming for Mac gives less cause for users to run Windows on Mac hardware.
Safari for Windows gives more reason for web developers to support the lowly Mac user, who could otherwise be ignored.
And XHTML/AJAX, or Web2.0, means that the iPhone has no significant programming hurdle for users. You could write up a simple iPhone app using Safari on your Mac or PC, and download it to your iPhone when it’s ready. You could even tweak other apps to your liking. Perhaps Apple will be motivated to release DashCode for Windows as well. But it just goes to show that scripting has already won.
It will also inhibit the adoption of Microsoft’s PopFly!, Silverlight, Adobe’s AIR, and other proprietary “solutions” to ubiquitous, networked apps.
It also means the iPhone has no significant programming differentiator from any other platform. Thus, whatever apps you write for the iPhone will operate with minor modification on the Nokia N90, which also has an embedded WebKit.
And, finally, it means my plans are not only safe, but will carry more weight than I thought.