Tag: itouch

Steve is showing a completely interactive ad here, almost like a sub-app inside the application. Embedded video, toys to play with. Really impressive as far as mobile advertising goes. If that kind of thing excites you.

Joshua Topolsky, liveblogging the iPhone OS 4 event.
He hits on the key point: advertising, no matter how great, only excites the advertiser, generally not the advertisee (though in narrow circumstances: of course, you’re glad to hear about something that interests you. 99.9% of all web-based advertising I’ve ever seen would interest no one). Nothing poses more of a hazard to the platform than opening this sort of floodgate for intrusive, platform-wide ads than does iAd.
Which Apple itself introduced today.
The examples shown seem tame enough, but then it always seems tame to start. Advertisers simply will not content themselves with opt-in advertising tucked away inside an app, and the new suspend/resume function means there’s no escape, the interrupting ad will still be waiting for you when you return; these are the people to whom you’ve just given the keys to the kingdom, and it has the capacity to make the crown jewels (the information-driven apps) totally unusable.
Pundits keep thinking Apple is going to “closed” itself out of the mobile market just like they all have convinced themselves that Apple did in the PC market. They won’t. But if it’s not careful, Apple will ultimately advertise itself out of the market.

iPaddery

I think “the web” doesn’t mean what John Battelle thinks it does:

There’s a very easy way for the iPad to [have a HyperCard like development environment for casual users to make apps with], and it doesn’t involve creating another HyperCard. It just involves the iPad becoming a world class Internet client. So far, from all I’ve heard, it sounds like it won’t be, and if you want to make anything that works great on the iPad, you have to make it in Apple’s proprietary authoring environment – just as you did for the iPhone. I think that’s a classic Apple mistake.

Er, methinks that, to John, Flash==“the web.” Sadly, no. Apple is, in fact, ensuring that iPad, iPhone, iTouch have a world class internet client. That’s called WebKit. The proper response on the part of web developers (and casual users, for that matter) is to move away from proprietary (e.g. Flash) to the open, or at least more open alternatives present in HTML5. You can make, today, a standalone application built entirely on that basis. Like Glyphboard or Pie Guy show, you can have a fully functional, offline capable, completely web-standards-based application on an iPhone without ever touching any of Apple’s “proprietary authoring environment” or relying on the Apple-run iTunes store for distribution.

Remaking HyperCard isn’t necessary. Apple already has a world class, non-proprietary authoring environment on their mobile OS. It’s called “the web.”