The subject of iSites (http://isites.us/learn) and other similar services came up at #momo Edinburgh today. This category of tools/services gives an interesting insight into how the future of apps and the web. Convergence is the term, methinks.
What do they do ? In effect, they allow you to bundle up collections of RSS feeds as categories in a "news" app. You define the look and feel, and the app talks to a server to learn the categories to display and the feeds to use to fill the categories. These are displayed in the familiar (to iPhone users) table and hierarchy views. The nice thing, in terms of the app store approval process, is that the app as it appears on the iPhone is fixed, and responds to all changes of the configuration data on the server with which it communicates.
Clearly, this is a restricted sort of niche, but it's a useful one nonetheless. And if you turn your head 90 degrees, you see that what you have really got is an, ahem, browser for the iSites format of feed aggregation. Take the obvious step and define an XML schema for the description of your iSites app.
Now look at the technology that those in the know are touting will kill apps, HTML5. That would be an XML schema for the description of web data, in one form or another.
So from the top down we have HTML5 doing everything in the browser, and from the bottom up we have iSites doing feed aggregation. My view is that a lot more of these kind of tools will emerge for broader application categories than just stream bundling. We will end up with a broadening of web programming into app programming, where the programming involves bringing the elements together in a declarative style; writing the AppXML. It has always been a bit of a stretch to see current web programmers transformed into Objective C hackers; the skill sets are just too distinct.
Now I just need to organize the 500 apps (sorry, shortcuts to AppXML pages) on my desktop (sorry, phone) and I can go home.
No comments:
Post a Comment