Siu Lun

I recently had to look into mobile application developments and straight away, I thought, iPhone Apps.

iPhone Apps has been gaining ground and becoming ever increasingly popular. In my office, I reckon all the male have an iPhone. 3G, 3GS whatever.

And all of them buys and downloads apps!

Then somebody suggested to me to develop mobile apps as offline web-apps, then I thought straight away, that’s not right, I wanted offline access and web-apps on the iPhone are slow… then I decided to do a search anyway, as with technology, you never know what’s possible and I went and utilised the power of the world…

I found that… though I should’ve remembered as I read it a while back too… that mobile Safari does include offline access support therefore can deploy web-apps on the phone.

And there seems to be a lot of ‘evangelist’ for the mobile web-app ‘camp’. To a degree I think it is just over-hyped.

Still, the pure idea of click through Safari, then through to the mobile address still haunts me.

The art of UI and IA design is to minimise click through. One click more is a click too many.

So I think I’ll stick to my native apps until somebody develop a cross-platform web-app ‘platform’. This should be possible. Though whether Apple allows it, is a different story.

Later.

Well here it is ladies and gentlemen.

The jury’s out and jQuery has won .net’s open source application of the year award.

jQuery without a doubt has transformed a lot of javascript development online and is one of the most straightforward javascript abstraction library available.

Multitouch.

A word that has been echoing in our ears for the past two years. Made ever popular by the real world application Apple has shown in it’s iPhone and iPod touch product line ups. Manufacturers are scrambling to get multi-touch devices into mainstream market.

Finally, Windows 7, which will become the world’s most used operating system in the next 5-10 years. Fully supports multi-touch technology.

Today’s consumer hardware development is driven by the gaming industry, faster processors, bigger rams, faster GPUs. They’re all there to create entertainment.

What’s inevitably on the horizon now is that the gaming industry is getting into 3D vision and multi-touch technologies. Mobile phone applications and games are the experiments on UI and ‘introduction’ to the full-blown PC games.

The first of these new generations of games is already coming: Take a look at R.U.S.E

However, possibly due to the financial downturn that we’re still trying to clear. These technologies maybe delay, products that supports full multi-touch screens are far and few between. So are products that supports 3D vision. There is no doubt these two technology is the future, but currently no products on the market supports both. Just how far are we till we see such products on the market? And more importantly, how much would they cost?

Only time will tell.