I have an iPhone and for the most part I love it.  I like the interface, the seamless access to music and all the apps on the AppStore.  I don’t like the shortcomings, such as the lack of cut and paste, no video capture, lack of landscape keyboard, etc… Many of these will be addressed soon with the 3.0 OS, which is already in public beta.  We have created six apps for the AppStore ourselves and we know and love Objective C.  But what about Android?  I’ve heard a lot about it, especially when the G1 launched, but I’ve never personally used it or seen it in action beyond some POC work by some of the developers on my team.

That is about to change.  Google did a very smart thing, which at first I thought was very generous, then I realized was a brilliant move to buy mindshare.  They gave all 4,000 of us a free Android phone just for coming to their conference.  But we weren’t 4,000 random people.  We are thought leaders and developers from all walks of life that know enough or care enough about Google to spend a couple of days learning more about it.  Even with this “Google Centric” crowd I saw a lot of iPhones and Blackberries and very few G1’s.  But now all of us have a free Android phone, and not only that but it is unlocked and we have a SIM card for 30 days of voice and data access.

I’d say the odds of all of us trying out some development on this platform just increased dramatically.  I’m curious to see what comes out of this or what types of skunkwork apps my team can put together now that we have a spare phone we can actually try things out on.
 

I just got back from the recent Google I/O developer conference and was struck by it’s simplicity.  It was short, only two days. It provided great content.  It provided great food and snacks.  It even had the requisite Wii and Rockband pods and upped the ante with Pool, Foosball and chair massage. 

So enough with the format, what was the message?  The message was all about the importance of HTML5 and how it was supported by all “modern” browsers.  The browser made by the boys in Redmond was not on this “modern” list.  I haven’t followed the HTML 5 standard that closely but was surprised along with others with what could be done within the browser without a plugin.  Does this mean Adobe should worry about Flash marketshare dropping?  Not immediately, but in a couple of years, maybe so.  In a nutshell you have some new tags and features to consider:

<canvas>  This tag allows you to have pixel level control in the browser and do things such as draw a diagonal line.  They even created O3D which allows you to create compelling 3D graphics and use the graphics card, not the CPU.

<video>  Now you can embed a video as easy as an image without worrying about plugins or codecs.

Geolocation – Your PC or Laptop can now be as smart as your iPhone and you can choose to share your location with the browser to get location awareness in Maps or other apps.

App Cache and Database -  HTML 5 allows you to do some interesting caching and has it’s own SQL Lite DB (very similar to Adobe AIR).  This can allow you to cache portions of your app for faster access or to do interesting offline applications in the browser.  Google Mail already uses this approach on the iPhone and Android.

Web Workers – An API for running background Javascript so you can do things asynchronously and not slow down the user experience.

The big question of course is when is the HTML5 support going to be broad enough that developers can take advantage of all of this and really exploit it?  Google asked that we as developers push that curve and not allow these features to lie dormant for years as was the case with the foundations of AJAX.

My next post will talk more about Google Wave and some other announcements that came out of I/O 2009.