Vic Gundotra at Google IO keynote yesterday declared that the web had won. It is the dominant programming system. He then went on to introduce a host of new technologies. What does this mean for us in the real world of app development?
- Mobile apps will eventually be web apps. (no more developing separately for Symbian, Iphone and Blackberry). Mobile browsers will soon be able to talk to native mobile features like the accelerometer, GPS and calling.
- Web apps will be faster (browsers are getting faster through processing javascript quicker, allowing local data storage) and will compete head on with heavier and heavier desktop apps (think Google Photo Editor, Google Project and so on)
- Geolocation is coming – we’ve filtered information now by its popularity (Google / Digg), and by what our friends think (Facebook) and next we’ll filter by its proximity to us (Geolocation).
Obviously I care more about a friend or celebrity popping into a bar in the next road to me than I do about someone on the other side of the planet. Accurate, reliable geolocation services (see Firefox 3.5) are just around the corner for the mass market and will see a new way of filtering information.
For the techies out there here are a few links and notes to get you excited:
- HTML 5 will be in Firefox 3.5 and Chrome soon – looks cool – allows tag and enbaling pixel based layouts (draw a diagonal line). They showed a cool demo of rotating a playing video with a javascript transform.
- 3D engine will be in browser natively so you can access with javascript
- Web Elements allows you to drop code snippets (like a comment wall) onto your web page really easily
- App engine now supports Java – Manuel Lemos has managed to get PHP running on app engine as well
- Geolocation is going to be in and working in Firefox 3.5
