iPhone Multi Touch JavaScript API?

So far the talk on the web about the WWDC keynote today is about Safari for windows (I think it's great, but not all that surprising). The big news today for me is that essentially that Ajax is the iPhone SDK. I interpreted this in two opposing ways:

• Apple isn't ready to support an iPhone SDK in Cocoa
• Apple fully believes rich internet applications == "way of the future"

I'd really like to believe the latter.

On a side note note, I am trying out the Safari 3 beta and holy shit is it fast. The JavaScript engine implementation is really every bit as good as advertised.

So what I'm stuck wondering is if we'll get some sort of "real" multi touch API to work with. This view point makes some sense to me (summary: they won't provide anything extra for simplicities sake), but that's definitely not my hope.

When looking at patterns of serious innovation in the industry (and let's consider a mass market multi touch device "serious innovation"), nobody bothers to check with a standards body to make sure there is consensus (I'm thinking W3C here, not FCC). So until multi touch devices are a completely common place thing (3 - 5 years), and there are well agreed upon cross browser standards, I hope that apple goes ahead and gives us something to play with even if it's completely proprietary and not standards compliant in any way, because as far as I can see there are no standards for multi touch devices of any type.

Perhaps my main hope is just that I don't have to learn Objective-C. But I do think that if the only available option (for a time) for developing multi touch interfaces for the masses was via HTML/JavaScript/CSS, that it would not only cause web development to be taken more seriously, but it would also make that technology stack more viable for more desktop / device programming in the future.

Dave Hyatt said "I'll have much more to say about this in the coming months." back in january. So hopefully in a few weeks he can start talking.

Posted June 11th, 2007 at 3:51 pm by Ryan in Opinion