Yesterday, after hearing the news that the iPhone would support apps developed using web standards, I was pretty excited. I was ready to take a month and write an app for the iPhone… all my dreams of actually getting something I designed running on a mobile device would finally come true after 3 years of letdown!

Today, after calming down and watching the keynote, I’m not nearly as excited and I’ve even crossed over into being disappointed.

When I heard that developers could write for the iPhone using web standards my brain was thinking that these apps could live on the phone. I don’t know why I thought this, I just did. If this were the case, you could be sure that your 3rd party applications would run while on a train going through a tunnel. Play your downloaded sudoku puzzles, whatever, wireless signal not required. This is possible, however would require the iPhone to act as a server for any more complicated applications. As it stands now, if I write a sudoku—or any other—web application for the iPhone, you would only be able to play it as long as you had a connection the the internet.

So, based on this, I might not be spending July writing an application for the iPhone, and might just be following my path of writing a web application (perhaps with iPhone support?) I think apple is going down the right path, and that moving to using modern web technologies to write applications is a good direction to go. However, until their is more integration with the iPhone—an ability to add data to the phonebook, calendar, or even store data locally—I wouldn’t agree with Steve Jobs saying that its possible to develop applications for the iphone.

I would say its possible to develop applications for the internet. But then again we all already knew that.

Oh? and no flash? thats just too bad. I conceder flash part of the base functionally of any full web browser these days. Even the wii has flash.