Identity Crisis

Like many Mac developers, the iPhone as a platform leaves me a little baffled.

I became a Mac developer so I could program in Cocoa, not because I have some inherent love for objects with a big Apple on them. If I wanted to program in a crappy language just so I could get more customers, I’d switch to Windows, not stinking JavaScript. Cocoa has EIGHTEEN YEARS of design and evolution behind it from some of the brightest people in the business. It’s famous for being fast, concise, and powerful. JavaScript was thrown together by some dudes a couple years ago to make web pages kind of, like, do shit and stuff.

(via the straightforward eloquence of Wil Shipley)

Steve’s announcement of AJAX/DHTML as the iPhone SDK struck a particular chord with me: this is the sound of the death toll of the desktop application. I personally haven’t written a line of Mac code in about 10 months — maybe 9 of those were spent figuring out a way to make Windows suck less (it can’t be done) and the last few weeks have been spent coming up to speed on a contender for the webtop, the Facebook platform.

Let’s recap the last 20 years or so:

1. Apple made a computer that was cheap and easy and sold it to end users.
2. Windows won the desktop wars due to mismanagement at Apple, shrewd OEM deals, and the relentless commoditization of PC hardware.
3. The web won (is winning?) the consumer application war because Windows won so completely on the desktop through business deals alone, and left the technology side of their offering completely stagnant, in effect creating the best platform ever for a computer to get pwned and become part of a botnet.
4. The web becomes a shitty-ass platform to code on because Microsoft wins the browser war. You can also choose to program in Flash, but it’s hard to say whether that’s more or less like a dentist appointment than Java, the loser of the Rich Internet Application wars. Either way, if you’re a programmer with a Cocoa background, you’re surrounded by suck.
5. Apple makes a great operating system and programming environment based on OPENSTEP, which wouldn’t exist if NeXT computers hadn’t failed, which wouldn’t exist if Steve hadn’t been forced out of Apple, and which Apple wouldn’t have had to buy if they hadn’t lost the desktop wars due to their mismanagement and Microsoft’s awesome yet pretty much illegal business mojo.
6. Apple makes the best-selling (at launch) phone in history, Steve makes a cryptic reference that he “skates to where the puck will be, not where it is”.

CONFUSION!!! Where do we go from here? When was the last major business success story you heard about a company that made a consumer product for the desktop? Okay, Skype, BitTorrent (sorta — dunno if they’ve made any money yet or not). What else? There are the IM clients, which were all created about 10 years ago and have pretty much frozen in time save for the occasional feature such as rich smiley icons.

I know, I know. Wil explicitly states that he’s not interested in switching to craptastic programming environments just for the sake of garnering a few more customers. It’s easy for him to sit back and turn away customers because he’s sitting on top of one of the most celebrated Mac applications created in the past few years. He has the luxury of staying small, lean, well-liked, and profitable. But I bet he’s wondering: what do I do for an encore?

If you ask some platform-neutral entrepreneur where to put their money and the next few years of their life, can you honestly expect anyone with a sound mind to suggest that it should go into anything but a web product? Just by virtue of being on the web, your business even comes with three independent exit strategies called Google, Microsoft and Yahoo!. And it’s a lot easier to sell your product into the huge market that is pretty much anyone with even the crappiest of Internet connections. What is YouTube other than a gigantic transcoding and streaming farm? It was worth a BILLION AND A HALF DOLLARS. Hey Wil, are you listening? BILLION. Forget Lotus, that’s Aston Martin money, my friend. And it’s all powered by technologies that some dudes threw together to make web pages, like, do shit and stuff.

For me, that’s the most inexplicable thing — the web is all held together by duct tape, scripting languages and the relentless monitoring of servers by operations guys who don’t get anywhere near enough credit. And the only real programming problem to solve is that of scale — everything else is all about marketing and content, preferably the viral and user-generated kind. Who knows what the fuck that is.

It’s interesting to see the web interface cues that the iPhone has adopted. Who other than Apple would be bold enough to create an entire user experience completely devoid of cut and paste? Using the iPhone on that wonderful Friday evening it occurred to me: users don’t copy and paste anymore. Why? Because every web application comes with one or many “share” buttons which package up a URL to the thing your looking at and ship it off to whomever in your address book you want to spam. Drag and drop? It’s been completely missing from the web for so long that an entire generation of kids grew into target demographic age without it. And if you’re wondering why the menu bar in Leopard is semi-transparent, well it’s probably because no one knows how to use such an antiquated thing anymore.

If there’s a right time for a native iPhone SDK, Apple will do it. One thing they’ve gotten exactly right lately is timing — timing when the consumer market is ready for the things they’ve had in their back pocket for years. UNIX on the desktop? 1999. Hard drives full of media in your pocket? 2000 or so. And the iPhone, that “smart”phone with more than a passing resemblance to Apple’s Newton device? Well, the world wasn’t ready for that until 2007, I guess. But there may never be a right time for an iPhone SDK for me, or Wil, or the people who make NewsFire, MarsEdit, TextMate, or Yojimbo (just browsing through Leopard’s weird 3D Dock) — there might only be right times for VoIP software makers, IM services, and other strategic partners.

Let’s hope I’m wrong, though, and that Apple comes through with a SDK for the iPhone that pushes Cocoa technologies to where they need to be in order to survive for the next eighteen years. Otherwise, it’s the tyranny of the dudes who make shit to make web pages do stuff for the foreseeable future. At least it’s a better tyranny than Windows software development, I guess…