Jim Hoskins over at Done21 has found out something very interesting about the iPad and web applications: a framework Apple hasn’t told us anything about yet, labelled “AdLib” which should garantuee native-like performances for webapps. [Link]
From the post:
“With the iPad comes a special Safari bookmark labeled “iPad User Guide.” The page it links to behaves almost exactly like a native application, but in the web browser. It has a split-view with all of the UI flare in UIKit. The crazy part is, it’s done completely in HTML/CSS/JavaScript.
What’s particularly interesting is that it does something that shouldn’t really be possible in Mobile Safari: It includes scrolling panes that can be manipulated with a single finger, complete with the signature iPhone OS “scroll bars” and elastic transitions. If you have ever worked with Safari on the iPhone, you know that having scrolling boxes of content is sort of possible, but requires a special two-finger gesture to scroll.”
Whether this might turn out to be a revolution for developers willing to approach Apple’s devices, I have many doubts regarding Apple freeing webapps like this. It sorta seems too easy and unexpected to me. Perhaps we’ll know something more tomorrow.
