Since Steve Jobs finally revealed his tablet, four days ago, I've read tons of articles and blogpost, and I've given the gizmo a lot of thought. Some things I've realized are:
Among everything that has been written so far, Joe Hewitt's post (he is the man behind Facebook for iPhone, among other things) stands out as the most insightful by far:
"Anyone who feels underwhelmed by that doesn't understand how much of the iPhone OS's potential is still untapped."
"The bottom line is, many apps which were cute toys on iPhone can become full-featured power tools on the iPad, making you forget about their desktop/laptop predecessors [...], if you're a developer and you're not thinking about how your app could work better on the iPad and its descendants, you deserve to get left behind."
"The one thing that makes an iPhone/iPad app "closed" is that it lives in a sandbox, [...] In my mind, this is one of the best features of the OS. It makes native apps more like web apps, which are similarly sandboxed, and therefore much more secure. On Macs and PCs, you have to re-install the OS every couple years or so just to undo the damage done by apps, but iPhone OS is completely immune to this.[,,,] If you want to invent a new scripting language or background service or something, you're still totally free to do that, but you're going to have to run it on a web server. If you want total freedom on the client side, then write a web app."
I can't wait to see how this pans out...
