Web Directions Year round learning for product, design and engineering professionals

It’s the conversation that will never apparently die, “web apps” versus “native apps”. But it is to me missing the point. Scott Jensen put it best a couple of years ago, when he argued “mobile apps must die”

Native apps are a remnant of the Jurassic period of computer history, a local maximum that is holding us back. The combination of a discovery service and just-in-time interaction is a powerful interaction model that native apps can’t begin to offer.

What excites me most about this observation (I’ve quoted it extensively in presentations and articles) is that we’ve been given an extraordinary opportunity to re-imagine, and build from scratch, a whole new way of working with machines. What exactly this might look like is as yet far from clear, but people like Scott Jensen are exploring these ideas, as in his recent W3C article Enabling new types of web user experiences, but Scott is far from alone.

What an opportunity we are being presented with. In some ways like that liminal period from the late 1960s to early 1980s that saw the emergence of a more personal type of computing, of GUIs and PCs, personal networking and affordable computers outside the context of business.

Yet we still focus so much on the apparent shortcomings of web technologies—the inherent slowness of JavaScript, the lack of access to lower level device APIs, the jankiness of scrolling in web views—rather than the unique empowering features of web technologies that Scott alludes to.

Afterall, PCs were ludicrously under-powered compared with mini and mainframe computers of their day, and widely derided as toys, unfit for real computing. Ringing any bells? But the spreadsheet and desktop publishing software they enabled, ridiculously crude by today’s standards, started whole new professions, whole new industries. Developers like the Knoll brothers (with Photoshop, originally developed for a Black and White computer), and Dan Bricklin developer of VisiCalc, for which the term killer app was invented, not to mention Douglas Engelbart, and other pioneers of GUI based computing were far less concerned about the shortcomings of the technologies they were working with, and far more on the opportunities they represented.

You have the chance to be the Mitch Kapor, the Knoll brothers, the Douglas Engelbart of this generation of computing experience.

Will you take that opportunity? Or keep carping on about the shortcomings of Web technologies?

It’s our privilege to have Scott Jensen as one of our keynote speakers at Web Directions, along with others we really consider pioneers in this new wave of the web, Golden Krishna, who challenges us to imagine that the best interface may be no interface at all, and Alexandra Deschamps-Sonsino, who considers how the internet of things changes how we design.

So come imagine what the next wave of web experiences will look like at Web Directions South in Sydney in October, taking inspiration from another of computing’s giants, Alan Kay, that “The best way to predict the future is to invent it”.