The Google Gears/iPhone speculation reaches fever pitch! It's off the chain!

Ian is still musing over how you'd get Google Gears on the iPhone. There is a project for Safari in the gears subversion repository and instructions on how to get it working in WebKit as a plug-in. Sadly the latest version fails to build and I don't do objective C so I'm a wee bit stuck. Looks like it might be time to pull out a textbook.

There's a much better summary of anything I can put together on the subject over here.

GooglePhone actually a software platform?

From the Register

This would make more sense, although I have also heard rumours that it's real and it's made of plastic and friends of friends have nearly touched it. The core bit of this wave of speculation is what Google Gears does in mobile. Opera have "endorsed it". Symbian is believed to be putting more or less the same functionality in the next OS release: cobble together an HTTP proxy and a database together with some scripting and you have a Gears clone. Mozilla like it but Minimo is still too big to play nicely in phones. I'd be very surprised if the iPhone doesn't have some cache magic in it.

It would be more sensible to keep it as a reference platform: Google stand to make more money out of extending the reach of their core business (that'll be small ads) than they do getting involved in hardware. Particularly phone hardware, which I have this horrible feeling Apple are about to discover is a horrendous business.

Working with intermittent connections is a big constraint on mobile applications, and it makes sense to cache information where possible. This isn't the best approach for information rich applications (working a day trader screen in Google Gears would be foolish) but standalone apps like Writely^H^H^H^H^H Google Docs don't actually need a network connection: they just need a storage of some variety.

Safari and iPhone

Yesterday's Steve Jobs announcement was the sort of thing British politicians excel at: re-announcing things in a new way, so it looks like there's something new to report.

We knew that the iPhone runs Safari. Therefore it isn't a huge surprise that Steve suggests that we develop apps for the iPhone using Ajax and HTML. What is surprising is that people should fall for the "iPhone is open to developers" schtick. Well, yeah! What will be interesting is whether we get Apple style widgets to play with or not.

As a side note, David Card rightly blogs that the release of Safari for Windows is designed to increase the developer pool for the iPhone. (Thanks to the rather more alert Ian Betteridge for drawing this to my attention).

And snapback sucks. There. I said something bad about Apple.

UPDATE: it looks like Mr Daring Fireball wasn't fooled...