the onda

In the last 2.5 years of heavy iPhone use, I've had a few cases where I've wanted to sit down to build an app that would make my life easier only to discover some iPhone SDK limitation that would make it impossible. The lack of background processing has been a chief culprit in a some of these cases, but in just about as many, the lack of true inter-app communication or even a decent plug-in system for the four most common apps (browser, messaging clients, camera, and maps application) has made writing multimodal glue impossible.

Multimodal glue? Let's take that mouthful in pieces.

Multimodal refers to the fact that the interface for computing should be able to move seamlessly throughout my day from my laptop at home to my mobile phone to my 24 inch desktop display at work, and even eventually, to my tablet of choice. This is one of two reasons for our collective move to clunkier web-based experiences instead of desktop apps (the other reason being the collaboration vector that is opened when the data is held on the server).

Some use cases have longstanding protocols that make this easy within the single application silo: IMAP for email being the best example. But others do not; for a great example of one app that is unnecessarily still stuck to the device, look no further than the SMS application on most phones (it's why I'll take the kludgey Google Voice solution to SMS (on any non Android device) any day over tapping out messages on a tiny screen while sitting at a huge monitor).

And glue refers to the interesting combinations that come out of being able to wire these applications together in new and unexpected ways. The web-as-platform is king here; a few years ago we called this class of interop "mashups" (thank God that term devolved into "smashups" before falling into cultural oblivion), but now we take it as given that you can plug your Twitter stream into your Facebook status, as a simple example, with a just a few clicks.

The glue apps are especially interesting in the context of a mobile device thanks to location information and the existence of a number of really interesting personal databases (call logs, addressbook, media library), and the fact that most platforms don't allow it (the iPhone is not alone here— RIM, Palm, and the forthcoming Windows 7 Mobile seem to be cargo culting their way to copying the wrong thing) is going be very good news for Android, and to a lesser extent Symbian Series 60.

But other than the platforms getting with the Android way of doing things, there is hope. Just as John Gilmore claimed that the Internet "interprets censorship as damage and routes around it," it would seem that web-savvy developers are seeing SDK limitations in multimodal glue as damage to be routed around. Reading apps that can post to Twitter is a good first example, though in this case, the app developer is forced to write an entire Twitter client within his app. A more interesting example are websites that rely on cloud services to deposit data into other apps. For instance, I read HackerNews on Mobile Safari and can mark an article for download into my Instapaper app through a link that is served to me. It's kludgey that the data is sitting in my browser and has to roundtrip itself through the Instapaper servers to get to my application, but it is nice a pattern that other developers can use to inject a little cluefullness into broken platforms.

A good thing to consider as we sit here right before the release of the completely gorgeous but totally locked down Apple iPad.