haha
Watched the keynote earlier in the slightly wee-er hours of the morning. I have to say the whole iPhone Apps thing seems pretty poor. I'd have to agree with John Gruber that if doing apps this way was so cool, so easy and so just perfect then why arent Apple doing their apps this way?
John Gruber as Steve Jobs said:
We know that you want to write your own apps for iPhone, and we’d like to see that too. We love the apps you write for the Mac, and we’d love to see what you might be able to come up with for iPhone. We’re thinking about it, and working on ways that we might make that happen, but we don’t have anything to announce today. The good news, though, is that because iPhone has a real Safari web browser, you can write web-based apps that work great on iPhone.
Had they said that then it might have been better, but the prospect of having to be connected to GPRS, EDGE or some hapless Wifi point just to use some "app" is stupid, and highly costly. While you could argue that at the price of the iPhone people should have enough pocket change to throw at those GPRS/EDGE costs thats a pretty big assumption that they will want to.
This summarises it best
John Gruber said:
Telling developers that web apps are iPhone apps just doesn’t fly. Think about it this way: If web apps – which are only accessible over a network; which don’t get app icons in the iPhone home screen; which don’t have any local data storage – are such a great way to write software for iPhone, then why isn’t Apple using this technique for any of their own iPhone apps?
edit
Just read an entry over at the salon.com, heres a piece of it with good points and one silly one
salon.com said:
Under this compromise, it's unclear if third-party apps would be able to use all of the iPhone's graphics, network or storage capacities. Could you run a version of Skype on the iPhone? Could developers create a jukebox app for iPhone that competes with iTunes? What about a photo-editing program? And what about Firefox on Safari?
Have to agree that no matter what Apple have provided to the "iPhone Web Apps" through Safari the likelihood of them getting access to graphics, network and most certainly storage capacities is going to be fairly low I'd say. Network maybe, but the others are less likely.
Skype is an amazing application and while AT&T will get less of their moneys worth through its use (save on data charges) I don't think Apple should be preventing it from being installed on an iPhone.
As far as jukebox apps for the iPhone, I've not seen better ones than iTunes on the Mac yet so I certainly wouldn't care or bother with an alternative for the iPhone, Photo editing would be quite cool but again doing this with your fingers would just be messy and Firefox on an iPhone, hahahahahahaha, its bad enough on the Mac without slapping it on something with less resources, not to mention you can't get Firefox for Windows Mobile either, though some would argue that at least the potential is there.