On the Mediactive blog a couple of days ago, Dan Gillmor posted about “Hacks/Hackers Unite”—a weekend-long boot camp going on right now that brings together “hacks” (journalists) and “hackers” (developers) to try to develop a “killer media app” for the iPad.
Gillmor likes the idea of journalists and coders working together, but sees a great big problem in execution: he feels journalists should not be supporting Apple’s closed ecosystem where the rules for rejection are often capricious and arbitrary. (We covered previous Gillmor rants on this subject here and here.)
Instead, Gillmor will attend the Maker Faire, sponsored by a division of O’Reilly Media, which places its emphasis on openness.
In the discussion below the article, Burt Herman, one of the organizers of “Hacks/Hackers Unite”, responds:
Yes, I understand the concerns about the iPad being a closed system. But we do intend to foster development of html5 apps that can easily run without app store approval. The fact is, the iPad is the tablet that is now on the market and being used by hundreds of thousands of consumers. Should we wait to develop tablet apps and let journalism keep falling behind? Or why not try to be ahead and learn about how news can work on tablets now?
Gillmor may be right to worry about the implications of Apple’s closed ecosystem for journalism, but Herman has a point that it is the ecosystem we have. It is possible that what the hacks and hackers learn about tablet journalism can apply to other tablets—though not directly, since Apple’s developer agreement makes cross-platform development very difficult.
Thanks so much for your post.
Regarding what you say about cross-platform development, the iPad has a great HTML5 compatible browser, so anything built to run as a Web application and take advantage of tablet gestures would work on other devices, such as whatever we expect from Android. There are Web frameworks such as Sproutcore that can create Web applications that are very similar to native applications.