Digital Brainwaves

ArsTechnica is reporting on sources inside Apple that the iPhone will not plan to support native code on the iPhone “for the foreseeable future,” although they are working on adding additional capabilities to WebKit and Safari for iPhone, including offline storage, enhanced connections from JavaScript to iPhone functions, and potentially, the ability to have Home Screen icons point to offline web applications on the device.

This sounds to me like an interesting best-of-both-worlds compromise, particularly offline storage: web-based applications remain sandboxed in Safari, while allowing the ability to store data for faster access/offline access. Optimally, such web pages could be locally stored to run completely on the device, not needing to hit the web at all.

Ultimately, the question at this point is, when might something like this appear? Says Ars, “Apple is currently aiming for an unspecified ‘January’ deadline on these updates, and it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that it will likely be announced at Macworld 2008.”