Friday, April 09, 2010

Where are the HTML5 design tools?

It should be really, really clear by now that Apple wants to, in the words of Raid, "Kill Flash Dead!". Yesterday, Apple introduced new terms to its developers program agreement for iPhone OS that prohibit use of any programming languages other than Objective-C, C, C++ or JavaScript, and any intermediate or multi-platform development tools. That includes the new Flash-to-iPhone OS cross-compiler that Adobe plans to include in Creative Suite 5, which will be launched worldwide this coming Monday.

Obviously, this puts Flash developers in a (slightly) deeper fix than they were before the iPhone 4.0 announcement, but to me, it raises a more interesting issue: Where are the graphical HTML5 development tools? You can use any text editor to code HTML5, and Adobe's Dreamweaver will do a fine job, but how do you create the sophisticated interactive applications that we've come to expect from Flash? It's extremely unlikely that Adobe is going to extend Dreamweaver to compete with Flash, and Microsoft's web development tools are focused on Silverlight for video and interactivity, not HTML5.

Where are the HTML5 graphical application tools going to come from? At this point, I don't know. There's a real market opportunity there. The first company with a HTML5 interactive design tool that feels familiar to Flash developers will hit a gold mine.
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