Most of you know that we are an Apple shop. We all use Apple equipment running OSX and started the switch the month that the Intel switch was made. We all have iPhones that we actually use everyday. And now, some of us even are starting to use iPads (which hold the promise of changing the way people use computers at home)...
Most people know about the fight between Apple and Adobe over allowing the Flash player on the iPhone / iPad. Apple claims that Flash is buggy, slow, and would consume too much power... but Adobe has been working for years on getting Flash down to where it would run fine on mobile devices (in fact almost all mobile devices now have Flash support). The buggy part comes from the same perception problem of Visual Basic... anyone can write a program using the tool, and when you get inexperienced people writing code that finds its way into production machines, bad things are going to happen. This is not a fault of Adobe (or Microsoft in VB's case), its simply a matter of junk in junk out.
Now why is this at all relevant? Well onePOS is working on our web-based suite of products known as oneMetrix (first on the horizon is our above store data management tool). When evaluating how to create a web-based product one thing became clear, the standard java-script implementations of our competitors and many other web sites (like Netsuite that we use to run our company) would leave our customers dissatisfied. Since java-script is implemented by the browser, each browser will behave differently. Pages take extended times to load. If we use some of the controls to make the site feel more like an application and less like a browser form, it probably wont run correctly on OSX or Linux.
Adobe makes a web-development tool called Flex, thats lets you build *very* powerful applications based on the Flash player. These applications look and feel like a real desktop application, but in fact are running on a webpage (or can be downloaded and run standalone). They work the same in any browser, and they work the same on any machine. The promise of the technology is that we can write an application that feels and works great and runs anywhere with a single effort...
Except it can't run on Apple's mobile platforms. As a work around to the "no Flash" stance of Apple, Adobe has created a way to "compile" a flash application as an iPhone / iPad app side-stepping the battle for people that have real business needs to run on the Apple mobile platforms... and the tool launches next week. However, this week Apple announced iPhone OS 4.0 and in the process added language to its developer agreement basically prohibiting these Flash compiled apps.
So, onePOS has to make a decision. Make a crappy website that mostly runs on a web browser, choose a tool to deliver an amazing application that runs everywhere but Apple mobile devices, or write the applications twice (once for everyone, and a second time for Apple mobile). We owe it to our customers to not choose option #1, and while Steve Jobs might call us lazy, we simply do not have the time or resources to have a separate team of developers creating iPhone / iPad apps.
So, with great sadness, unless Apple changes course (highly unlikely), there will be no onePOS web access on iPhones / iPads.
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