netvibes - (re)mix the web

Netvibes’ recent announcement of an improved mobile version together with a special edition specially designed for iPhone users, is also good news for UWA developers.

During the iPhone presentation by Apple’s Steve Jobs, he famously made it clear that this new product would not require any SDK, but rather Ajax. While it was a shocker for all those setting their hopes for killer-applications on the iPhone, it turns out to be a great news for UWA developers.

Indeed, the iPhone version of Netvibes is proof that the direction taken by Apple in the matter leads to the entire collection of UWA widgets being able to run on that nifty little phone. No need to install a plug-in or extend the framework: UWA widgets “just work” on the iPhone.

For those of you who have been tinkering with the idea of proposing their service through an iPhone app, UWA is now another choice: easy-to-use, very portable and in constant development.

We could say that this is a new platform that UWA support, but the truth is that it is simply the result of much hard work from the Netvibes engineers, combined with the tools put in place by Apple’s. UWA is just happy to neatly fit in.

Going back in time, comes a nice reminder from Tariq’s presentation of UWA, at the Future Of Web Apps conference in February 2007. There, he announced UWA, already working on Netvibes, iGoogle and Apple Dashboard, as you all know. Half-jokingly, he also announced, months before the iPhone release date, that we would try to make UWA work on the iPhone.

Well, here we are. Here is, side by side, page 14 of Tariq’s presentation, and plain ol’ iPhone. The Digg widget was featured in the presentation, so in the iPhone we scrolled down to the Digg widget placed on the displayed Netvibes tab to get a better perspective. It seems our mockup wasn’t too far off.

When taking this picture, we tought it could be headlined with something to the effect of “Netvibes: we deliver”. Of course that would be gloating, but what we can say is that the coming month will see a couple more of “deliveries” from Netvibes UWA… Stay tuned.

Tags: iphone, portability, wa

This entry was posted on Friday, September 7th, 2007 at 5:06 pm and is filed under Articles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.