Today I wrote my first “Initial impressions”. It is about a eBook which dives into AngularJS. A framework from Google offering great features for webapp developers.
The future wil undoubtedly contain lots of web based apps. I expect that it may will be an importent supplement for app store based native apps. We are not there yet, but HTML/CSS/Javascript based browser apps are getting stronger and stronger by the day. Things like accessing the hardware of say the phone are offered through HTML5. You can for instance access the webcam and manipulate the live video, doing things like “Chroma key” (“green curtain”) overlaying elements on the video from the webapp. All done using only HTML5 and javascript!
Webapps run anywhere only a browser is required. The days of plugins in the browser are long gone! Many devices today share the rendering engine used to convert then HTML markup, the CSS styling and the javascript into a webpage, they use an open source engine: WebKit. For instance Google Chrome, Apple Safari and Opera desktop browsers all use webkit. Other devices like Apple iPhone and modern Samsung TVs also use it – so we are getting closer to a write-once-use-everywhere scenarie, and that is great!
When someone wants to offer an online service it makes great sense to choose a platform which have a wide use. The cost of developing such services are lower when you can write-once-use-everywhere. Maintenance costs are lower and it will all lead to more services for us users.
It also makes it much easier to develop in such a setup cause as many discover the power of webapps we will see more developers blog and share their experiences with the HTML5 based webapps. It is a positive development which we all enjoy.
A great example from history with environments that works is the Microsoft Visual Basic script. It was the fundament of many of the initial applications developed for the Microsoft Window operating system. Thousands of “apps” were developed by many people. Many of the apps were dead after some years, but as so many “seeds” were planted the number of surviving apps were larger, and many of the software houses developing for Windows today have root in that area of time. It also was the reason for many people to choose windows.
Apple iOS saw the same development, and today many people choose iOS instead of say Google Android because of the fact iOS have more apps.
With webapps we may finally have the chance to run our beloved app anywhere – choose whatever platform you desire, just be sure it has a great browser! Also we may see even cheeper apps because we dont have to pay a percent to the hosting app store as we sell the app.
This takes me back to where I started: I wrote my initial impressions on an eBook which is about AngularJS. AngularJS is a framework which will let people write great webapps – who knows if YOUR webapp will attract so much attention that you become a millionaire? 
Let your hope drive you life, go for realising your dreams! And perhaps one of those dreams can be realized through a webapp, written in AngularJS, something that this book is an example of
Initial impressions from the ebook “instant AngularJS (starter)”
