Internet visionaries are looking over the horizon to a time when you won’t need a walled app garden to reap the benefit of your smartphone.
Instead, using the mark-up language of HTML5, software developers are increasingly creating app experiences on websites.
A great example is the HTML5 site for the hit game Cut The Rope. It’s a casual game experience in the same category as Angry Birds, but no app is required.
Cutting the rope…
And game makers don’t have to create an app for every platform to distribute it.
With 25 levels Cut the Rope is available online for free at www.cuttherope.ie.
Try it for yourself on a Nokia Lumia phone or Nokia N9. Tip: go to options and change from drag to click. Then tap on the rope to cut it.
A hungry frog.
It shows that, with the power of HTML5, experiences that were once limited to applications are now coming to life across the Web.
OK, it’s a bit slow at the moment on phones, but the fact that it works at all proves the massive potential for mobile. It actually works really well on a laptop or PC. It’s easy to see why developers and businesses are mad for HTML5 sites.
HTML5 Web apps are heaven-sent for business because they make creating, maintaining and distributing “apps” far less expensive and far more manageable.
Both the Nokia Browser and Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 9 are focusing on reaping the benefit of HTML5. So when you explore via the Nokia Browser on Nokia smartphones like the N9 or via Nokia Lumia handsets on IE9, you’re part of this web app revolution.
By creating mobile Web applications that take advantage of HTML5 and other software, developers will be able to target any make of phone and their various operating systems with a single code base.
Looking forward, any browser, including mobile Web browsers, will be able to render the HTML pages created with these technologies. Developers still need to consider dealing with different sized screens, and there are security issues at present, partly because the code is relatively simple.
But many in the industry are confident that these can all be overcome.
Nokia Lumia Windows Phones offer an outstanding browsing experience with IE9. Developers for the OS can use the same underlying engine as IE for Windows, with the same mark-up, to deliver great HTML5 experiences on mobile as on desktops.
The Nokia N9 smartphone offers one of the most advanced, yet easy-to-use, mobile browsers. Class-leading JavaScript processing performance and many HTML5 and CSS3 features enable people to experience the rich web content and apps.
Created by ZeptoLab, the concept behind the Cut the Rope game is simple: Om Nom, a curiously cute green monster, is hungry, and you can use your mouse to manipulate ropes, airbags and bubbles to feed him candy, and collect stars along the way for more points.
It’s wonderfully addictive: in its app-based incarnation, it’s been downloaded over 60 million times to date. But now the whole experience is remade entirely using HTML5.
And thanks to the hardware acceleration enabled in IE9, the game looks and feels just as rich and immersive as the original app.
image credit: Carlos Varela
