Joe Hewitt isn’t exactly a household name; his former project, however, very much is. Hewitt was the one man wrecking crew responsible for coding the Facebook application for the iPhone — the App Store’s most popular application for quite some time. Back in November of 2009, Hewitt, seemingly pushed to his breaking point, announced that he would no longer be developing for the iPhone: “My decision to stop iPhone development has had everything to do with Apple’s policies. I respect their right to manage their platform however they want, however I am philosophically opposed to the existence of their review process.” A very respectable objection, and one, in all likelihood, shared by many developers.
Fast forward to today, what does Hewitt think of the iPad? On his blog joehewitt.com he writes: “iPad is exactly the product I’ve been wishing for ever since I wrapped my mind around the iPhone and its constraints…I felt strongly that all Apple needed to do to revolutionize computing was simply to make an iPhone with a large screen. Anyone who feels underwhelmed by that doesn’t understand how much of the iPhone OS’s potential is still untapped.” An interesting view, and one shared by our own — often times equally disgruntled — Boy Genius.
Personally we like all the talk about the “untapped potential” of the iPhone OS and the “revolutionizing of computing” but remain skeptical on how fast users are going to adopt iPad into their digital device portfolio. What do you think? Apple was almost a decade ahead of its time with the Newton, is the iPad a similar situation? Can the iPad revolutionize computing with a tiny user base, or will it need to be adopted on a scale similar to that of the iPhone? Or, was this simply a swing and a miss out of Cupertino?
