John Gruber’s “Let the Tea Leaf Reading Begin” is excellent, but omits something, as far as I’m concerned. Significant portions of the article are spent on the premise of problematic JavaScript performance on the iPhone being a large reason for UIKit-based apps instead. However, he bases this on outdated information:

Iconfactory developer Craig Hockenberry [..] wrote a splendid weblog entry titled “Benchmarking in Your Pants” regarding the lackluster performance of JavaScript code running in MobileSafari compared to compiled Objective-C code running in a native iPhone app.

True that, and it is a splendid overview of JavaScript performance indeed – but it’s also based on iPhone software 1.0.2 (or perhaps even older). iPod touches (finding the right plural for these is tough) always shipped with 1.1, and iPhones now run 1.1.1, which, says Apple, has “Improved performance of JavaScript.”

Of course, Apple doesn’t specify by how much and in what areas performance has improved, and I personally have no way of testing. But the “Javascript on the iPhone will take about 80 times longer to run than it does on the desktop” claim may not be valid any more.

Second is this. For a completely new market contender to achieve 2% share within less than four months, and to have 82% customer satisfaction with their first product (i.e., to get so many things right the first time), is impressive. It’s extraordinary. It also puts into question the claim that the iPhone is more fluff, hype and marketing than actual substance: the efficiency of commercials is metric that’s entirely different from the ultimate satisfaction from a person who has actually used the product.

Finally, allowing Web apps to store information locally (beyond the scope of a cookie) is of interest to many a developer. Speculation that Gears, Google’s solution to this matter, is coming to the iPhone has been rampant, but now the WebKit team has presented an even sweeter solution. Safari hasn’t been too fast about merging in changes from the WebKit development trunk (delays of over a year aren’t uncommon), but this nonetheless points to official support for storing data on the iPhone using nothing but JavaScript in a Web app. Eventually. And the implementation looks excellent: the built-in database browser even includes a text field to let you run SQL queries.

With security and other issues worked out, this should hopefully make it into – semi-educated guess – Firefox 4 as well.