Today Apple presented some amazing stuff of leopard, a Windows version of Safari and suggested to develop Apps for the iPhone with Web Standards.

Many people thought there will be a whole SDK for the iPhone and an enviroment to run Apps natively, but there will never be something like this, instead Apple wants you to use Safari as an environment to develop your Apps for the iPhone. I also think they will have some kind of gateway to access iPhone stuff like phone numbers.

Using Web Standards as a Environment for applications is the right direction to go! Adobe is doing it with Apollo. Microsoft is doing or will do it with Silverlight.

Nearly every platform understands Web Standards and can handle them.

Using them to build applications is also a huge benefit for developers.

For Example if 37signals wanted to build a simple To-Do list application for the iPhone they just have to take their HTML Views add a Javascript to store the data localy on the iPhone (maybe using Google Gears) and thats it. If someone of them wants the same app on one of his computers, using the Apollo Runtime, it will be no big deal.