We spend a lot of time and bandwidth using client apps and closed platforms. It makes sense: Big platforms and device-specific apps look slick, they're easy to use, and they deliver rich interactive multimedia (which is one reason why they use so much time and bandwidth). Wired magazine wrote a big cover story about the internet's shift away from the open to the proprietary web.

But that shift is hitting a snag. The main problem with apps and big platforms is that while they may be easy to use, they're still tough for nonprogrammers to make. While the content publishers, platform owners and device makers had largely been working together to create a new money-making ecosystem, fights over dividing that money mean they're now just as often routing around each other, playing negotiation hardball or openly going right at each others' throats.

Meanwhile, HTML5 increasingly makes the web look better and work harder. We've written often about companies' new HTML5 products, but less often about the people and platforms that make them possible. Here are some new tools from Twitter, WordPress and Adobe that are flattening the learning curve and making the open, multidevice web even easier to build.

1. Adobe Muse: Websites by Print Designers

Adobe Muse, recently released in beta, is a post-Dreamweaver web design and management application. It's targeted for print and graphic designers rather than webmasters, borrowing most of its user interface and metaphors from Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign, promising the ability "to design and publish original HTML pages to the latest web standards without writing code." It's a site-building counterpart to the Adobe's new HTML5 animation tool Edge, which we wrote about previously.

Muse is much more fully baked than Edge. It has tools for wireframe site planning and management, easy syncing of design elements and architecture across multiple pages, and popular interactive widgets. Also, while Edge had a handful of proof-of-concept banner-ad and bouncing-logo animations, Muse has a broad range of well-developed tutorial and introduction videos.

If I were building a website from scratch today, I would probably try to use Muse. For print-native, HTML/CSS-literate-but-no-markup/coding-ninja people like me, it makes a lot of sense. In fact, we're awfully close to the target market.

Still, it's a tough needle to thread for Adobe. On the one hand, it has to broaden its base of users, but still shore up its "professional tool" bona fides. If you're a hard-core web developer, you may have never used a WYSIWYG tool like Dreamweaver. The user base is further cut in by veterans "graduating" to application-building platforms like Django, PHP or Ruby on Rails or "downgrading" to free easy-to-use tools like WordPress.

So the natural move is to appeal to professional designers who are already using Adobe's other tools, who can learn HTML5 and CSS3 on the sly while designing and managing sites using a more intuitive GUI. In turn, as Parsons School of Design's Irvin Chen points out, companies can get away with asking a print designer to also do a webmaster's job.

2. Twitter Bootstrap: Giving Away Standards for Free

Twitter doesn't have the same problems as Adobe: It has no sales of developer suites to prop up. But it also has a vested interest in making it easier to build websites quickly and easily, and to directly or indirectly influence how those sites look and work.

Twitter's web development team recently released Bootstrap, a tiny (6 KB!) open source toolkit for quickly building handsome websites and apps. It's really just a CSS stylesheet that defines a site's design in the usual way, but it's unusually rich and flexible. Besides defining fonts, headings, tables, buttons and popovers, it also uses Less, a JavaScript CSS pre-processor that helps designers quickly define variables, functions and other tools to extend the basic look and function of the site.

Twitter's Mark Otto writes that Bootstrap was built to help Twitter solve its own design and prototyping needs:

In the earlier days of Twitter, engineers used almost any library they were familiar with to meet front-end requirements. Inconsistencies among the individual applications made it difficult to scale and maintain them. Bootstrap began as an answer to these challenges and quickly accelerated during Twitter’s first Hackweek. By the end of Hackweek, we had reached a stable version that engineers could use across the company…. Today, you can use Bootstrap to throw together quick prototypes or guide the execution of more sophisticated designs and larger engineering efforts. In other words, Bootstrap is a very simple way to promote quick, clean and highly usable applications.

By releasing Bootstrap on Github under an Apache license, Twitter wants to get community coders' help in making it smaller and faster, while also helping third-party developers on its platform build faster, more-consistent web apps, and helping Twitter further define the general look of the web.

British designer Drew Jones is already working on porting Bootstrap to WordPress. Instead of defining the CSS each time, using similar tools and styles and tricks from site to site, Jones wondered, “Wouldn’t it be great if these techniques were available to implement at the beginning of a project with a way of modifying them to suit the design of the website I’m building them for?” Bootstrap gets a little bit closer to that ideal mix of standards and customization.

__3. WordPress Goes Global: Adaptive Design for Next-Gen Browsers

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Bringing Bootstrap to WordPress makes sense, because WordPress is both huge and easy to use: On Friday, as part of its "State of the Word," WordPress announced that it powers "14.7 percent of the top million websites in the world, up from 8.5 percent, and the latest data show 22 out of every 100 new active domains in the U.S. are running WordPress."

WordPress is also trying to unify its site design and user experience around new browser capability and HTML5. "Right now we have a completely balkanized experience," WordPress lead developer Matt Mullenweg says. "I'm proud of our six platforms in mobile, but each one has a different interface." The answer for WordPress, coming in the near future, is built-in adaptive designs that ensure unity across platforms.

This is a subtle point. Apps for mobile became popular in part because mobile web browsers were so different from one another. If you had to code a website or develop a platform differently for each different web browser, it made just as much or more sense to develop a native application for each platform. If, on the other hand, you have broadly compatible browsers, and a rich set of now-mature HTML5 tools that helps you adapt for the differences you do find, developing once for the web and running on every platform has a competitive advantage again.

Mobile apps that make more sophisticated use of a device's hardware can still have a lot of value. We also shouldn't underestimate the fact that app culture has now become an important part of how people interact with their mobile devices. If you've gotten accustomed to using apps and discovering new tools through an app store rather than a browser, you're likely to continue doing so. And if users are looking for apps, companies will still make them, even if they also increasingly explore their options with HTML5.

Nevertheless, with companies like Apple increasingly tightening restrictions on apps for their devices, blocking access to APIs and asking for a cut of any and all transactions, the age of app wrappers for simple content websites may turn out to be just a historical blip.

See Also:- Sidestepping Apple: From Amazon to Condé Nast, Companies Rethink App Strategies