iPhone Apps in front, App Engine in back

There were some great points in this UXHero article. The one that really hit home is that the iPhone's fixed (and known) screen size allows for designs to be much more consistent and more usable. 

One simple piece of information, the certainty of particular screen dimensions has a huge impact on usability.

Great point. It started me thinking back to a lot of my design ideas for generic development pieces that are easily pluggable to generate flexible and diverse web apps. All of a sudden I hit on it. I'd been using Google App Engine as my REST web-service back end, and an rich javascript page as my front end. I could be developing iPhone apps as front-end clients for my generic web-services, and voila. Light-weight, highly usable and customized interfaces with a generic loosely coupled back end.

Perfect formulation for someone like me who just wants simple and persistent data storage and processing, so I can abstract that away and get to the meat of user interaction.

See? Just like my previous post, I want to see tighter integration between Apple & Google, not diversification. App Engine + iPhone Apps for the win!