Interesting
Interesting that an important component of webOS - WebKit is from Apple's (though of course, not entirely their creation.)
Mozilla free-love coders caressed by Palm
Two prolific open web standards advocates at Mozilla are leaving the non-profit foundation for Palm, vowing to spread their developer-centric gospel to the smartphone maker's webOS platform. Ajaxian.com co-founders Dion Almaer and Ben Galbraith have accepted new positions helming Palm's developer relations team. The duo …
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Monday 28th September 2009 09:20 GMT Giles Jones
Games consoles
Nobody seems to mind the locked down nature of games consoles. Why bitch about it when it is a phone?
At least you don't have to buy expensive specialist development hardware (well, if you're a Mac owner that is) to develop for the iPhone. Games consoles are another thing entirely.
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Monday 28th September 2009 09:20 GMT DZ-Jay
Tricky
Perhaps those same "Orwellian" constraints on distribution, quality, functionality, and content are what has made the iPhone so attractive to the masses.
Sure, it seems safe to think that people are just buying iPhones and iPods purely as a status symbol or as an inducement into some sort of cult; but to do so ignores a fundamental fact: That many cool and expensive status symbols and cult accoutrements existed before, yet nobody was buying.
I agree that Apple's restrictions sometimes border the irrationally obsesive, and I disagree with some of their more mundane decisions; but I understand that most people don't care. I'm not making judgement on any group of people in particular, but perhaps the masses were indeed waiting for a totalitarian dictator to give them something that could only be used in certain ways to ensure that it does what it says on the tin.
You know, choice is a wonderful thing, but it is also the progenitor of crap and lawlessness. Some people like their choices limited and their decisions made for them. And apparently, there are a lot of them.
-dZ.
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Monday 28th September 2009 09:20 GMT Anonymous Coward
lol what??
"Two prolific open web standards advocates at Mozilla are leaving the non-profit foundation for Palm, vowing to spread their developer-centric gospel to the smartphone maker's webOS platform."
lol what? web standards guys from Mozilla and developer-centric in the same sentence?
These guys have been some of the heaviest backers of HTML5 and without question HTML5 is NOT a developer-centric standard. It's inconsistency (new tags for somethings, old style divs for others), it's ambiguity (redefinition of certain well known tags), the steps it takes to destroy separation of concerns throughout (embedding more content into the markup) make it as far from developer-centric as you can get.
No, HTML5 is designed for joe average, except joe average doesn't use HTML anymore, he uses MySpace, Wordpress, Facebook and so forth to publish his life to no one that cares. It's a crappy, poorly designed spec.
Just because people worked at a browser developer does not mean they know the first thing about developing web applications- this is evidenced by the abysmal quality of HTML specs coupled with the fact they've mostly been controlled by browser vendors, and how the cleanest specs in recent years that were controlled by the W3C rather than browser vendors (i.e. XHTML1 and XHTML2) have been poorly/not implemented by browser vendors.
Pretending these guys are in any way developer-centric when it comes to web applications is a complete joke. Looking at their inability to implement XHTML2, the abysmal quality of the HTML5 spec, coupled with other points such as how sluggish Firefox and IE is, how buggy Safari is on Windows, how many security flaws exist in all browsers I'd in fact question the general ability of most browser developers at all to be honest. They seem to be a hodge-podge of incompetent dreamers for the most part.
Certainly there's nothing come from browser developers and others involved in penning the HTML5 spec in recent years that would suggest they know much about enterprise and general large scale application development.
People like this are responsible for holding back the internet as a whole, please don't give them credit they don't deserve.
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Monday 28th September 2009 10:36 GMT TimNevins
@Giles Jones
"Nobody seems to mind the locked down nature of games consoles."
Nobody? Are you sure??
If that was the case nobody would ever have modded their XBox to run XMBC or purchased an R4 for their DSLite to run homebrew, or any other modchip(Viper GC etc) for that matter for all the previous generations of consoles, to get around restrictions such as region locking.There is a thriving homebrew scene on almost all consoles.
" Why bitch about it when it is a phone?"
People unlock their phones everyday to get around restrictions imposed by handset vendors.
No seriously. They do.Honest.
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Monday 28th September 2009 15:06 GMT sleepy
Apple likes open standards too
You're free to produce whatever Webkit/browser based Apps you like on iPhone, or to port your Pre apps to mobile Safari, which has a pretty full, high performance HTML5 implementation. So open webkit development is available for iPhone. Indeed, keeping Flash off the iPhone was a major blow Apple delivered for open content standards. But strangely, given the choice, developers prefer Apple's proprietary alternative. In fact you can have the best of both worlds, wrapping your open HTML5/Javascript App in a signed, sealed and distributed by Apple native wrapper.
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Biting the hand that feeds IT
