On Sat, 2011-11-19 at 11:53 -0800, Iain Duncan wrote:
On Sat, Nov 19, 2011 at 3:24 AM, Stefano D'Angelo
<zanga.mail(a)gmail.com> wrote:
2011/11/19 David Robillard <d(a)drobilla.net>et>:
[...]
Writing one UI
that works on all reasonable devices for free
with zero
software installation? Free "remote
control" with any PC or
tablet or
phone with wifi? Yes please. Whatever cons
there are, they
don't even
come close to trumping that very tangible
user-visible win.
Hmm, I'd have to say though, as someone who does RIA apps for a
living, (mostly in Python + Dojo and JQuery) it's still a freaking
pain. Compared to using PyQT or PyWx, all of the javascript widget
libraries still really hurt. Mind you, I'm sure that will change.
Probably in less than a few years too!
Yeah, it's moving extremely fast. Frankly you have to be pretty blind
or stubborn to not realize that web tech is by far the safest UI
investment at this point.
That said, making something work in a browser is, at least for me (and
presumably many around here), dramatically less of a pain than having to
deal with Windows and Mac OS X directly.
There is, of course, the option of simply not caring about other
platforms and the irrelevance that comes with it, but the dramatically
increased user base is nice for those of us that desperately cling to
fantasies about getting enough donation money to survive off this libre
audio software thing :)
Given how easily and nicely you can stick webkit in anything these days,
nobody even has to know it's actually HTML under the hood anyway (though
for audio purposes, the remote control via tablet thing is too awesome
to not want to provide to people)
What I'd like to see is something that fills the
same role as the
browser, but is a clean break from the sorry cludgey state of
javascript. I'm sure the Android guys are on it though, so I'd agree
it's likely the path of the future. Maybe we will at last see the
arrival of the universal appliance platform that java was supposed to
give us 20 years ago? ;-)
Indeed. Like it or not, that's what the browser is finally becoming.
I wish the language was a bit less insane (I never look forward to the
nightmare of developing in anything without a decent type system), but
oh well. See above about user tangibles trumping petty developer
gripes.
-dr