5 ms·

I like the idea of Ubuntu Touch (having worked with Ubuntu a lot), but even more so Firefox OS. As a web developer, the idea that "native" could simply mean "th

I like the idea of Ubuntu Touch (having worked with Ubuntu a lot), but even more so Firefox OS. As a web developer, the idea that "native" could simply mean "the Web platform" is really attractive.

muyuu 4y ago
Attractive-for-the-developer ideas are fine but attractive-for-the-user dominates. That's the sad lesson since the 80s and 90s OS wars and the early dominance of the market over the committee-standards that happened repeatedly with databases, with web browsers, with text editors, with spreadsheets, etc etc.
- scarface74 4y ago
  Why is it a “sad” lesson that users have preferences that are not in line with developers?
  - tannhaeuser 4y ago
    It's sad for developers, I guess ;)
  - muyuu 4y ago
    Personally I see the ossified bifurcation between users and developers as a major defeat that perhaps I won't live to see reversed. It was not set in stone that people would be by design dumbed down progressively as computing caught on, rather than assimilated into the computing world as 1st class citizens. In a parallel universe something like the Smalltalk, LISP or Forth machines were widely adopted and the dichotomy between user and developer was blurred to mean an incidental situation related to a specific set of code. It's hard to even convey in words how damaging it is, and can still be much worse, that the user was corralled first as a consumer and then as the product. Wholesale across all the industry. And the sad thing is that it wasn't like this, at all, as late as the 1980s.
    - scarface74 4y ago
      Yes and I’m sure that car mechanics are also tsk tsking about everyone that drives a car doesn’t know how to fix one. I’m sure they also thing that cars have been “dumbed down”. I’ve been programming for a long time (since doing assembly in the 80s). My second job out of college was for a small company where I was a developer and also had to manage a SAN, a dozen computers that ran jobs, mail servers, ftp servers, MySQL and SQL Servers, messaging servers (MQSeries, MSMQ) etc. Now I can just write some yaml or HCL and spin up an entire “server room”. I don’t wax poetically to juniors who never have to go through that and I even encourage them to use an even higher level of abstraction - the CDK that allows you to use code to create the yaml. Ob Disclaimers: yes I work at AWS now (ProServe). 2nd disclaimer: while the CDK creates CloudFormation, Hashicorp ported it to work with Terraform and is cross platform.
      - muyuu 4y ago
        I don't think the car mechanics analogy goes very far(tehe) but it could be done with some consumer electronics, as long as the integration and coupling of software and hardware has worked much more against the people than it has benefited them. Granted, it's not for everything. But by losing computing we lost a lot more, too.
        scarface74 4y ago
        How so, I think the modern iPhone works a lot better for most people than my old Apple //e or the first PCs I used ever did.
        muyuu 4y ago
        i don't think you've read the above messages wholly, or if so you have missed the point
      - deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
satvikpendem 4y ago
I don't want to run a browser to run applications, that's almost as bad as running Electron apps on the desktop.
- alpaca128 4y ago
  Who says every app has to run in a separate browser instance like with Electron? It could be as efficient as a browser tab, which would be perfectly fine as long as the UI is built in a reasonable way. On Android it's been possible for a while to install webapps via the browser that are then displayed like normal apps on the homescreen, and that is nothing more than running a website in the single browser app instance running on the device.
  - satvikpendem 4y ago
    I have an Android and have done as you described but they're simply not as smooth as native apps, not even considering the lack of good native API integration.

I like the idea of Ubuntu Touch (having worked with Ubuntu a lot), but even more so Firefox OS. As a web developer, the idea that "native" could simply mean "the Web platform" is really attractive.

muyuu 4y ago

Attractive-for-the-developer ideas are fine but attractive-for-the-user dominates. That's the sad lesson since the 80s and 90s OS wars and the early dominance of the market over the committee-standards that happened repeatedly with databases, with web browsers, with text editors, with spreadsheets, etc etc.

scarface74 4y ago
Why is it a “sad” lesson that users have preferences that are not in line with developers?
- tannhaeuser 4y ago
  It's sad for developers, I guess ;)
- muyuu 4y ago
  Personally I see the ossified bifurcation between users and developers as a major defeat that perhaps I won't live to see reversed. It was not set in stone that people would be by design dumbed down progressively as computing caught on, rather than assimilated into the computing world as 1st class citizens. In a parallel universe something like the Smalltalk, LISP or Forth machines were widely adopted and the dichotomy between user and developer was blurred to mean an incidental situation related to a specific set of code. It's hard to even convey in words how damaging it is, and can still be much worse, that the user was corralled first as a consumer and then as the product. Wholesale across all the industry. And the sad thing is that it wasn't like this, at all, as late as the 1980s.
  - scarface74 4y ago
    Yes and I’m sure that car mechanics are also tsk tsking about everyone that drives a car doesn’t know how to fix one. I’m sure they also thing that cars have been “dumbed down”. I’ve been programming for a long time (since doing assembly in the 80s). My second job out of college was for a small company where I was a developer and also had to manage a SAN, a dozen computers that ran jobs, mail servers, ftp servers, MySQL and SQL Servers, messaging servers (MQSeries, MSMQ) etc. Now I can just write some yaml or HCL and spin up an entire “server room”. I don’t wax poetically to juniors who never have to go through that and I even encourage them to use an even higher level of abstraction - the CDK that allows you to use code to create the yaml. Ob Disclaimers: yes I work at AWS now (ProServe). 2nd disclaimer: while the CDK creates CloudFormation, Hashicorp ported it to work with Terraform and is cross platform.
    - muyuu 4y ago
      I don't think the car mechanics analogy goes very far(tehe) but it could be done with some consumer electronics, as long as the integration and coupling of software and hardware has worked much more against the people than it has benefited them. Granted, it's not for everything. But by losing computing we lost a lot more, too.
      - scarface74 4y ago
        How so, I think the modern iPhone works a lot better for most people than my old Apple //e or the first PCs I used ever did.
        muyuu 4y ago
        i don't think you've read the above messages wholly, or if so you have missed the point
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]

satvikpendem 4y ago

I don't want to run a browser to run applications, that's almost as bad as running Electron apps on the desktop.

alpaca128 4y ago
Who says every app has to run in a separate browser instance like with Electron? It could be as efficient as a browser tab, which would be perfectly fine as long as the UI is built in a reasonable way. On Android it's been possible for a while to install webapps via the browser that are then displayed like normal apps on the homescreen, and that is nothing more than running a website in the single browser app instance running on the device.
- satvikpendem 4y ago
  I have an Android and have done as you described but they're simply not as smooth as native apps, not even considering the lack of good native API integration.