People sometimes say that “you can never have too much of a good thing”. People are also often wrong, and in the case of those saying that, they definitely are. Too many vitamins may not kill you,…
An overview of the Smartphone OSes currently available and announced (Windows Phone 7 Series). Interesting to note is that the only OS that supports Flash is Windows Mobile 6.5, and the newer…
I love when I stumble across some fantastic site I never thought to ever look for. Of course this site exists. Is it sort of annoying? Yeah, what isn’t? The point is it’s funny to laugh at crazy bitches. Maybe someday there’ll be a crazy ass men blog. Who knows? We have a black president!
(Sort of related note: Feminists make me extremely uncomfy. Not like women that stand up for themselves when they should, but people that call themselves a feminist and throw a shit fit about everydayumthang. They should get some tissue paper and make flowers. It’s so relaxing.)
I have discussions on this subject with the girl on a near-daily basis. It’s a fascinating topic, mostly because we’re seeing very slow progress on a lot of fronts, whilst other (mostly technological) progress is highlighting and revealing the ways in which our society is still dramatically behind.
Fascinating, fascinating stuff.
“Every major mobile platform is now either using WebKit or will be soon. Except for one.”
— John Gruber, on RIM’s new WebKit-based browser, the one obvious holdout being Windows Mobile.
While I’m a huge fan of WebKit, both in my pants and on my desk, this strikes me as an odd thing to triumph. For one, replace “WebKit” with “Flash” and suddenly the iPhone is the holdout.
Well, that’s only “sort of” true. Right now, most smartphones don’t actually support Flash, they just have it announced for 2010. Many of them also had it announced for “late 2009” and that didn’t happen. The few phones that currently do have Flash support also have notoriously terrible battery life when browsing the Web.
Oops.
Perhaps this year we’ll actually see the major iPhone competitors add Flash support to their devices. Sure, it’s very possible. But we’ll have to wait and see when that happens whether it’ll actually create a better user experience.
Anyway, that wasn’t your point, but I felt it worthwhile to explain the reality of the Flash situation, which you inaccurately described.
More importantly, though, with something like browser rendering engines, I’m philosophically opposed to a monoculture.
As am I, but I’m on the fence when it comes to the mobile sphere. I fully agree that competition between WebKit, Gecko and Opera/Presto would be great on the mobile platform as well, I just don’t feel so strongly about it being such a bad thing that this competition currently does not exist.
I’d like to see it in the future, but there are two big reasons why I’m happy it’s not the case right now:
1. Two sides of the lack of competition coin
As far as mobile browsing is concerned, I’ve yet to see a particularly great mobile version of Firefox or Opera. I know many people that work for both Mozilla and Opera and I think they’re doing lots of great stuff on the desktop, but on mobile I’ve yet to be impressed at all. The lack of real competition right now, as far as I can tell, mostly just stems from the lack of a worthy competitor to mobile WebKit. That will change, but that’s the situation right now.
2. HTML5 and CSS3
With HTML5 and CSS3 undergoing such dramatic changes right now, making good use of these is painful enough as it is on the desktop. I know this because I made the JS library to make it easier, and it’s proving quite popular already. As painful as it is on the desktop, it would be much more painful if we had the same thing going on in mobile. We don’t have the processing power on mobile devices to throw JavaScript toolkits and libraries at it that add the missing features to certain browsers. We can do that just fine on the desktop, but not on mobile.
I would like for us to have some semblance of cross-browser support for the coolest stuff in HTML5 and CSS3 before we start having to worry about mobileGecko and Opera Mobile on smartphones.
Apple doesn’t allow runtimes, but…
…what’s the case for WebOS and Android? I see that there’s a Firefox for Android, but can’t find such a thing for WebOS (which, I’m guessing, makes some sense due to the entire OS being WebKit-driven). And Opera?
Apple is, as far as I know, the strictest of rulers when it comes to deciding what is and isn’t allowed on their devices. But when it comes to the users, that doesn’t seem to be an issue either way: they’re just wanting sites to render (Flash issue aside for a moment).
And that’s the thing: when it comes to mobile devices, there actually are far more different browsers right now, but almost all of them are so totally not as usable as the WebKit browsers that there are very few developers who think it’s worthwhile catering to those browsers.
Unless Mozilla and Opera manage to produce a browser that performs better than mobileSafari in virtually every way possible, it doesn’t seem like competition is going to happen on mobile anytime soon. And that’s not such a bad thing, because the WebKit team is so busy competing with them on the desktop and porting everything to mobile and making it perform really well, that both users and developers are currently reaping lots of benefits from the status quo.
I suspect that when either the iPad allows competing browsers, or someone makes a competing product that gains enough mindshare and market share to make a difference, we’ll see the mobile browser sphere opening up quite a bit more after all.
This is precisely why you should see these two talks. Alex Steffan does two things in them: 1, he explains the reality of our situation (knowing is also half the battle in combatting it, and knowing which steps you take matter more than others is extremely valuable), and 2: he shows you countless of awesome examples in which people use technology and creativity to already produce sustainable, smart solutions to problems people are dealing with.
The net result, by the end of it, is that you’re coming out of it with a renewed sense of hope, joy, inspiration and dedication. The number of ideas, really great ideas, presented in the two videos is staggering, and seeing so many people come up with so many awesome things will for sure help you feel better about this issue. It’s quite likely, in fact, that it’ll do to you what it did to me: inspire me for a number of ideas in which I can do something that helps. Something that matters. That got me excited. Reinvigorated!
It certainly did not leave me more unhappy about the world. Quite the opposite, in fact.
And that’s why I’m so adamant about sharing these videos with people.
Just skip the five~ minute intro on the first video and watch some 10-15 minutes. I bet you’ll be intrigued to watch more. If not, well, your loss :-)
If you care about the environment, you need to watch this.
If you care about the future of our species, you need to watch this.
If you’re interested in learning a lot of simple things you can do that’ll make your life better and help make the world better, you need to watch this.
If you’re without a job and want to be inspired in a hundred new ways in which you can make a difference, start something new, find a job or be more creative, you need to watch this.
If you’re a business owner looking for ways to grow your company or have it be more efficient, you need to watch this.
If you’re a politician or are actively involved in politics, you need to watch this.
If you live in Seattle, or Vancouver, or Portland, or San Francisco, or London, or Amsterdam, you need to watch this.
It is that good, and it is that important.
You’ll need to set apart 3 hours for it, but in those three hours, Alex Steffen will introduce you to countless of interesting facts, aspects of our society and more, and inspire you so much that the grim reality of our ecological trajectory won’t be able to sadden you anymore. You’ll not be short of ideas for things you want to do for a whole year.
You need to watch this. Because those three hours can change your life.
In the early 1980’s, John Warnock and Charles Geschke left Xerox PARC to co-found Adobe Systems where they invented PostScript which, with the encouragement of Steve Jobs and the introduction of the…
I’m hoping it adds the excitement to my life that I need.
Gouda. Pshaw.
If you wanted to taste some seriously great Dutch cheese, you should’ve just forced me to open one of my cheeses during SFTU and share with all.
In fact, can someone please punch me in the stomach for not doing so anyway? You all would’ve loved it and I would’ve been super popular by offering everyone cheese. What a missed opportunity…
Hey!
I’m sorry, but I’ve already left LA. Didn’t have time there for almost anything, it was just a quick in-and-out to chat about important matters with my buddy Luke and then onwards to D.C. (where I’m at now). Alas!
Next time I head to SoCal I’ll definitely announce it well enough ahead of time so we can arrange a meetup!
(answered here so that all other SoCal peeps know, too)
(via laughingsquid)
Because nothing says “trust” like forcing you to use a Government-owned email service.
