Famo.us open to everyone

I have many friends from my home country (Brazil) far removed from San Francisco and the Bay Area that know about what I'm working on without me telling them. The fact that they know about what Famo.us is working and we don't have the luxury of having the visibility of a Google or Apple, is a testament that this approach may have value.

Many of us are entrepreneurs here. Having a great technical solution is half the battle. Awareness is the other half. I've been doing this for a long time, and I think there's gobs of merit in our solution despite the rough edges. I also know there's gobs of skepticism of our approach. If how we've communicated has been less than ideal, but succeeded in getting people to at least try to framework out that either would have dismissed it out of hand or sat on the sidelines waiting for others to test it first, then it might have been worth it.

What I do know is that despite some of our foibles, that when someone who is knowledgeable actually takes the time to sit down and build something, they come back a believer in the approach we're taking. A few months ago, I replied calmy to one of the first naysayers I encountered early on on reddit who was about to dismiss us. He gave it a shot and he's now become one of our biggest supporters.

Lastly, to you and everyone else, if the criticism you're giving us comes deep down from your values (and is not just a kneejerk reaction and bandwagon haterism), please tell us. It's a learning experience. We're a pretty motley crew here as Famo.us and not all of us come from an Open Source background, thus not all of us have the same experience upon which to draw when making decisions on how to handle an issue that might be controversial. Some open source ideas are controversial among people with a different business background, just as some good business decisions may be controversial among us that work on open source. Oftentimes the solution that produces the most good is somewhere in the middle. Furthermore, just because someone doesn't have the same experience as you or I, it doesn't make their decision necessarily invalid, since they may be operating based on experience which we lack and informs them to the contrary to the conclusions we'd come to. I know that I myself joined Famo.us with far less experience on how to generate attention for the important work I may be working on. I learned a ton about the value of that skill. Sometimes the difference between succeeding or failing with a good solution is generating publicity that increases willingness to experiement with your solution. Howard Aiken once said, "Don't worry about people stealing an idea. If it's original, you will have to ram it down their throats.". The lesson I've learned is that if you've got a good idea and you're worried about ramming it down their throats, you're probably selling it wrong.

Thanks for your thoughtful, balanced comments.

We'll work on making the demos available at standalone URLs (instead of iframed on our site). In the meantime, if you haven't tried them and want to, you can:

1) download the starter pack

2) go to the demos folder

3) open a webserver in each folder that serves the app.html as the index (just occurred to me that we should switch app.html with the iframed index.html for this very reason).

4) then open each demo on your phone over the local network.

Nearly every day I curse Google for breaking the native interactions with my browser (I mostly use Opera and they seem to only care about support for Chrome). For instance, today I was trying to type an equals sign and Google Docs only wanted to enter a plus, with or without the shift key. Please don't use them as your role model.

The thing about native toolkits is that they are battle-tested and you can trust them to work. Custom UI components are bound to have nasty little lurking bugs, so you should use them as icing on the cake. For things that are absolutely essential, like scrolling or entering data, please use components I can trust.

I've been around software long enough to remember when desktop application devs thought it was a good idea to develop their own basic UI components. Needless to say (or maybe not) they were often broken, usually in unexpected and irregular ways. I suppose it's only fitting that web devs would try, though to be honest I hoped that impulse had ended with the death of Flash.

It's all well and good to say "don't put native scrolling on a pedestal" but if the alternative simply isn't usable that pedestal sure seems justified.