91–100 of 153 posts
I hope Mozilla puts Servo into Firefox OS sooner rather than later. Same for rebuilding the whole thing in Rust, although that will probably last 3+ years.
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Android's open enough for me, but what I find unhappy is that Google seems intent on tricking people into revealing more and more information. It often reminds me to turn on history tracking, despite having said no many times. Every time I use the Play store, it tries to get me to enter a phone number. The way it does this is by popping up a dialog, with no buttons except continue . It makes it look like you MUST do…
> Every time I use the Play store Try F-Droid, a repository of FOSS apps with a focus on user confidentiality. They offer some security assurance by building and signing the apps from the orginal source, and offer nice functionality such as automatic updates (which you can disable, of course). Their store and related app is a fork of Aptoide. I often can find good solutions on F-Droid, but the repository is small. ht…
I help a lot of middle aged and elderly people who are not all that tech literate, and get asked a lot for recommendations, and I definitely think there is a niche for something between feature phones and smart phones. A lot of people are not interested in putting in the investment of time and money to get up to pace using Android or an iPhone. There's quite a big step to using those devices, for instance in managing…
I agree there's a good opportunity for simpler phones that still get some of the benefits of smartphones rather than a 10 year old Nokia. That said, I don't see much in the article to suggest this is what Mozilla is going after. Yes, some of the devices will be cheap, but there are plenty of cheap Android and Windows phones too. Even if an OS did target just this market, the problem would still be a lack of apps. The…
http://www.engadget.com/2015/03/01/mozilla-is-bringing-firef...
http://liliputing.com/2015/03/firefox-os-coming-to-low-end-f...
I really respect Firefox OS for being fully open, but I dislike the lack of native applications. I wish normal glibc Linux mobile distros (not Android) would gain more traction. Sailfish OS is great, but they don't seem to be interested in opening up the UI and most of the core applications.
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JavaScript is the path a lot of people want to walk for making mobile apps. Firefox OS is the first to make it the primary way to develop apps for the platform. It has been possible to write fully native (not webview wrappers) Windows Phone apps in HTML and JavaScript for the last four or so years, but web developers didn't really adopt the platform (and those that did primarily used C# and XAML). You can scoff that…
If I had the choice to program in C# or Java I wouldn't touch Js. I can't take the language seriously when the are languages that does things so much better being offered.
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The startup I work for was approached some time ago by Firefox in order to ship our app on FFOS (our app has ~1 million daily users, so we regularly have this kind of proposals). I did not participate in this firsthand, but from what I gathered from my colleagues, the FFOS SDK is so atrocious that sadly the idea of porting our app to this OS is laughable. On the other hand, we are fully committed to our iOS and Andro…
I tinkered with Android development when the original Google Developer Phone came out (aka G1). And, after years of not paying it any attention, because my focus was on server development, I've started learning my way around it again. It's not even the same world. So much of the tedium of developing in Java has gone away, due to better libraries, much better tooling, and just all around a bigger/better ecosystem. Mak…
Not true at all, actually; I was doing this back in 2009 on Palm's webOS platform as one of the first wave of devs with early SDK access.
IMO, webOS' adoption of HTML5/JS apps as "native" was too ahead of its time, and unfortunately early enough where the intersection of hardware of the time and browser JS performance left it looking pretty janky compared to IOS and Android. Still, I loved developing for the platform in spite of everything that happened around the OS.
All that said, I'll probably give FFOS a shot as a development target in the near future.
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If I had the choice to program in C# or Java I wouldn't touch Js. I can't take the language seriously when the are languages that does things so much better being offered.
Funny how that works. Some people like one thing, others like another. It just doesn't make sense, sometimes! Why doesn't everyone only like what I like?
I like JavaScript just fine for what it was originally designed for.
I help a lot of middle aged and elderly people who are not all that tech literate, and get asked a lot for recommendations, and I definitely think there is a niche for something between feature phones and smart phones. A lot of people are not interested in putting in the investment of time and money to get up to pace using Android or an iPhone. There's quite a big step to using those devices, for instance in managing…
It would be nice if another OS could be as instantly familiar as it was, as willing to be as simple or as complex as its user asked it to be.
It's funny how even today iOS and Android are just catching up to some of the beauty of webOS. Pieces of it live on in blatant (sometimes poor) rip offs, but even today I still miss it.
I help a lot of middle aged and elderly people who are not all that tech literate, and get asked a lot for recommendations, and I definitely think there is a niche for something between feature phones and smart phones. A lot of people are not interested in putting in the investment of time and money to get up to pace using Android or an iPhone. There's quite a big step to using those devices, for instance in managing…
In any case, I'm excited about the Firefox OS not because I'm old but because I'm interested in a technology that holds a lot of open-source promise: lower costs, non-coercive apps, respect for user privacy, among others. The app (and OS) development model encourages transparency (promotes security) and with a "lower bar to admission" invites wider participation among users.
Since I'm pretty familiar with web programming I think it will be great when FOS devices become available in N. America. I think it will attract many people looking for the alternative it offers.
Us elderly folks tend to value simplicity and utility over bells and whistles, after all, by default a senior's life is complicated enough. We're old, we don't have time to waste, we see through a lot of the marketing hype and unnecessary crap. When there's a task to do gimmicks are just a hassle--making a phone call should be simple, sometimes it's all a person is aiming to do.
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Android's open enough for me, but what I find unhappy is that Google seems intent on tricking people into revealing more and more information. It often reminds me to turn on history tracking, despite having said no many times. Every time I use the Play store, it tries to get me to enter a phone number. The way it does this is by popping up a dialog, with no buttons except continue . It makes it look like you MUST do…
> And of course, the idiotic permissions system. Want to check to see if a user's on the phone? Gotta also get access to who they call and their IMEI and other permanent identifiers. This bothers me the most about Android. What is the point of individual Permissions if it's all or nothing!!
0. Reading through all our email (We were so naive back then)
1. Google saying it would never link data from its other websites (Youtube, bloggr) with our Gmail id, and then going ahead and doing just that
2. Google announcing Android as Free, Open-source Operating System, then with each update removing functionality to Google Play Services,
3. Google sabotaging the permissions system, by clubbing innocuous, essential permissions with down-right dangerous/malicious ones
4. Creating amazing tech that could provide a quantum leap in the quality of life (for the first world at least) but will further enable Google's all-seeing eye to impinge over our daily life (Self-driving cars, Google Glass)
5. Acquiring home automation companies, robotics company with large defense contracts,
... is that Google is well on its way to becoming truly Evil.
People say that the NSA's unsaid motto is 'to collect it all'. I say that motto sum's up perfectly Google's vision.