161–170 of 276 posts
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You'd be surprised at how well JavaScript performs when allowed.
It performs well, until the code is too complex for the JIT compiler to get type inference / speculative optimizations right. Then it suddenly performs very, very poor, because it falls back on dynamic (very slow compared to inline) dispatch and doubles instead of ints.
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AFAIK you can do it right this minute, if you'd like. Here's a guide for dual-booting B2G and Android on SGS2 (though I have no idea how up-to-date it is): https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Boot_to_Gec...
Wow, thanks. I might give this a go.
I'm impressed by what Firefox OS managed to achieve using web technologies, but I posted this as a warning that users may chain themselves to some proprietary webapp even stronger than to native one. Hopefully Firefox Os will force more webapps to provide offline mode.
[1] Of course DRM tries to take away this advantage from desktop apps.
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I'm confused by your statement about "the daunting prospect of dealing with Objective C, Java and C# simultaneously. This is a ludicrous prospect for a lone developer." Perhaps that's true for a hobbyist. But any professional software developer should already be familiar with at least one (if not all) of those languages, and should be able to pick up the others with very little work. Once you know C#, for instance, y…
The point is not that the these three languages are hard or obscure or that using all three is hard. The point is that maintaining the same code in parallel in three languages is a Wrong thing to do. DRY. Big companies can get away with it because they can throw manpower but it's still wrong.
Once you have built it in one framework it will be much faster porting it to the others. I know it requires 3 updates when you add a new feature but it's not a major pain and you get native apps running very fast.
What I can't see is how this would "going to change everything" from an user perspective. I only can see this as increasing the amount of apps in stores very quickly. But stores already feel very dense with numbers like 500k apps.
Can anyone tell me what I am missing? because I can't see this changing everything.
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any idea when/if it will be available to buy? or what markets they are aiming at (latin america?)?
Brazil at first, next year. We're working on developer devices that can be used worldwide.
Edit: Didn't read carefully. You already mentioned that developer versions would be available worldwide soon. Any mailing list to subscribe for the announcement?
You could set your watch by the HN response to a story like this. Pure doom, gloom and naysaying. Smartphones these days live and die by their app ecosystem. I would love to be working on mobile apps, but for the expense of buying an iPhone, an Android phone and a Windows phone, plus licenses for software to develop for all three. Not to mention the daunting prospect of dealing with Objective C, Java and C# simultane…
Well, do you really need to develop on all three?
Among the reasons I got into Android development was because the upfront cost was $0. I just needed any laptop or desktop made in the past ~5 years, which I think all of us have already.
After several weeks -- when I decided I didn't hate it completely, and I got tired of using the emulator -- I got an old phone off of eBay, and I actually spent less on that than I did on a book from O'Reilly.
It's very easy to start programming for Android.
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You can use C# for all three with monotouch. But honestly it doesn't matter much. Objective C is very similar to C# which is very similar to Java. It is really just slightly different syntax. And you can always just embed a webview and use html + js if you really want, though that is much harder to work with and less versatile imo. That is the reason I am not cheering for firefox OS. Why on earth would I want to be l…
There are loadds of high-end games written in JS: Cut The Rope. Bejeweled. Angry Birds. As well as many more lesser known ones that push things as far as possible. You say "doesn't include WebGL", but WebGL is just the visual output… a game like BananaBread requires epic performance from JavaScript aside from WebGL: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/demos/detail/bananabread WebGL is one of the main reasons why we c…
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"Smartphones live and die by their app ecosystem" Have you got a source on this? I am just curious. I love my smartphone, but I basically use whatsapp and the internetm, mp3, video, and fbreader 99.5% of the time.
a) Your set of 99.5% apps are going to be different from those of other people. You need a lot more coverage than that to make a substantial percentage of people happy. b) It's often not enough to just have an app for a specific task, it needs to also tie into a specific ecosystem. For example I don't need generic VoIP software on my phone, but I absolutely must have access to Skype. For somebody else it might be Web…