Open Standards: How you can support them

This is partially a response to http://tabulacrypticum.wordpress.com/2011/10/18/ecosystem-or-curated-manure/

I think somehow in this walled-garden world, we have forgotten about open standards. We have walled gardens of content (various DRM schemes that only work with one service or device), walled gardens of personal data (say hello to social), walled cloud providers, walled garden hardware accessories (say hello proprietary connectors), and walled garden APIs.

I think we need to stick to open standards wherever available. Open standards mean that consumers can ultimately get more choice. Think USB and the number of USB keyboards available in the market. Once you buy a USB keyboard, there is no need for you to wonder if it will work with your computer and yet the standards mean that there is enough competition and variety in the marketplace.

Not necessarily open-source, but open standards are what we need. Good news is that there are some things we can all support:

1. For music at least, most stores have gone DRM-free now.
2. For APIs, one would be wise to stick to open standards like OpenGL for graphics or at least cross-platform toolkits like Qt (for desktops at least) and PhoneGap for mobile wherever possible.
3. For hardware accessories, I stick to standards like USB and bluetooth where possible.
4. For personal data like calendar and contact sync, instead of sticking my data in some proprietary service, I am investigating ownCloud. Looks promising.

WebOS and Enyo: Issues from a developer perspective

WebOS is a great OS that I like using very much. However things have progressed very slowly.

1. Enyo is nice but still needs more work and polish. APIs need to mature. The same old story that has been plaguing WebOS for a while now.

2. Enyo tooling support needs to mature. Seriously, where is the Visual Studio or even Eclipse level IDE support for editing Enyo code? Sure it runs in Chrome on the desktop but certainly thats not comparable to other modern offerings. Even Ares is not yet ready for Enyo for example.

3. Documentation is still not very good. Compare to the ton of books that I can get on Android development. HP is trying to remedy that with workshops and events, and that is good, but still needs a LOT more work. Maybe more video and learning material needs to come out of HP.

4. Enyo is not an open framework. HP talks a lot about “Web standards”. But guess what, Enyo isn’t a library you can use outside of WebOS right now so its as much of a proprietary framework as any other.

5. WebOS is not too aggressive on web standards and JavaScript performance is not top of the pack either. Take a look at this article.A bit disappointing for an OS that is called “WebOS”.

6. The Mojo compatibility story looks poor on the TouchPad at least. Take a look here.

7. Not quite sure what is happening about the weird paid app catalog carrier restrictions HP had in place. Not sure if they are solved yet.

I do think that Enyo and WebOS development tools have some way to go if HP wants to fight with the big players. Driving more aggressively on web standards will help. If more and more developers realize that web standards are good, then it will help HP in getting more content and services to WebOS. At the same time, Enyo and tool support need to mature and making them cross-platform will help as well. Clearly HP has the work cut out for them and it will be a long road. If HP continues to fall behind, I am not sure WebOS will be around for very long.

Comment here or send me comments on twitter @codedivine.

Libre Graphics Meeting 2011

If you are a user or developer of open-source graphics software, or if you are just curious about them, you might be interested in the Libre Graphics Meeting 2011. It is being held in Montreal in May.
Software such as Blender, Krita, Inkscape, Scribus and The GIMP are examples of open-source software graphics related software applications.
More details on their website
You may also be interested in donating to them. You can details on their website, or you can just go straight to the donations link

Palm, Mojo and Enyo

Looking into WebOS development. WebOS world is in a big development transition with the upcoming Enyo replacing the current Mojo. I just hope that they provide a mic API finally
Comparing Mojo to Qt, Qt with Qt Mobility is clearly superior but Mojo is looking to be more “fun”

Got a Nokia N8, development begins

I now have Nokia N8 and have already started development and testing for the device. First up is some simple CPU benchmarks for Symbian and Meego. I am curious about the ARM11 in the N8. For example, how big is the cache size? How is the integer and floating point performance etc. I think I can understand the CPU a little better by writing benchmarks and will publish results to inform others as well.

Meego 1.1 netbook. Whats the point?

I put Meego 1.1 on a netbook (Eee 1000H). Installation mostly went fine except that the wifi did not work initially. I found the fix described here:

http://forum.meego.com/showthread.php?t=1756

However, wifi still is not totally stable.

As for the UI, I am not sure why one should really bother with Meego on a netbook. The UI is not that easy or intuitive or eye catching etc. and the drivers and applications are mostly standard Linux stuff.
So then why should I get Meego as opposed to say Ubuntu or OpenSuse or any other Linux distro?

Windows Phone 7 business model

I am not sure I understand the business model Microsoft is pursuing with Windows Phone 7. Even if they sell say 10 million phones an year, and assuming say a $25 licensing fee for the OS, they only make $250 million that way which is not a big amount for MS. Sales of apps probably are not a big revenue maker either. Consider each user downloading apps worth $20 per phone MS makes $6 out of it per user giving an additional $60 million. I guess MS is hoping to sell a lot more than 10 million phones per year.

Symbian^4 dead, no more Orbit confusion!

Thankfully Nokia has killed Orbit. Qt world was under the threat of fragmentation with the Meego team developing Meego Touch while Symbian focusing on Orbit. If you used either, it was not clear how you would port apps from one to the other and would have killed Qt’s cross-platform advantages. The future of Meego Touch is still not clear and its not clear whether it will be available on Symbian. I guess I will focus on just the core Qt and Qt Quick which are guaranteed to be available on all platforms.

Nokia’s Qt is impressing more and more

Have been learning Qt and the more I learn, the more impressed I am with it. Recent changes such as Qt Quick look extremely impressive. Learning Qt means that i can reuse my knowledge for writing desktop applications. Great job (formerly) Trolltech and Nokia. More posts on Qt soon.

Symbian stuff

Well nowadays Nokia bashing is in fashion so I figured I might also add some views. I think Symbian is lagging behind in some critical areas:

1. Default web browser needs to be improved. Whether its rendering speed, javascript execution or support for features such as HTML5, WebGL or Flash 10.1, it needs to be improved. Opera Mobile is a workable 3rd party solution for now but Nokia need to step-up their game here.

2. Phones with better CPUs than an ARM11 680MHz is required. This is not a problem with Symbian but rather with Nokia.

3. Some sort of notification API is required for applications. Qt also needs a good widget API so that an application can have a “display as widget” mode.

4. Symbian^4 is a critical point for Symbian due to breakage of backwards compatibility. Nokia need to work with big-name developers actively so that well known apps such as google maps, skype, opera mobile etc remain available. If these apps were to disappear from Symbian, Symbian^4 will be as good as dead.