Comments on: Palm gets it’s Mojo back?

By: sachmonkey

sachmonkey — Mon, 12 Jan 2009 16:56:16 +0000

I concur with Joe Hewitt on this. We need to move to a powerful mobile browser based app model and Palm’s Mojo is the first right step in that direction.

I share my thoughts on this here:
http://www.sachinrekhi.com/blog/2009/01/12/palm-gets-it-right-with-mojo

By: brianleroux

brianleroux — Sat, 10 Jan 2009 19:58:12 +0000

@bawjaws you have not done your research sir. PhoneGap applications have been deployed in the app store for the iPhone and there are several successful Android implementations. In short, PhoneGap is adopted, accepted by the official stores and maturing quickly.

By: bawjaws

bawjaws — Sat, 10 Jan 2009 13:51:50 +0000

@nosredna: that’s one of several hacks discussed by John Resig at the link I provided but they’re all currently incomplete and may not be able to reach their full potential without official blessing and co-operation.

By: Nosredna

Nosredna — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 19:33:20 +0000

Ack!
.
Please change that “it’s!’ It’s giving me a stomach ache!
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@bawjaws: “the iPhone still doesn’t have a way to build apps with javascript and web technology.”
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Is that true? I thought that PhoneGap fixed that. Is PhoneGap not a reasonable solution? I hope it is, I was planning on trying it.

By: bawjaws

bawjaws — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 17:37:33 +0000

@tdegrunt: minor correction, the iPhone still doesn’t have a way to build apps with javascript and web technology.

When Jobs announced the only way to develop for the iPhone was to write webapps (i.e. websites), but were clearly using Obj-C/Cocoa for all their own apps all the Mac OS developers with years of Cocoa experience wanted in on the action and caused a big fuss.

Some of those developers have done very well with ported apps but I personally think the platform itself, new developers and users may have been better served with some standards based HTML5 style development.

You can read about some attempts to hack this by building on what Apple gives you here:
http://ejohn.org/blog/iphone-javascript-apps/

So this Palm moves makes a lot of sense to me, and I hope Apple and others follow suit, maybe even in a compatible manner (for simple apps at least). Here’s hoping.

By: tdegrunt

tdegrunt — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 13:02:14 +0000

Strangely when Steve Jobs announced the iPhone and its Web-Based SDK, most developers cried out for an Objective-C based SDK.
I for one hope for a standard way of creating GUI apps, for phones, for desktops with the use of HTML, CSS and JavaScript and a Gears like persistence. It might not be the best way for developing 100% of the applications, but for quite a few will do nicely.

By: perenzo

perenzo — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 07:25:33 +0000

Additionally to a UI Javascript API a tool like Google Gears for mobile devices makes sense. This way you get access to device specific functionalities like geo location, camera, acceleration and so on. For iPhone there is an application available in die App Store offering these functions via a simple API trying to be close to the HTML5 definitions of W3C. The app is called "Big Five" and the API is available here: http://www.big5apps.com/api. A tutorial and screencasts show how to use this technique: http://www.big5apps.com/tutorial.

By: mrmass

mrmass — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 07:22:24 +0000

It’s not “it’s”, it’s “its”.

By: Dion Almaer

Dion Almaer — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 06:46:30 +0000

slideshowbarker,

Thanks for that. If anyone else has actual details on the API etc…. we are all ears!

By: sideshowbarker

sideshowbarker — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 05:33:07 +0000

FWIW as far as the Web engine that's behind all this: According to an interview with a Palm VP, Stephane Maes, "The Web browser is Palm-developed, but based on the WebKit engine."