Hi all! Sorry for slacking last week, but we were at Funconf! And boy, it was fun. Let me just put the iconic pic right here so there are no mistakes.
Image courtesy of Kyle Neath.
Here’s another, in full color:
Image courtesy of Oren Teich
That’s right. Donkey, Delorian, Clown and a Llama that ran away. (No, really :) Funconf was fun and different from most confs we go to. But enough about that. The past two weeks have been interesting enough. Here goes, in no particular order.
There are some rumours that RIM might go on a firesale for their PlayBook. The disappointing device not gaining traction might be causing that.
Microsoft dropped a few bombs too. They released a publicly available early developer build of Windows 8. We’re all a little anxcious to see win8, of course because it’s supposed to be built on html5 technology. That made us all Windows developers over night.. ;) But that was old news. The build has been received praise and complaints. Overall I think the biggest fact was Microsoft reveiling they wouldn’t support plugins on the browser of their new platform. Could that be the last nail in the coffin for Flash and Silverlight? Not really, these rules only seem to apply to mobile. Microsoft also released some IE10 previews. But to see latest of them, ie10pp3, you actually had to install win8 first because it only runs on that OS. Microsoft also announced they’d go for the walled garden approach for win8 mobile. That means any app on mobile devices has to go through their store. More pitchforks? No, that’s how Apple does it for a long time. Microsoft just woke up to it.
Meanwhile, Mozilla released version 7 of their Firefox browser.
Earlier HP had enough of their CEO and ejected him, replacing him by Meg Whitman. But Leo Apotheker was a nice enough guy to at least send out one last memo, after his departure. Such a nice gesture, so … trustworthy and honest too! Moving on…
In case you’re as interested in JavaScript (or ECMAScript) as we are there’s some good news! There’s a draft for the next version of the specification, ES6. If there was any time to chime in it is now. Regardless of what Google might be up to, JS won’t be going away any time soon. Especially when so many companies are investing in it as they are now.
On a completely different story, the US is getting closer to introduce net neutrality rules. However, even though the intentions are well meant I doubt that we’ll be seeing those rules in effect any time soon. And when they are eventually, they’ll probably be watered down so much that they won’t change very much. Let’s take an example to the Dutch government here! (And only on that point…) Granted, they goofed up at first but they recovered and “we”‘re now pretty much covered. Although one could argue about that too.
Oracle entered the next tier in undoubtfully a long script of many tiers to eventually get rid of this pesky think called Open Source completely. This time it’s MySQL. They announced adding a closed source extension to it, thereby tainting pretty much the entire project. I’m sure we’ll find out their next tier in a few weeks, when this dust settles.
Almost finally, Meego follows the trail of WebOS. Intel revealed they intend to ditch it in favor of a new OSS OS, “html5″/linux based, called Tizen. Good call guys, I’m sure WebOS was a com-pletely different beast. Ohwait… Anyways, they seem to have some vendors standing in line, so this might be interesting. What am I saying, it will be interesting! Even more interesting is that Nokia has just starting selling their only Meego device, the N9. Congratulations to the buyers, you just bought a device who’s support got canceled. I’m expecting a fire sale for those devices soon though. It was actually received decently too. Ohwell.
Finally then, announced today was the Kindle Fire. Amazon revealed their newest device. And while the device got some attention for being a cheap but decent alternative to the iPad, in our community more attention was given to its browser, Silk. I do feel kind of bad for SilkApp and wonder whether they’ll opt to rebrand soon. Regardless, I find the attention Silk received interesting because it’s doing pretty much the same as Opera mini; proxying your web surfing and converting the pages you visit to something more compact and optimal to run. An interesting technique, but hardly unseen. I guess the difference is between the type of company offering it. Besides that it’s just another browser. One that has no market share at this point and we’ll just have to wait and see whether it’ll grow any.
Some quick releases and links. I’ve seen a font decompiler and editor. A web-based vi. Found a site where you can code in a few cross-compilers online. A handy mobile framework comparison chart. Some awesome text-shadow demos. A blog post about porting the Source FPS engine to WebGL. And a very funny article about what PHP would be like if it would use proper British.
That’s it. Yeah, really, that’s it :) But hey, this was two weeks worth. Next week I’ll tell you all about JSConf.eu and Fronteers. Maybe even in a special. But you may have to wait for the weekend for that one ;)