Mozilla Announces Boot to Gecko, Jumping Into the Mobile OS War
With smartphones becoming as commonplace as they are these days, it's no surprise that companies other than Google, Apple, and Microsoft are trying to get into the lucrative market of programming apps and operating systems for mobile devices. And why wouldn't they? As more and more people make the switch from feature phones to smartphones, any tech company worth its salt has to have some hand in the market, be it accessories like headsets, cables, or cases, if not an app or operating system.
Although Mozilla has been battling Google and Microsoft on the internet browser front for a while, it's been noticeably absent from the mobile OS front that's been very hotly contested in the past few years by its competitors. Until today, that is. MozillaWiki added an entry today describing B2G, a shorthand reference to Boot to Gecko, a project by Mozilla "to pursue the goal of building a complete, standalone operating system for the open web."
Here's the lowdown: Mozilla plans to use use a small amount of Google's Android operating system code for hardware interaction. Everything aside from that will be built from scratch, including an entirely new user interface, as well as a suite of unique apps to go along with it. Unlike Android, it will not be using Java as its coding language, and it won't support programming in native code. The project is still in its infancy, and Mozilla has announced it in order to get as much feedback as it can from the public (at least, the programming public).
Source: Gizmodo, Tech Radar, MozillaWiki
Flash is Finished with iPhone and iPad
Well, it's official. Adobe has stopped development of tools that would have helped developers bring their Flash to the iPhone and iPad, marking the next move in the continuing Apple vs. Adobe spat.
The blog post comes two weeks after Apple announced that all iPhone apps MUST be written in Objective-C, C, or C++ (in effect leaving Flash developers in the cold).
In a post on his blog on Tuesday, Mike Chambers, the chief product manager for Adobe Flash developer relations, wrote that "The primary goal of Flash has always been to enable cross browser, platform and device development... However, this is the exact opposite of what Apple wants."
He goes on to say "I think that the closed system that Apple is trying to create is bad for the industry, developers and ultimately consumers, and that is not something that I want to actively promote." Instead, Chambers writes that he is more interested in developing software for Android devices, especially the Android tablets that should be coming out later this year.
Despite the mountain of content on the internet that uses Adobe Flash (namely games, ads, and YouTube), Apple refuses to accommodate its use on their devices, stating that it's "buggy" and unsafe. Instead, Apple has been supportive of HTML5 as the up-and-coming replacement that will improve on and eliminate all the problems that come with Flash. There are certainly differing opinions on the matter, however, and with the opportunities of developing for the Android platform spread out ahead of them, Flash is nowhere near down and out just yet.
Source: Wired, Mike Chambers