Amazon Kindle SDK Beta Applications now open | Hacker News Reader

Amazon Kindle SDK Beta Applications now open

kindlepublishing.amazon.com

33 pointsandymism18 comments

Wow, three strikes on first contact. I'm becoming less and less enthused:

  - Your browser is not supported (Safari or Chrome)

Uhm, seriously? We're still doing that? I mean, I get it for IE 6, sort of, but it's not like there was some huge complex app hiding behind there; it was a text form.

  - We'll get back to you

Wait, wasn't that what this was? I needed to to sign up and fill out questions, just like last time, so that I could still not download anything?

  - Space is limited

Amazon might run out of interwebs? "The interenet is not a big truck..."

Well, it's not like they didn't let me in (Chrome). It was just a warning.

The first time was a 'please notify me when the beta is even out'

dude, space is always limited in betas, and not because they don't have enough interwebs.

No offense man, but it sounds like you're getting upset because it's not working flawlessly and just the way you expected right off the bat. It's an early beta from a company that hasn't (to my knowledge) ever even done a release like this before.

I thought the 'browser not supported' message was odd too. I got that message while signing up using my iPhone, but it seemed to work just fine.

Besides reading-related apps, what types of apps is the Kindle more suited to over, say the iPhone/iPad/any other smart phone? From what I've seen, the refresh rate seems to limit its usefulness, such that any non-reading centric app would be at best a poor cousin of apps on those other devices.

Am I missing an elephant in the room?

Some of my initial excitement was dampened when I saw the specs. Not that there aren't interesting things to be done, but full-blown multimedia seems unlikely.

You could probably do a MYST-like. Beyond that, probably not a lot of multimedia.

Maybe one could create a really cool reading app.

An example just popped into my head- something like google maps (perhaps even google maps itself) could work extremely well (with the large screen) if you make route finding, zoom, etc, seamless enough you don't need to drag the map around.

(and by seamless what I really meant was 'right on the first try')

One of the things I'll be excited to see (or develop, if I'm fast enough) would be a social note taking app integrated into the reader, shared among a book club for example.

There are plenty of constraints (slow screen refresh, not ideal user interaction) but who knows, some good new ideas might be born to work around them.

Got this on Chromium (Mac):

"Your browser is not fully supported"

Same here, with Safari 4. Looks like it worked fine after spoofing the user agent though.

Since it's J2ME, I signed up to see if I can port Hecl to it. What with the slow screen, an interpreter won't be the limiting factor.

Anyone interested in doing some development work for this platform?

I don't have a specific project yet but would love to make contact with some J2ME hackers. Please e-mail me: gavinobrown at gmail.

Here is the Javadocs for the kindle specific stuff: http://kdk-javadocs.s3.amazonaws.com/index.html Nothing too exciting. No sound, no location.

I didn't realize there was no sound. That's a disappointment.

I wonder how long the no location will last. After all, hitting Alt-1 show current location in google maps in the browser.

Still peeved that your program must "not be a generic reader". They'll swing their weight around, or they wouldn't have that language in there.

I'm still amazed at the stuff everyone's getting so caught up on. So what if it's not just like every other mobile computing device? Maybe it's time to think about the problem differently. There's a ton of things that can be done without a high refresh rate. Some video games, and videos, are just about the only things that require the high refresh rate, and the Kindle is NOT a game platform.

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