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Comment by blntechie | Hacker News Reader

I'm sure they're not going to use ASP.NET controls. If WebOS is universally accepted as developer friendly I don't see why Windows which is planning for a similar toolkit will not be considered so.

And let me know when the day arrives when you can develop and run platform-neutral apps in Mac,iOS or in fact Linux. Don't be unreasonable. Thanks.

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Qt, GTK, Tcl/Tk - for Tcl/Tk that day is at least thirteen years ago. For Java that day is sixteen years ago.

sure... if you want an equally shitty experience across all platforms

And... web apps aren't?

Nothing I wrote is unreasonable. The only real advantage of HTML5 on the desktop is that it has a shallow learning curve vs., say, iOS.

I didn't say it wouldn't be developer friendly. I'm saying that it really makes no difference that they are using HTML+JS if, like WebOS, they have tight coupling to the native OS API.

Also, I didn't say they would use ASP.NET controls, but something similar - rich controls backed specifically by the OS.

My point stands: Different developer toolset - same vendor lock-in.

Apple actually tried to introduce HTML5 as the development platform for the iPhone, and developers didn't want it.

Not quite. Safari for iOS is crippled when compared to the desktop versions. You have to write a native app over a web app if you want to allow the user to upload images or video, for example.

The world was pretty significantly different at that time: in 2007, we hadn't even seen 280slides yet. It wasn't obvious to everybody that you could write really great javascript-based webapps. Nobody was even calling it html5 at the time.

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