BoltJS: Another Secret Piece Of Facebook’s Spartan Puzzle? | Hacker News Reader

BoltJS: Another Secret Piece Of Facebook’s Spartan Puzzle?

techcrunch.com

27 pointsjmjerlecki10 comments

Is it just me or does anyone else experience the text getting fuzzy when zooming in on the article text on their iPhone at TechCrunch?

I've experienced this for a while and it's quite annoying.

examples:

Standard Zoom: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/5514110/Photo%20Aug%2029%2C%2021%201...

Zoomed in: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/5514110/Photo%20Aug%2029%2C%2021%201...

Yes just noticed it on my iPad.

I don't understand the meme that this is a move to encroach on Apple's territory. Apple could give two shits — unless Facebook decides to get in the hardware platform business, theres no way Apple loses any significant business. In fact, maintaining the best mobile browser means it's more than likely it'll help them sell devices.

It's not a meme, mg invented it out of whole cloth and it's spread from pure tech crunch inertia. I mean, he's even personally reported 'mixed signals' that Apple not only doesn't mind, that in fact they're actively helping...

HTML5 will let Facebook distribute mobile applications through the Facebook app, instead of going through the App Store. So Facebook can get a 30% cut through Facebook Credits when a mobile game is built on top of the mobile Facebook platform, instead of Apple getting a 30% cut when the game is distributed through the App Store. That's why people interpret this as competing with Apple.

First class web apps mean users are less tied to a certain platform, which is not something Apple wants. They also love getting 30% of transactional goods.

The distribution channel is the win here. People instinctively turn to the app store to find new apps. Apple has that locked down. The only play is the HTML5 channel. The problem with that is the huge consumer education effort that will need to accompany a HTML5 distribution platform. If they can wrestle away enough market share from apple that average consumers instinctively go to Facebook to find new apps like they go to the apple app store they will win.

This is somewhat sensationalistic journalism, typical of Techcrunch. There's nothing terribly groundbreaking in this BoltJS library. I don't think there's any way you can make a conclusion that this is what Facebook is going to use to compete with Apple. It's a typical MVC JavaScript boilerplate, there are about 10 other JavaScript projects similar this. And given my past experience with Facebook JavaScript API's, I have absolutely zero interest in using theirs.

More generally, I can't imagine why anyone would want to build on Facebook's mobile API instead of Apple's given how crappy Facebook's API has been historically. (And Zuck endorses this: "Move fast and break stuff.")

Agreed. I don't see why this would be more appealing.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com