Comment by nailer | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nailer | Hacker News Reader

As a Playbook owner running OS 2, and a software developer, I agree that there isn't room for a fourth ecosystem of 'native' apps written especially for BB devices.

__Blackberry should stop running to where the ball is, and start running to where it's going to be__

What I would like is the ability to run web apps as proper apps. Ie: make Playbook the best way to consume web apps out there.

- Apple's trying to push native apps that are iOS exclusive.

- Android is from Google, a Java shop.

Both require web developers to shoehorn apps onto them via Titanium or PhoneGap.

- Awesome HTML5 support. PB OS 2 currently has (308 in html5test as of last night)

- Left/right gestures swapping web app windows like PB OS 2 currently swaps between desktop-style apps. No desktop-style tabs.

- Use the high resolution icons on my site, rather than snapshots of the UI.

- Focus on webworks as the primary SDK, ditch Air & Java/Android completely.

If you wrapped up the mobile gmail this way, it'd be as seamless as a 'native' app and a better experience than competing tablets.

I just want to add a datapoint to your "where it's going to be" point, which I agree is the way to go for RIM.

Out of the blue, our startup started to receive suggestions directly from RIM on how to improve our performance and compatibility with the Playbook's Webkit implementation. They actually went as far as cracking open their web inspector and doing some analysis of our handling of touch events, some minor CSS issues (we use a lot of -webkit-transform), etc. I'm not sure whether this is part of an officially-endorsed policy or whether it's just some proactive folks within RIM, but it's been quite helpful.

Whether positioning the Playbook as a really good Webkit runner will win them back significant market share or not is up for debate, since there are many tablets entering the market that have decent implementations on decent hardware now.

Any other specific things that would make web application better or specifically what would you use if it was there?

One thing I am proud of is the addition of inspector built in. Turning on inspector, browsing to my web apps on the device and on my desktop having the full webkit inspector is very handy for debugging stuff you can't debug on the desktop such as touch events. One of those features that as soon as you have you can never go back. http://www.berryreview.com/2011/04/15/hot-webkit-web-inspect...

We got some advice from RIM on how to run this inspector, and it's been quite useful to improve our compatibility with the Playbook and especially the 2.0 OS.

That said, there are drawbacks to the Playbook that are hard to ignore and make it hard to recommend as a development target from the viewpoint of a "webkit developer" (oddball term, but there you have it.. :) ).

They feel quite a bit more sluggish than even the iPad1, which is fairly old hardware now. It would be encouraging if at least one non-Apple Webkit hardware+OS implementation out there actually managed to do CSS3 animations even half as smooth as the iPad2. I'm optimistic this is going to happen, but I don't think the Playbook has it right now. One thing I've liked about the Playbook and WebKit implementation is that we're mostly seeing what we interpret as "correct" behavior (aside from some Touch events interpretation, but we just received some help with RIM on that with the touch-mode setting). In comparison, the Samsung Galaxy Tab exhibits crazy smearing and other rendering errors when performing -webkit-transform. Our reference for correctness is Mobile Safari, though it has quite a few fun rendering bugs as well (iOS 5 actually introduced a couple new ones).

I'm not trying to be funny, but one thing that seriously inhibits productive web development on the Playbook is its power button and battery characteristics. Sometimes we literally cannot figure out how to get our Playbook to turn on -- the power button on these things has to be seen and felt to be believed. Sometimes you'll press the power button and it won't come on, and will suddenly spring to life 7 to 10 minutes later while sitting abandoned on your desk. Weird stuff...

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