Next of Search

Update: I just added information about Firebug, which I found while reading a book, “Ajax on Rails“.

Today I came across with an interesting guy, Joe Hewitt, while reading an article at TechCrunch. It was interesting since Joe, the co-founder of Parakey which is now merged by Facebook, alone developed the Facebook application for iPhone. An entrepreneur gave up his vision and became a developer of an iPhone application for Facebook??? Even though what Parakey was trying to do seems a bit vague on their website, it doesn’t seem like they didn’™t know what they were doing. Parakey was a developer of Firebug, a very popular Firefox plugin providing a wealth of web development tools and Joe made huge contribution in iPhone WebDev at Google Groups. Listen to his interview at the bottom of the article at TechCrunch. You will find that these whole things just didn’t make sense. So I digged more about him. Not long after, I found his blog and also found a kind of hint why he became an iPhone application developer in his blog.

Do you remember MS IE4 totally changed our internet life? It became de-facto standard in the old days, letting a lot of Netscape users crying out since there are abundant of IE4-only websites. (Include me among them. ;-)) So there were lots of people accusing MS of using non-standard technologies. The same debate is happening again with iPhone. Some people claim that iPhone will be like MS IE4 and it will create non-standard web sites which only work with iPhone so that other mobile device users will lose accessibility to those web site. Other people argue that there are so many innovations in iPhone and others should adopt them and let the industry figure out what will be the next standard as we go.

On the Compiler (”The IPhone Is Internet Explorer 4 All Over Again“):

Ironically, some of the best performing, easy-to-use sites on a mobile device are the very 1998-looking sites that just display content in a long list. Obviously, desktop users don’t want the web to revert to 1998, which is why designers find themselves caught in the middle and forced to design two separate sites - one mobile, one normal.

Which was working until the iPhone came along and created a 3rd space - iPhone-optimized sites.

The iPhone has created a division in the mobile-optimized web which is eerily similar to the days of IE 4 when many sites simply didn’t work in Netscape.

Joe said (“The IPhone Is IE4 Again (in a good way)”):

The iPhone is going to have the same effect as IE4, but unfortunately there are a fair amount of web developers who don’™t care about progress or innovation. The dogma of web standards has blinded them, to the point where they don’t even understand how standards come to be in the first place. Do you really expect companies to refrain from releasing new products until a standards body approves, and then for all their competitors to release an identical product at the same time?? Would you like to be held to that process in your work? Companies should be encouraged to release new things, and we should standardize later.

As for the iPhone’s side, there are still so many people who cry out for native iPhone SDK for better performance. But I think that the web service model gives much more value to people beyond the performance issue and believe that Apple will maintain their choice of web service model as the iPhone development platform. I know that it’s Apple’s call to make. Until now, the answer was “NO”. Let’s see if Apple will open the Pandora’s box. Now back to Joe Hewitt, I think Joe is seeing something in iPhone, which might be different with what I am seeing but I am sure that he will agree this:

iPhone is setting the new standard in mobile web.

Wow, will I be able to time-travel in my life time?
[From 'We have broken speed of light' - Telegraph]

For instance, an astronaut moving faster than it would theoretically arrive at a destination before leaving.
The scientists were investigating a phenomenon called quantum tunnelling, which allows sub-atomic particles to break apparently unbreakable laws.
Dr Nimtz told New Scientist magazine: “For the time being, this is the only violation of special relativity that I know of.”