Archive for February, 2008

Hi Gang,

I’ve been picking up more and more chatter regarding the imminent release of Mootools 1.2b and I keep getting emails and whatnot asking about CNET’s codebase, which works in 1.11, but not so well in 1.2 (even with the Mootools compatibility layer).

We’re working on it and we’ve made a lot of progress. We’ve now migrated ALL of our code and have only the 3rd party scripts we support (Slimbox and Autocompleter) left to port. But even then we’re not ready to release it - or even post a release candidate - until we’ve done some QA.

So this post is just to tell you all that, yes, we’re porting it all to 1.2 and that it’s not that far off. You can, if you like, browse the documentation for the new scripts here:

http://clientside.cnet.com/docs/Core

We’ve rearranged things a bit (more on that in a later post), renaming some classes and methods and whatnot. We’ll also have a compatibility layer that should make our code work with Mootools 1.11, as well.

Other plans include a download page much like the Mootools download page (finally!), specs (unit tests), and demos.

Stay tuned; we’ll have a release candidate for you to start playing with in another week or so.

-aaron

Ajaxian has a post up about an article from the former VP of Palm regarding the death of Mobile Application development at the hands of the web. I’ve been chewing on a mobile web app in my head the last few weeks for my startup (I still spend time at CNET, I also recently launched my own project) and reading this was interesting. Here’s a short clip from the Ajaxian post, which itself is an excerpt from the full article.

Michael Mace, a former Palm VP, says the business of native mobile apps is dying. He includes a quote from Palm veteran Elia Freedman summarizing why some of us have found mobile application development to be a deeply frustrating experience.

From the technical perspective, there are a couple of big issues. One is the proliferation of operating systems. Back in the late 1990s there were two platforms we had to worry about, Pocket PC and Palm OS. Symbian was there too, but it was in Europe and few people here were paying attention. Now there are at least ten platforms. Microsoft alone has several — two versions of Windows Mobile, Tablet PC, and so on. [Elia didn’t mention it, but the fragmentation of Java makes this situation even worse.]

I call it three million platforms with a hundred users each (link).