Sometimes I feel bad for the guy. One of today’s posts is closer than any man should have to come to groveling, shameless self-promotion, and overt begging.
If Apple had created an open platform, I’d be hard at work on it now. If anyone would port Frontier (it’s GPL) to their mobile device, the whole thing would run right now. I’d help of course. (Important: I could also grant a non-GPL license to any platform vendor, to the original code release only.)
Nokia? Microsoft? Sony? Apple?
Translation: would someone, anyone, please take my kludgey, archaic, and obscenely bloated architecture and breathe new life into it? Please?
As always, Dave completely misses the point. Nobody needs to run Frontier on their iPhone when it has a continuous wireless connection that can connect to a web server running Frontier. For that matter, nobody needs to run Frontier. Period.
Its been a fun day for Dave. One of my favorite Dave quotes, from another post today…
“In the mid-90s I was considered by some at Apple to be their #1 enemy, more so than Microsoft which was eating their GUI lunch, or the web that was undermining their assumptions about how dumb users are.”
Now, can you imagine anyone at Apple saying to themselves “I’m really not scared of Microsoft or the Internet but its that Dave Winer that really scares me”
He then goes on to recount a story where he helps boost the popularity of Gil Amelio of all people.
Getting the bloated, buggy, crash-prone Frontier to run in the limited constraints of a mobile device would be a technical achievement on par with cold fusion. Is anyone other than Dave using that tool as his primary programming environment, rather than just fucking around with it from time to time when he comes up with some new half-ass kludge like Twittergrams? He’s a user group of one.
If I had spent 20 years pushing all text through the same Outliner… I’d want that Outliner on my iPhone too.
But hey, that’s just me. I wouldn’t tell anyone and expect them to care about my frustration. Did I mention that I wish the iPhone had “vi”? It will get “vi” before Dave gets Frontier on a mobile device and can program anywhere/anytime in his favorite outliner.
“You can’t teach old dogs…”
Just to be clear… I don’t have an iPhone. I’m waiting for it to sync with Exchange for work. I may be waiting longer than Dave waits for Frontier.
That should be subject to some sort of penality. When interoperability is relatively trivial and two vendors won’t allow it (or maybe just one vendor won’t allow it) because they market a competitive solution.
Motorola Q anyone? HTC Mogul? Treo 700?
Windows Mobile? Sure. And the iPhone runs OS X. Sure.