Comments on: Restarting Innovation

By: Michael

Michael — Sun, 08 Jul 2007 16:34:59 +0000

David Phillip Oster: That it's open source is yet another way that WebKit is an exception.

By: David Phillip Oster

David Phillip Oster — Sun, 08 Jul 2007 16:24:20 +0000

I'm commenting on: "To build a really innovative application you may have to start from scratch, and then you’ll wish that the framework didn’t exist."

There is a huge difference between Webkit, and other frameworks from Apple, for example, NSTextView: Webkit is open source. You can get it from http://webkit.org .

So, your argument used to be true, until Webkit.

If you want to write a word processor with additional features, you have to throw away the additional 70% that NSTextView provides and start from zero, doing a huge amount of work just to get up to the level that NSTextView provides. If you want to write something that overlaps with Webkit, you can start with the source and build your app.

As a programmer, I say: yes please, Apple, give us more frameworks, with source code, and we'll give the people more apps.

By: Michael

Michael — Sat, 07 Jul 2007 14:54:56 +0000

JulesLt: I agree that data formats are important, but documenting them doesn't solve all problems. iPhoto has changed its library format several times, for example. I'd rather see a plug-in interface and an API to access the contents of the library. Apple did document the Keynote 1.x schema, but now that technote is marked as a legacy document. Word's XML format is documented, but it's so complex as to be inaccessible to most developers. I think it would be great if other applications could access data from Pages. Its "working format" is more interesting than the output format if you're trying to automate anything.

By: JulesLt

JulesLt — Sat, 07 Jul 2007 14:05:27 +0000

All I think we really need is more and more application data to be held in databases, and some documented schemas.

This is based on the observation that people used to think they wanted software compatibility - 'why can't I run program X on machine B'? Over time they've realised what they actually wanted data compatibility, and gradually standard formats emerged.

But there's still some data stuck in application specific silos - occasionally - as with Pages, iMovie, iDVD, Photoshop, that makes sense as they're 'working' formats where you 'publish' to another.

By: Henrik

Henrik — Sat, 07 Jul 2007 12:46:16 +0000

OmniWeb is based on a modified version of WebKit though. So it would probably work out well if the new frameworks were also open source, so that they could be modified to add the final 30 %.