Sunday, March 24, 2013

My Review of JavaScript Enlightenment

Originally submitted at O'Reilly

From Library User to JavaScript Developer


Absolutely essential reading

By Piers Hollott from Victoria, BC on 3/24/2013

 

5out of 5

Pros: Helpful examples, Well-written

Best Uses: Intermediate, Expert

Describe Yourself: Developer

If you work with JavaScript, maybe you love it, maybe you hate it. Cody's book is a constant reminder for me why I love working with JavaScript. It's a unique language, and this is a unique book. As soon as I finished, I went back to the beginning and started again.

(legalese)

Thursday, March 21, 2013

I mean, it's almost with sadness that I am uninstalling Opera, but something happened a while back, and all political arguments aside, I'm just as happy with Firefox. You see, I really liked Opera Unite, which embedded a web server inside the Opera browser. All sorts of potential in that idea, although realistically, this allows you to operate an intermittent file server. For testing purposes, however, it meant I didn't need to run a separate web server. Anyway, water under the bridge, Opera is no longer supporting this feature.

At a time when people appear to be switching back to Firefox from Chrome because newer builds of Chrome are apparently slower... I might start running the Aurora stable nightly builds of Firefox. I have a love/hate relationship with Firefox. At the moment, because Firefox is providing the only decent SVG support for mobile devices, I love it again, even though the only mobile device I have is Android, and I like Chrome for Android a lot. I just have no room for Opera.

Thursday, March 07, 2013

Firefox OS and Mobile Health

I have to say, I am very excited about Mozilla's Firefox OS, formerly Boot to Gecko, a Mobile OS built on web standards like HTML5, CSS and JavaScript, powered by a small Linux kernel. The OS is going to target less expensive phones, without requiring the power that Android or iOS do. If you were thinking PhoneGap, a Firefox OS app is much simpler than that. Why am I embedding in WebKit when I can boot to Gecko?

So the downside will be market penetration. In Canada or the States, or the UK. In Brazil, in Mexico, in eastern Europe, these phones could hit a sweet spot and build a strong developer community.

And this is why I'm excited. The real strength of mobile health is not going to be iPhone apps for American Doctors; it's going to be useful tools for areas that aren't already serviced by Epic or Meditech... In LMIC countries, a suite of mobile medical tools, and particularly one you might modify or extend yourself, that will be invaluable.

The developer phones are cool and orange as well.