Tamarin cometh

While Microsoft focuses on an 3.1 incremental improvement for ECMAScript in IE 8, Brendan Eich (CTO of Mozilla and father of JavaScript) is developing the Tamarin ECMAScript engine from Flash (donated to open source by Adobe) for Microsoft's Internet Explorer, to ensure the world goes to the ECMA4 level with JavaScript 2.0 before 2009.

Clever, commissioning the same ActiveState developer whom Microsoft did (for Perl and Python engines) to wire their JavaScript into IE. Only the code is not just Mozilla's; it was born of Adobe, owner of Photoshop and Flash, who has motive & means for its worldwide distribution.

Addendum: See the difference.

iPhone basics

Although iPhone wallpapers are 320x480, its WebKit-based browser's viewing resolution is 320x396 (navigation buttons occupy the bottom, and address etc controls are on the top). The iPhone has no java (unlike Android) and no real Adobe Flash plugin, but Safari now has HTML5's offline storage support.

The Android Platform

What are Sprint, T-Mobile, China Mobile, Samsung, Motorola, HTC, and LG doing together? They're members of the Open Handset Alliance developing phones based on Google's Android software for mobile devices (a complete stack including OS, middleware, and key apps).

The investor analyst press gave it the moniker "gPhone" since it was announced after the Apple iPhone launch, but the iPhone has little to fear from Android which seems aimed at the mass market for consumer phones. Apple has always been happy with their niche; Google on the other hand needs ubiquity to control advertising on as many screens as possible. (The threatened include Symbian, Palm, Windows Mobile and Danger Hiptop [Sidekick]).

Why should a web developer care? The "phone" as a browser client has an installed base of 3x that of personal computers, and in the post-iPhone era, the phone is no longer a "mini" platform but is actually richer and fuller than a PC client. It is also mobile, much more intensely personal, and many times more lucrative for digital products and services. And it's fun.

My initial perception of Android was that it was just like the other proprietary phone operating systems; I didn't realize it was built on Linux, SQL*Lite, and Java. It seems like it will be fun & easy to develop for.