26 (edited by cbreeze 2009-10-17 20:45:03)

Re: Chumby.com sucks. For no good reason.

Hi kanawha.st,

kanawha.st wrote:

Ah... Am I saying this to such a good contributor like you?
Please excuse me if I sound too rude, but please understand that I want chumby to be a popular gadget like iPod so that I can recommend it to non-geek friends.
And I apologize, I should not have continued this stimulatingly titled post, but I could not ignore the gravity, you know.

Actually it was I who was being a bit rude.  Sometimes it's hard to tell who is actually engaging in some resonable dialog, or just demanding chumby ind. *do* something.  I only say that because I can be this person myself. smile

I want chumby to be extremely successful just as you, so my apologies.  I think your ideas are extremely valid.  I imagine if there are a volume of developers, we will probably see some movement on that front.

Debate and discussion is always good, so please don't take my post too personally.  I can be a little passionate sometimes. big_smile

And thank you for the nice comments as well.

Cheers.

Re: Chumby.com sucks. For no good reason.

this is all so true. flash needs to die and the chumby should support HTML 5 rendering with java/javascript support. flash is an ugly ugly platform mostly proprietary.

Re: Chumby.com sucks. For no good reason.

Duane wrote:

A couple of comments:... Java applet developers, Microsoft Silverlight developers, even HTML/Javascript developers have precisely the same issues.  Flash on Android will have it, too, and every other phone that supports Flash, the PS3, the Wii, etc.  The chumby is not a less capable/more restrictive platform - it's the *same* as everything other platform that has a network security sandbox, and every other implementation of Flash.

O.K., I'm very late to this discussion and a complete noob on flash.  But I don't think your argument holds water on two counts:

1) On those other platforms, one is NOT limited to Flash!  I can write Android, etc. apps that aren't flash, and I can most certainly run web-based apps using the device as an html client.  Heck, I wrote a javascript/html app over 10 years ago that runs on Android phones, Blackberries, and iPhones, and they didn't even exist then! 

2) Having just looked into Flash and crossdomain issues, there are additional workarounds for html/javascript or html/Silverlight (using JSON data feeds, at least) that DON'T work with Flash alone (and since for Chumby, we're not talking Flash in html, we can't just use an integrated html/php/Flash workaround either).  Developers on other platforms AREN'T limited to pulling data from sites that explicitly allow Flash access or to server-based proxies of their own, but have some additional workarounds that don't work for pure Flash applications.

My son and I are still going to play around with developing a new Chumby app (since he knows Flash, I know parsing structured data and APIs), but as others have said, the barrier is fairly large to someone coming from the web and web API world.