On: HP's touchpad was bound to be a flop

[watmough]

The same thing happened with SUN NeWS, a PDF-based rendering system, some 10 years or so ahead of OS X. It was beautiful, but slow.

Give it time, even as an iOS programmer, in my opinion I'd think that HTML/CSS/JS is long-term, the better way to go, simply because it's open.

Let's hope openness wins in the end.

[protomyth → watmough]

NeWS was Postscript and a contemporary of NeXTSTEP which was also Postscript, but much more sane to program (and this comes from a Postscript lover).

I hope we come up with something better than HTML / CSS / JS, because they are a step back from the current app platforms. Hopefully there will be an evolution / revolution.

[rbanffy → watmough]

NeWS was also very hard to program. Just try to write a spreadsheet in PostScript...

[ams6110 → rbanffy]

The NeXT OS used Display PostScript, and I believe that is still the core of OS X Quartz, is it not?

Are you saying that there was not a good API for drawing on the display? You had to spit out raw PS?

[aardvark179 → ams6110]

It was more than that, you wrote your entire UI in NeWS's Postscript-with-knobs on, and communicated asynchronously with the server side of your app. Think of writing a desktop app as a tiny web-server with the UI in a browser, only all the UI is in PS rather than HTML/CSS/JavaScript.