The WebKit Blues Continues

A couple of months ago I commented on WebKit, the technology behind most of the modern Web browsers today. The comments were from the end user's perspective. Today a few words from the developer side of me.

For many months I have been involved in a new secret startup of mine, which by the way is becoming less and less secret as I write this. We will be going live with the product in a matter of weeks and I promise the product is cool. And contrary to what I had been doing before, this time it is mostly hardware. But, you know, hardware today still consists of at least 60% of software. This is what BMW claims - 60% of non recurring costs of bringing a new model of a high end car to the market is software. You have probably never considered cars being a software...

But coming back to the WebKit. We needed touch control panels for our product. We could have had designed our own hardware panels, but considering how many devices today are "touch panels" the better way was to develop software compatible with everything that could be considered a panel. iPhones. iPads. iPods. Android phones. Android tablets. Bada (Samsung) devices. Blackberries. Hey, even laptop and desktop computers. The obvious common denominator has been the Web browser. And html. But "pure" html able to run on any device is dull and unimpressive. We wanted something users would like. Like a lot.

And it turns out moving up just a notch, the next common denominator is WebKit. Sorry Microsoft Internet Explorer. You have been the only one not compatible. Everything else runs our front end interface perfectly. Even the Kindle (I figured this one out reminding myself about the old blog post of mine!). Honestly, never before, I had such powerful multi - platform technology capable of handling advanced user interface. Real true write - once, run anywhere.