but I'm talking the whole thing. We would want a Windows-replacement where you have e-mail, spread sheets, word processing and presentations on your mobile device. You could dock it in your office and it would negotiate with the AD to immediately let you log in with touch ID or similar. If you like, you could use it in the go. But it would mostly be your private pocket-sized hard drive.
Here's why it's not going to happen in the next 10 years. Apple isn't doing it, we can know this for sure. Why?
- The device must play nice with Microsoft software in the transition period. Apple would never do this, even if it meant total world domination in ten years. History showed this in the past and they don't have the culture to do it. The culture must be seeping through the walls if a large company is going to build portable software.
- It would require unfathomable effort since there are so many different Microsoft protocols to adapt to, from Exchange to Samba, from Kerberos tweaks to AD vs. LDAP limitations.
- Most of all the operating system itself must be open to developers, or power users will hate it. Power users require meta applications if they're going to use the platform: hot-keys, customization, scripting and so forth. The sealed iOS system where each application is sandboxed is too lame for professional work. Nobody is doing only spread sheets, so in that sense we're all power users. Mac OS, as well as Windows, are both heading in that same direction of "security trumps power users."
Secondly, the Android community can't build the modern home/office pocket PC since they are a fragmented committee of followers who have never invented anything except openness. Which of course is great, but it doesn't take us any closer to the mobile PC replacement.
Microsoft would have been my bet, but in the last 10 years they've taken such an awful amount of horribly bad decisions that they're pretty much screwed. And especially so on the mobile market of course.
A good app could mitigate part of the shortcomings, and that's what I've tried to do in Trabant, but it cost me ten times the work load to get 20% of the features. Right now I can run on all three platforms but:
That should mitigate part of the gaps between the platforms, at least in terms of rapid prototyping.
A good app could mitigate part of the shortcomings, and that's what I've tried to do in Trabant, but it cost me ten times the work load to get 20% of the features. Right now I can run on all three platforms but:
- None of the platforms have code synchronization yet. I need some type of text file merge, but conflict solving is hard and it's going to cost me a ton of time. Perhaps I'll release v1.0 without.
- Editing on iOS sucks, as does all other types of content creation on touch devices, and it took me several days to build despite open sås. On the other hand, there aren't a whole lot of programming apps for iOS so I think it's going to be worthwhile.
- I haven't ported the IDE (99.99% SciTE) to Mac yet, haven't even investigated if it's a good option. One suboptimal possibility is to release v1.0 without IDE for Mac and just let users use whatever editor they please and start through the terminal.
That should mitigate part of the gaps between the platforms, at least in terms of rapid prototyping.
