Official WebOS Support Initiated

Posted July 16, 2009, 11:12 a.m.

Palm has finally made their Web OS software development kit (SDK), including a device emulator, available for free download. As such, I am now initiating official Off on a Tangent support for the Palm WebOS web browser.

Palm launched the ‘Pre’, their first phone running the new operating system, on June 6 without a publicly available SDK or emulator, which prevented me from supporting it at the time. I initiated preliminary support on June 22 after messing around with a demo unit at a Sprint store.

I have to say, I’m very glad to be seeing some convergence in mobile web browsers. The included browsers on Apple iPhones, Palm WebOS devices, Google Android devices, and Nokia (Symbian) S60 devices all run browsers based on the same WebKit display engine. This makes support very easy, since if a site works in one there’s a good chance it works on the others.

I’m also a long-time Palm fan, and am thrilled that the company has started to make itself relevant again. I’m looking forward to the proliferation of WebOS to other carriers and other form-factors (I’m a fan of the ‘Treo’ or ‘BlackBerry’ arrangement with a front-facing screen and keyboard with no sliding or opening required).

Scott Bradford has been putting his opinions on his website since 1995—before most people knew what a website was. He has been a professional web developer in the public- and private-sector for over twenty years. He is an independent constitutional conservative who believes in human rights and limited government, and a Catholic Christian whose beliefs are summarized in the Nicene Creed. He holds a bachelor’s degree in Public Administration from George Mason University. He loves Pink Floyd and can play the bass guitar . . . sort-of. He’s a husband, pet lover, amateur radio operator, and classic AMC/Jeep enthusiast.

Quotes

No matter how outrageous a lie may be, it will be accepted if stated loudly enough and often enough.

[The First Amendment] requires the state to be a neutral in its relations with groups of religious believers and nonbelievers; it does not require the state to be their adversary.

Men must see that force begets force, hate begets hate, toughness begets toughness. And it is all a descending spiral, ultimately ending in destruction for all and everybody.

The ‘prudent’ have always called the works of God madness.

Let falsehood enter the world, let it even reign in the world—but not with my help.

You have to risk failure to move forward.

When ignorance destroys culture, monsters will emerge.

The fear of being laughed at makes cowards of us all.

But the mere fact that social order reigns to some degree does not mean that a given society has come to explicitly understand its own behavior, its own moral code.

Too many people get credit for being good, when they are only being passive. They are too often praised for being broadminded when they are so broadminded they can never make up their minds about anything.

Science is not a monolithic body of doctrine. Science is a culture, constantly growing and changing.

[Pure] democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and have in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths.

By rejecting conscience, certain persons have made shipwreck of their faith. . . .

There’s an old saying in Tennessee . . . I know it’s in Texas, probably in Tennessee . . . that says, fool me once, shame on . . . shame on you. Fool me . . . you can’t get fooled again.

Now anything the people demand that is right it is most clearly and most emphatically the duty of this Legislature to do; but we should never yield to what they demand if it is wrong.

If your experiment needs statistics, you ought to have done a better experiment.

Do not pretend you are happy with something if you are not, and if a reasonable solution might, in principle, be negotiated. Have the damn fight.

Natural selection does not positively produce anything. It only eliminates, or tends to eliminate, whatever is not competitive.

When a true genius appears in the world, you may know him by this sign, that the dunces are all in confederacy against him.

Churches . . . that are nothing more than a loosely bound assembly of individuals committed to finding their own ‘truth,’ are no longer the church in any meaningful sense, because there is no shared belief.