[OT-Rodeo] Still waiting for the aha moment

[Peter Alcibiades]

Webkit came about like this.  KDE, who make a Linux desktop environment
complete with office apps etc, developed a rendering engine as the basis for
their browser, called Konqueror.  It was open source..  Apple then took this
rendering engine and made it the basis of Safari.  There was tooing and
froing about whether Apple was passing its enhancements back, this was
eventually more or less resolved, and Webkit is now both the basis for
Safari and for open source browsers.  Which would include Midori, Chrome,
Konqueror, and even the Gnome browser, Galeon.  

Now, what can you do as a Windows user?  if I understand it properly, you
can write Rodeo pages in Windows as long as you use a webkit based browser
to connect to the online authoring tool.  This does not include Explorer or
Firefox, but there is no shortage.  This would apply to Linux too.

You cannot use the Mac based editor which Sarah has written, unless you
either buy yourself a Mac or make yourself a hackintosh.  Which is pretty
easy to do, not that I have any interest in doing it other than the
intellectual challenge maybe, but there are too many of those already.  But
you can still write Rodeo apps.

You can then connect to those web pages with any webkit based browser from
any OS.  So its not really mac-centric, and not even Rev centric, if I have
understood it properly.

They will shortly introduce the ability to run those pages on your own web
server, again through a webkit based browser.  You should also be able to
write web apps that run from your own device, again once they implement the
ability to run from any web server.  

Correct me if wrong on this very last point?

The hope and belief is that this means that you can write apps for the
iPhone and iPad.  Because you are targeting abilities built into the
browser, and you do not need to go through Apple's app store to get them to
the public.  Apple can no longer tell you and your buyers that swimsuit
photos are politically incorrect this year.

Will it work, and is it interesting?  Yes on the last count.  Someone asks
to what extent this allows you to port all the functionality of a Rev app to
the web.  This is something I am not clear about, and it would be nice to
know.  It is letting you compose apps within the limits of the webkit
engine.  It is also letting you translate the gui part of a Rev app into
standard web pages.  But it does not seem to be porting the whole
application to a web site, not even a webkit one.  Its doing part of that,
and delivering part of the functionality of the app. If you want the guts of
the thing, you write the rest of it in the Rodeo editor.

Is that pretty much right?
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