By Motorola’s looking to get their feet wet with web applications for Android-based phones (or phones with webkit-based browsers, more accurately) by purchasing 280 North – the team behind the easy-to-learn web framework Cappuccino. The sale went down for $20-million and it said to help put Motorola in a better position to create better Android experiences for the many people who buy their phones.
No other details about the purchase or types of web applications were given, but it’s now clear as day that Motorola’s just as serious about stepping the software side of their Android game up as any other high-end manufacturer.
[via TechCrunch]
This is interesting, because Objective-J and Cappucino are meant to be basically a web equivalent to Objective-C and Cocoa; specifically, if you know how to write desktop OS X software, Cappucino’s intent was to make it easy to use the same knowledge to write web-based software with good visual polish. One key thing worth noting is that Cappucino is literally made so that desktop apps which use stock controls can be converted over fairly easily.
This makes me wonder if Motorola wants the 280 North folks in hopes of creating a CocoaTouch equivalent… basically, making a Cappucino equivalent of UIKit instead of AppKit. The ability to take an iOS App Store app and turn it into a webapp with minimal rewriting/redesigning could be an interesting way to try to draw some apps from iOS native to run-in-the-browser sorts.
Of course, this is all just theory, and I could be waaaaaay off base.
You know what would make a better android experiance for moto phones…….support for devices after they are sold!!!!
Agreed. How about purchasing some damn programmers to get an update out in less than eight months!
A better android experience would need latest OS upgrades out in a timely manner, not locking the damn bootloader and getting rid of motoblur.