Re: [Jmol-developers] A Jmol-less iPad!

[Rzepa, H. <h....@im...>]

>On Thu, Jan 28, 2010 at 8:29 AM, Rzepa, Henry <h....@im...> wrote:
>> Who knows what niche devices such as the iPad will find, but given one target is reading books  (and scientific journals; the number of apps for doing so is growing rapidly),  a Jmol-less world might be beckoning.  I presume the prospects of  Jmol living outside of its  Java sandbox  (aka xMol!!)  are pretty distant, if not non-existent?
>
>Yeah, nice vendor lock-in example. Apple decides what you can and cannot do.
>
>Otherwise, it is interesting to learn how this will go... I have no
>iPhone and no intent to buy a iPad (because of the vendor lock-in
>issues), but would love to see Jmol-applications running on those
>machines...


Vendor lock in means many things.  For example, do you worry that you are vendor locked into Acrobat from Adobe?  Or Flash from Adobe. Or Silverlight from M$? In fact, to give  Apple some credit, they ARE trying to promote the  <<open>> (W3C ) standard HTML5 rather than Flash with the iPad.  So in theory, any content developed for the iPad could also be displayed using  (eg?) Chrome, which  I believe is also going down the  HTML5 route. Not that HTML5 will help much with  Jmol.

One could also argue whether eg CML4Word is  "vendor locked in" to Microsoft, since it will never work outside of Windows as currently factored using  .Net (which  I write as a  Mac user).
-- 

Professor Henry S Rzepa.
+44 (020) 7594 5774 (Voice); http://www.ch.ic.ac.uk/rzepa/ & /rzepa/blog
Dept. Chemistry, Imperial College London, SW7  2AZ, UK.

(Voracious anti-spam filter in operation for received email.
If expected reply not received, please phone/fax).