That was Android's Marketplace philosophy. $25 (on-time I think) developer fee and that's it. Self-signed (aka worthless) certificates. No review process. The result is that the store is full of shitty (and sometimes malicious) apps.

You can find SparkChess in AppStore, Android Marketplace, AppWorld and Google Webstore (no.2 paid app).

Show me something you've done, Mr. Anonymous Coward and then you can call bullshit on me.

I agree with you, and just to make it clearer, I DID compile from commandline and it was very straightforward. As mentioned elsewhere, my app was ported from iOS and Android to Playbook in a couple of hours and within a week it was signed and approved in the AppWorld.

Do those 2 hours include the entire time spent configuring the environment for the first time and the time it took you to get notarized papers and send them to RIM?

Yes, the 2 hours included installing the SDK and reading through the documentation as well as installing the simulator. They have step-by-step tutorials for this.

As a company, I didn't have to get a notarized paper, I only had to provide a scanned company registration, just like with Apple. Approval time was 2 days I think.

Getting the app signed was a 3 step process - ask for permission, get a file, run 2 command line tools.

Of course, it's much simpler with Android, where you can use a self-signed certificate, but for a user, I think it's beneficial to have some sort of verification process for vendors. I don't want my apps lumped together with scammers.

It's a non-issue: for now it's totally free.

Random whining programmer thinks process X is too complicated for him.

For me it was a non-issue. It took me exactly 2 hours to port my game (http://itunes.apple.com/app/sparkchess/id398133128) from iPad/Android to Playbook and test it, including installing the simulator. The signing process was a little more complex but really nothing fancy. If anything, on the whole I found the process faster and easier than publishing on iOS.

It took about one week for the app to be approved and it's now in AppWorld.

If it's any consolation, the Adobe Flash team have announced that support for WebM is coming soon, as well as optimized* video playback.

*flash was never designed to be an efficient video player. A video object behaves like any other DisplayObject, it can be rotated in 3D, have filters applied to it and so on, this is part of the reason performance was always less than spectactuar. Now they'll add StageVideo API, which will be an optimized way to display video if no other effects are needed.

So, as always, when Google and Microsoft fight, Adobe wins.

I've been using MaxCDN for more than an year. So far it works just fine.

Well, if JQuery were integrated with the browsers, it'd be great.

I keep wrestling with it because of lazy CMS (WP, Joomla) plugin developers. If you're not careful, you can end up with three requests to load JQuery, one local, one 1.3.x from Google and another 1.4.x from Google as well, plus various extensions like JQueryCycle AND some Scriptaculous as well. I've seen it.

And all of this for trivial stuff, like validating if a form field is not null, cross-fading a div or opening a pop-up. Come on.

JQuery is a really great tool for doing advanced stuff, but I find it sad that many devs no longer know how to use a simple .getElementById().

This seems like an ad for Contendo disguised as an inflammatory post.

Any webmaster worth their salt is using a variety of tools to improve loading speed - minification of html/css/js, combining scripts, CSS optimization, js packing, compressing PNGs with better tools and using CSS sprites.

I use W3 Total Cache for two of my blogs and the speed increase is substantial.

While we are at it, I wish developers would think it through before using JQuery for trivial stuff. Loading JQuery + bunch of plugins to do simple (and I mean simple) fades or form validations is pointless. Here's an example of what I mean.

So if they're doing this transparently, it's all th better.

I'm actually using Chrome 9.0.750.0 from the DEV channel.

And no, I can't see any difference from Chrome 7...

Yes, yes, yes. This is what fanboys of brand X forget. Having a dominant brand in any area is bad for us.
In photography, for all Canon vs. Nikon bickering, the fact that they have similar power and because they are constantly challenged by Sony, Pentax, etc. forces them to innovate.
Same with iOS vs. Android, browsers, cars and just about everything.

Personally, I'd love IE9 to be the best and coolest browser (for a while anyway). It would be yet another incentive for users to abandon IE6 or 7 and would force the others to keep up and fix long-standing issues, like the painful problems in Chrome's graphic library (Skia). I'd love to see Firefox losing some market share as a wake-up call.

You are right to a point.

The way I see it, the real problem is not that Diaspora has bugs; the problem is that it has fundamental bugs, bugs so fundamental that they question authors' understanding of the framework they're working with. It's bugs that shouldn't have been there at all.

Not verifying whether or not a user has the rights to edit an object is something pretty fundamental in my book.