Week 3 Summary: One context – Multiple applications
The “app” paradigm that took the mobile industry by storm, has brought on the concept of micro-applications that fulfill one purpose. This is great in terms of maintaining focus, but there is very little interoperability between apps. I need to look for a restaurant, use a different app. I need to take a bus till the restaurant, use a different app to locate the next bus. For a user, the context is the same, “Get to a restaurant!”, but I have to use different applications to achieve it.
That’s where I really connect with the motivation behind Argon being one singular platform (or ecosystem) where different Augmented Reality applications can run at the same time parallel to each other, within the same context.
So I’d imagine, the Argon browser will tell me which is the best rated restaurant on Yelp, and which bus I need to take
there in how much time. Once I have got the bus, I can hide the “channel” that shows me the bus options.
The next problem to tackle was what system to build this unified ecosystem on. Again, I see a parallel with the dilemma of different smartphone OSes that you have to code for in different languages (Objective C for iOS and Java for Android and Blackberry). Now every organization had to hire 3 people to build the same application – 1 developer for the Web, 1 for iOS devices and 1 for Android. When people searched for solutions, they turned to the web. Since there are definitely more Web developers out there than Java and C developers. Thus systems like Phonegap and Appcelerator were intoduced which provide a HTML/Javascript interfaces that let developers code in the Web languages and the engine translates it to native iOS or Android code.
What I see with the roadmap of Argon is a similar thought thought process. Since Web is the most ubiquitous mode available, its the best candidate to build the architecture on. Basing the Argon architecture as much as possible on the original HTML and KML stack exponentially increases its adoption probability.
The security features of enabling multiple channels running parallel by layering multiple transparent WebKit instances on top of each other , each in its own sandbox is really interesting as well.
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