The newest version of Flash allowed you to compile your swf into a native iPhone App. That's what this discussion is about, not Flash as in the browser plugin.
Yup, Tigon Studios. Viesel is a huge video game fan and apparently was very involved in the production of the game. He basically wanted to make the kind of game he'd want to actually go out and pay to play, regardless of the IP it was attached to. I remember buying Doom 3 and pirating Riddick when it came it. Doom 3 disappointed me, accused me of cracking it and pirating it when I didn't (I had to get a crack to run it just because it felt having a certain type of disc burning app meant I was pirating it), and just overall sucked. Riddick had comparable graphics, better performance, better storyline, better characterization, was longer, and was WAY more fun to play. I went out and bought it immediately as a show of support for games like that. Glad to see that money's helping the franchise. Hopefully they'll take some cues from the game, which was more similar to Pitch Black's vision of the universe than Chronicles in my opinion.
I still can't understand how it is that they're completely ignoring Palm's WebOS despite the fact that it's 99% identical to the iPhone's browser...
They did the same goddamn thing for Latitude and Wave. Both of those apps work fine on WebOS, but they block non-Android/iPhone user agents. Why are you blocking my phone even though your mobile web apps either 99% or 100% work on it Google? e_e
Also, multi-tasking is [...] limited for technical reasons which you are either unwilling to research or unable to understand.
Then the OS is badly designed. I'm sorry, but that's the truth. Every single one of their major competitors has multi-tasking: Android, WebOS, Blackbery OS, shit, even the horrid Windows Mobile has multi-tasking. And guess what? My Palm Pre and my friend's Droid both get pretty much the same battery life as the iPhone, and are even similarly specced with the 3GS. And they don't feel sluggish when multi-tasking either.
Why are you forgiving Apple for making a poor platform? It's THEIR fault it can't multi-task, regardless of the reason.
Las Vegas was in an arid desert too, what's your point?
Mars is so interesting because of all the rocks out there, Mars would be shit-easy to terraform in comparison. Basically we'd pump out a whole bunch of CO2 (something we're already doing on earth, albeit as a byproduct) until the atmosphere gets a bit thicker. A thicker atmosphere traps heat better. Then we introduce vegetation to convert said CO2 into Oxygen (lots and lots and lots of algae really, that way when they die and decompose, it can be used as soil). Boom, habitable. It will take a while, but the sooner we start the sooner it'll be ready for long term colonization and exploration.
Yeah, may sound a little dumb now, but realize that the Earth's current population is estimated at around 6.8 BILLION people. Currently, many areas are already suffering from over population, in the conservative projection is that we'll reach 9 Billion people around 2040 (though this assumes no major shift in the trend for deaths, such as world changing medical breakthroughs, etc).
So one way or another, if we hope to continue to survive, we're not left much choice other than to expand to other planets/moons. And since Mars is relatively close, has similar gravity, and environmentally isn't much different from Earth (on the grand scale of things in the universe), terraforming it is a very real possibility.
Ok, now try rereading that sentence. Specifically the part where I wrote "current gen smartphones".
HTC is making all their Android phones have a 3.5mm stereo jack starting with the HTC Hero from mid-2009. The Droid and Eris have a headphone jack. The Pre and Pixi have headphone jacks, All blackberries have had headphone jacks for a few years now, I'm pretty sure every major WinMo phone from the past 2 years has a headphone jack... I could continue but it'd just be redundant.
It's one thing to say that normal phones don't have headphone jacks, as you're right, most don't, but then again, what's the point of connecting one of those to your car? That's the point of this particular thread remember? Car connection?
I don't own an iPhone or an iPod Touch and never planned to, but I do own a Pre, and when I want to use it in my car I plug the stereo cable from my tape deck into the headphone jack and put it on the touchstone in my car. The phone's mic is in speaker mode when the 3.5mm jack is connected to something, so I just talk normally and the sound comes out of my speakers. This is not rocket science people. My best friend does the same with his Droid and used to do it with his iPhone 3G as well.
The iPhone may have proprietary car adapters, but try streaming Pandora while using its GPS and see how far you get...
Umm, what the hell are you talking about? Aux in jacks connect using a male-to-male stereo cable to any stereo jack (stereo jacks = headphone jack). What current gen smartphone do you know of that lacks a basic headphone jack?
It's called an aux in jack, and many more new cars have them than IPod docks. On older cars you can even get a stereo to tape converter to give that aging tape deck some usefulness. No one's going to embrace the iPhone because of their proprietary hardware interface. That'll only screw over consumers who inevitably decide to switch.
Apple will lose this fight because they made 3 big mistakes:
Alienating the homebrew communities by forcing them to do things like jailbreaking (these communities are rife with potential developers which will often willingly switch to more open platforms)
Releasing only 1 phone per generation and forcing a "one size fits all" mentality on people who want different things from their phone
Locking themselves into a horrible carrier for years on a network which was already crappy before the iPhone crushed it
As it stands, Android will be capable of gaining a lot of ground in the coming year and dare I say even be dominant in 12 months time as contracts expire. Hell, if Palm can pull some decent hardware out of their asses for their nice new OS, they might even finally be able to gain some ground too.
But hey, I guess you're too ignorant to think maybe the sheer amount of skyscrapers and concrete in NY would be one major cause of insufficient ability to handle calls.
Really? Cause as a NYC resident, my Sprint service works just fine all over the city. I've never dropped a call here when above ground. Neither has my best friend on Verizon (we have the Pre and Droid, respectively). The latter actually switched back to Verizon only a month ago and ditched his iPhone because he couldn't take the crappy service he was getting with AT&T. This is basically an issue with AT&T not having enough towers and repeaters in the city to handle the traffic.
PS - As a Jew, I find the accusations of some of the posts above outlandish. I mean, they've never mentioned the NSA wiretapping thing at our Jew meetings... only the mind control:P
MichaelSmith's quite correct. This is Apple and Oranges, so to speak. All of the iPhone's applications in it's first gen were ACTUAL web apps hosted on a server. They weren't really even apps, just mobile versions of web pages. The Pre's apps are on the phone however, and leverage a TON of the upcoming HTML5 spec to allow them to do things like use a client side db, play video and audio, etc. These were things that the iPhone could not do through its browser. Not to mention that iPhone apps can't play with phone settings, contacts, etc, while the Pre's apps can, since they're not "web apps," they're just written like them.
And how exactly does it "suck"? You haven't actually stated why. Have you ever used it? Or do you actually know anything about it? Or are you just parroting what some iPhone obsessed website said?
Yeah! No one uses Palm platform! I mean, it's essentially HTML/CSS and Javascript, but I mean come on, who writes that anymore? No one knows or cares about html and javascript because it's useless! Nothing uses it and there's definitely no one out there who can make a living off of it.
I do hope my sarcasm tags aren't necessary, given how absurd you sound. Yes, there are plenty of Java devs out there, and yes, I do wish Palm would release a Java SDK for the phone, but the fact is that that's not the developer segment they're going after. They're aiming development for this phone toward the millions of web developers out there. I've tried writing an app for the phone when the SDK first came out, and though I had no experience with the Prototype Framework they use for Javascript, I still had a little VLC remote control app up and running within the afternoon, with a pretty decent UI. They use the HTML5 specs for a bunch of things and I've seen some pretty impressive things done on the phone.
The only major problems are the current lack of low level networking (homebrew coders have written services for the linux backend though, in Java no less, to work around this for things like an IRC client), and 3D acceleration, though apparently they're working on the latter and even hired someone a few months back as a graphics framework engineer for the phone. There's speculation that that's one of the things they'll be talking about at CES.
Now, let me be clear about something, I have a Pre, but I don't think it's the greatest phone or OS in the world. There's actually a lot that I wish it had that Android has, but at the same time, there's a lot that WebOS has that Android doesn't (let's not even discuss the iPhone, as I honestly don't care about smartphone that can't do true multi-tasking). Both platforms still have a ways to go to true maturity though, and keep in mind it's still very early in the game respectively. The Pre's been around for what, 6 months? Android's v1 was pretty bad and many thought it dead till more phones came out and the OS matured. The reason the iPhone is so popular is primarily because it was the only game in town for a long time, and it didn't even have its much touted app store when it came out, or 3D acceleration. The way I see it, the more competition, the better. And the more innovative and creative ways they can all try to pull in both users and developers, the better it'll be for everyone.
I understand that, which is why I said the same thing in my third sentence... I was simply trying to illustrate the fact that you cannot simply discount reflected light as "not being a light source." To do so ignores the nature of light. What one has to take into account, rather than the source of original illumination, is the strength of the light that's actually hitting your retina.
Had you actually read the article you might've noticed that the eReader display tech was NOT the OLED tech. The article talks about two different technologies for different devices. The eReader display tech in the article is Ch-LCD, not OLED. The OLED tech they describe is intended for future cell phones and the like.
There's something noticeably absent from that list: the Moon. The moon was mankind's primary source of light before the advent of fire, and the moon can be very bright at times. Yet the moon's light is entirely composed of reflected light. The poster above you is correct: light is light, irrespective of the source. The key aspect is how bright the light is. Staring at the sun is bad, not because it's a light source, but because it's a POWERFUL light source which is much brighter than our eyes are capable of handling directly. With many modern devices, brightness can be varied for increased eye comfort and reduced strain.
That being said, the issue is that, often, reducing brightness also reduces contrast on light emitting devices. And when the brightness is high, it can wash out the darker colors, and make details hard to see because the light overwhelms it. Thus E-Ink is useful not because it's not a light source, but because it is a low brightness (when reading under reflected light) high contrast display, which uses almost no energy when the display is static, making it perfect for long-term reading.
When you download Firefox on Windows, you're downloading it from Mozilla. When you download Firefox in Ubuntu via apt, by default, you're downloading it from Canonical, which struck a deal with Mozilla to package their plugins with it and redistribute it. If you don't want them, you can uninstall firefox and reinstall it from Mozilla's repo, or just uninstall the plugins directly from apt. With Windows, Microsoft installs their plugin into the user installed installation of Firefox without asking permission or following the API. That's the difference. Neither of them has the right to install anything into a user install of Firefox from Mozilla, but Microsoft didn't care. The point is that there AREN'T different standards for Canonical and Microsoft.
The lack of multitasking in the iPhone is an asset, not a shortcoming.
No, I assure you, it's a shortcoming. Palm's WebOS did multi-tasking the right way (hell, even the iPhone's browser manages tabs in that way). And when I get a call on my Pre, I've never had an issue with "having too many apps open to take a phone call" as you imply. And when I recieve a phone call, it takes up half my screen to inform me of it. You say you rolled Pre's out to your user base recently and they didn't like them, but you fail to tell us who your user base is, and as such, give us no way of knowing if the iPhone, a Blackberry, or anything else for that matter would've fared much better.
I'll say this, after owning a Pre for about 2 months now, and having nearly all of my friends own iPhones, both definitely have their benefits and issues. There are things the Pre has which my friends wish their iPhones had (updates over the air, no need to use iTunes to sync, proper multi-tasking, etc). And conversely, there are things the iPhone has which I wish the Pre had (a more developed app store, better graphics acceleration, better functionality in landscape mode, etc).
I can't honestly say that one is necessarily better than the other, and they can't either from the many conversations we've had on the issue. the big questions is what happens from here, though. Palm's already moving onto their second WebOS powered handset, while Apple's still plotting their next move. I know many of my friends are planning to switch to Android once their contracts are up unless Apple actually does something of substance with the iPhone again. But the bigger point is that thus far they have ONLY the iPhone and nothing more. There're no options. I, for example, didn't want one because it lacked a physical keyboard, and I didn't want to use AT&T. Android, by contrast, is taking the buckshot approach wherein they're basically tossing a multitude of different handsets by different manufacturers onto different carriers, many of which look vastly different in their GUIs, but all of which will share the same core app store and capabilities.
The iPhone recently tried a new marketing campaign wherein they claimed "There's an app for that." By the looks of it, Android is essentially running with "There's a phone for that."
Ok, now try reading the article. The link is for devs who want a distribution method other than the store, but want Palm to host it, to make it easy for people to download it. This does not mean the app will be listed in the app catalog. If you want it to be listed in the official app catalog, then you can pay the yearly fee (same as Apple) and pick a price point for your app. The link is simply IN ADDITION to the store, not a replacement for it. They're trying to give developers as many options as possible to distribute their apps, on top of the 3rd party homebrew app catalogs which already exist.
And the mention that open source apps will not require a fee to be in the official app catalog is a major boon for open source software, because that means there's no cash or fee required to distribute a free and open app. I'm gonna be honest, thus far, WebOS in many ways seems to be a more consumer friendly version of Android. Hopefully when WebOS gets Java support it will expand even further.
You can insert a Page Break under the Page Layout tab as well:P
I can stand here arguing the minor details with you all day, but the fact is that those don't matter, because I never said it was perfect, I said it was better, and cited objective reasons for believing so. You have yet to do so other than give your own anecdotal opinion of being frustrated by it.
Insert is for objects, like Tables, images, etc. A Break is a type of page formatting, not an object. IDK, seems to make perfect sense to me. I didn't even click the Insert tab when I was looking for it.
Slashdot Mirror
The newest version of Flash allowed you to compile your swf into a native iPhone App. That's what this discussion is about, not Flash as in the browser plugin.
Yup, Tigon Studios. Viesel is a huge video game fan and apparently was very involved in the production of the game. He basically wanted to make the kind of game he'd want to actually go out and pay to play, regardless of the IP it was attached to. I remember buying Doom 3 and pirating Riddick when it came it. Doom 3 disappointed me, accused me of cracking it and pirating it when I didn't (I had to get a crack to run it just because it felt having a certain type of disc burning app meant I was pirating it), and just overall sucked. Riddick had comparable graphics, better performance, better storyline, better characterization, was longer, and was WAY more fun to play. I went out and bought it immediately as a show of support for games like that. Glad to see that money's helping the franchise. Hopefully they'll take some cues from the game, which was more similar to Pitch Black's vision of the universe than Chronicles in my opinion.
Video game based movie != Movie based video game
http://www.precentral.net/no-buzz-google-webos-spoofing-fails-fool
I still can't understand how it is that they're completely ignoring Palm's WebOS despite the fact that it's 99% identical to the iPhone's browser...
They did the same goddamn thing for Latitude and Wave. Both of those apps work fine on WebOS, but they block non-Android/iPhone user agents. Why are you blocking my phone even though your mobile web apps either 99% or 100% work on it Google? e_e
Then the OS is badly designed. I'm sorry, but that's the truth. Every single one of their major competitors has multi-tasking: Android, WebOS, Blackbery OS, shit, even the horrid Windows Mobile has multi-tasking. And guess what? My Palm Pre and my friend's Droid both get pretty much the same battery life as the iPhone, and are even similarly specced with the 3GS. And they don't feel sluggish when multi-tasking either.
Why are you forgiving Apple for making a poor platform? It's THEIR fault it can't multi-task, regardless of the reason.
Las Vegas was in an arid desert too, what's your point?
Mars is so interesting because of all the rocks out there, Mars would be shit-easy to terraform in comparison. Basically we'd pump out a whole bunch of CO2 (something we're already doing on earth, albeit as a byproduct) until the atmosphere gets a bit thicker. A thicker atmosphere traps heat better. Then we introduce vegetation to convert said CO2 into Oxygen (lots and lots and lots of algae really, that way when they die and decompose, it can be used as soil). Boom, habitable. It will take a while, but the sooner we start the sooner it'll be ready for long term colonization and exploration.
Yeah, may sound a little dumb now, but realize that the Earth's current population is estimated at around 6.8 BILLION people. Currently, many areas are already suffering from over population, in the conservative projection is that we'll reach 9 Billion people around 2040 (though this assumes no major shift in the trend for deaths, such as world changing medical breakthroughs, etc).
So one way or another, if we hope to continue to survive, we're not left much choice other than to expand to other planets/moons. And since Mars is relatively close, has similar gravity, and environmentally isn't much different from Earth (on the grand scale of things in the universe), terraforming it is a very real possibility.
Ok, now try rereading that sentence. Specifically the part where I wrote "current gen smartphones".
HTC is making all their Android phones have a 3.5mm stereo jack starting with the HTC Hero from mid-2009. The Droid and Eris have a headphone jack. The Pre and Pixi have headphone jacks, All blackberries have had headphone jacks for a few years now, I'm pretty sure every major WinMo phone from the past 2 years has a headphone jack... I could continue but it'd just be redundant.
It's one thing to say that normal phones don't have headphone jacks, as you're right, most don't, but then again, what's the point of connecting one of those to your car? That's the point of this particular thread remember? Car connection?
I don't own an iPhone or an iPod Touch and never planned to, but I do own a Pre, and when I want to use it in my car I plug the stereo cable from my tape deck into the headphone jack and put it on the touchstone in my car. The phone's mic is in speaker mode when the 3.5mm jack is connected to something, so I just talk normally and the sound comes out of my speakers. This is not rocket science people. My best friend does the same with his Droid and used to do it with his iPhone 3G as well.
The iPhone may have proprietary car adapters, but try streaming Pandora while using its GPS and see how far you get...
Umm, what the hell are you talking about? Aux in jacks connect using a male-to-male stereo cable to any stereo jack (stereo jacks = headphone jack). What current gen smartphone do you know of that lacks a basic headphone jack?
Apple will lose this fight because they made 3 big mistakes:
As it stands, Android will be capable of gaining a lot of ground in the coming year and dare I say even be dominant in 12 months time as contracts expire. Hell, if Palm can pull some decent hardware out of their asses for their nice new OS, they might even finally be able to gain some ground too.
I'd rather be a social outcast than someone so desperate for the approval of others that they'll buy a gadget just for the status it bestows.
Really? Cause as a NYC resident, my Sprint service works just fine all over the city. I've never dropped a call here when above ground. Neither has my best friend on Verizon (we have the Pre and Droid, respectively). The latter actually switched back to Verizon only a month ago and ditched his iPhone because he couldn't take the crappy service he was getting with AT&T. This is basically an issue with AT&T not having enough towers and repeaters in the city to handle the traffic.
:P
PS - As a Jew, I find the accusations of some of the posts above outlandish. I mean, they've never mentioned the NSA wiretapping thing at our Jew meetings... only the mind control
MichaelSmith's quite correct. This is Apple and Oranges, so to speak. All of the iPhone's applications in it's first gen were ACTUAL web apps hosted on a server. They weren't really even apps, just mobile versions of web pages. The Pre's apps are on the phone however, and leverage a TON of the upcoming HTML5 spec to allow them to do things like use a client side db, play video and audio, etc. These were things that the iPhone could not do through its browser. Not to mention that iPhone apps can't play with phone settings, contacts, etc, while the Pre's apps can, since they're not "web apps," they're just written like them.
And how exactly does it "suck"? You haven't actually stated why. Have you ever used it? Or do you actually know anything about it? Or are you just parroting what some iPhone obsessed website said?
Yeah! No one uses Palm platform! I mean, it's essentially HTML/CSS and Javascript, but I mean come on, who writes that anymore? No one knows or cares about html and javascript because it's useless! Nothing uses it and there's definitely no one out there who can make a living off of it.
I do hope my sarcasm tags aren't necessary, given how absurd you sound. Yes, there are plenty of Java devs out there, and yes, I do wish Palm would release a Java SDK for the phone, but the fact is that that's not the developer segment they're going after. They're aiming development for this phone toward the millions of web developers out there. I've tried writing an app for the phone when the SDK first came out, and though I had no experience with the Prototype Framework they use for Javascript, I still had a little VLC remote control app up and running within the afternoon, with a pretty decent UI. They use the HTML5 specs for a bunch of things and I've seen some pretty impressive things done on the phone.
The only major problems are the current lack of low level networking (homebrew coders have written services for the linux backend though, in Java no less, to work around this for things like an IRC client), and 3D acceleration, though apparently they're working on the latter and even hired someone a few months back as a graphics framework engineer for the phone. There's speculation that that's one of the things they'll be talking about at CES.
Now, let me be clear about something, I have a Pre, but I don't think it's the greatest phone or OS in the world. There's actually a lot that I wish it had that Android has, but at the same time, there's a lot that WebOS has that Android doesn't (let's not even discuss the iPhone, as I honestly don't care about smartphone that can't do true multi-tasking). Both platforms still have a ways to go to true maturity though, and keep in mind it's still very early in the game respectively. The Pre's been around for what, 6 months? Android's v1 was pretty bad and many thought it dead till more phones came out and the OS matured. The reason the iPhone is so popular is primarily because it was the only game in town for a long time, and it didn't even have its much touted app store when it came out, or 3D acceleration. The way I see it, the more competition, the better. And the more innovative and creative ways they can all try to pull in both users and developers, the better it'll be for everyone.
Well from my point of view as an American, the Italian legal system isn't that much better...
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2009/feb/03/google-trial-privacy
http://www.hulu.com/watch/111111/better-off-ted-heroes
:)
I understand that, which is why I said the same thing in my third sentence... I was simply trying to illustrate the fact that you cannot simply discount reflected light as "not being a light source." To do so ignores the nature of light. What one has to take into account, rather than the source of original illumination, is the strength of the light that's actually hitting your retina.
Had you actually read the article you might've noticed that the eReader display tech was NOT the OLED tech. The article talks about two different technologies for different devices. The eReader display tech in the article is Ch-LCD, not OLED. The OLED tech they describe is intended for future cell phones and the like.
There's something noticeably absent from that list: the Moon. The moon was mankind's primary source of light before the advent of fire, and the moon can be very bright at times. Yet the moon's light is entirely composed of reflected light. The poster above you is correct: light is light, irrespective of the source. The key aspect is how bright the light is. Staring at the sun is bad, not because it's a light source, but because it's a POWERFUL light source which is much brighter than our eyes are capable of handling directly. With many modern devices, brightness can be varied for increased eye comfort and reduced strain.
That being said, the issue is that, often, reducing brightness also reduces contrast on light emitting devices. And when the brightness is high, it can wash out the darker colors, and make details hard to see because the light overwhelms it. Thus E-Ink is useful not because it's not a light source, but because it is a low brightness (when reading under reflected light) high contrast display, which uses almost no energy when the display is static, making it perfect for long-term reading.
When you download Firefox on Windows, you're downloading it from Mozilla. When you download Firefox in Ubuntu via apt, by default, you're downloading it from Canonical, which struck a deal with Mozilla to package their plugins with it and redistribute it. If you don't want them, you can uninstall firefox and reinstall it from Mozilla's repo, or just uninstall the plugins directly from apt. With Windows, Microsoft installs their plugin into the user installed installation of Firefox without asking permission or following the API. That's the difference. Neither of them has the right to install anything into a user install of Firefox from Mozilla, but Microsoft didn't care. The point is that there AREN'T different standards for Canonical and Microsoft.
1 century = 100 years.
100 x 20 = 2000
NOTE: I'm NOT defending New Earth Creationism, as it's utter bullshit, but your lack of mathematical understanding disturbed me...
No, I assure you, it's a shortcoming. Palm's WebOS did multi-tasking the right way (hell, even the iPhone's browser manages tabs in that way). And when I get a call on my Pre, I've never had an issue with "having too many apps open to take a phone call" as you imply. And when I recieve a phone call, it takes up half my screen to inform me of it. You say you rolled Pre's out to your user base recently and they didn't like them, but you fail to tell us who your user base is, and as such, give us no way of knowing if the iPhone, a Blackberry, or anything else for that matter would've fared much better.
I'll say this, after owning a Pre for about 2 months now, and having nearly all of my friends own iPhones, both definitely have their benefits and issues. There are things the Pre has which my friends wish their iPhones had (updates over the air, no need to use iTunes to sync, proper multi-tasking, etc). And conversely, there are things the iPhone has which I wish the Pre had (a more developed app store, better graphics acceleration, better functionality in landscape mode, etc).
I can't honestly say that one is necessarily better than the other, and they can't either from the many conversations we've had on the issue. the big questions is what happens from here, though. Palm's already moving onto their second WebOS powered handset, while Apple's still plotting their next move. I know many of my friends are planning to switch to Android once their contracts are up unless Apple actually does something of substance with the iPhone again. But the bigger point is that thus far they have ONLY the iPhone and nothing more. There're no options. I, for example, didn't want one because it lacked a physical keyboard, and I didn't want to use AT&T. Android, by contrast, is taking the buckshot approach wherein they're basically tossing a multitude of different handsets by different manufacturers onto different carriers, many of which look vastly different in their GUIs, but all of which will share the same core app store and capabilities.
The iPhone recently tried a new marketing campaign wherein they claimed "There's an app for that." By the looks of it, Android is essentially running with "There's a phone for that."
Ok, now try reading the article. The link is for devs who want a distribution method other than the store, but want Palm to host it, to make it easy for people to download it. This does not mean the app will be listed in the app catalog. If you want it to be listed in the official app catalog, then you can pay the yearly fee (same as Apple) and pick a price point for your app. The link is simply IN ADDITION to the store, not a replacement for it. They're trying to give developers as many options as possible to distribute their apps, on top of the 3rd party homebrew app catalogs which already exist.
And the mention that open source apps will not require a fee to be in the official app catalog is a major boon for open source software, because that means there's no cash or fee required to distribute a free and open app. I'm gonna be honest, thus far, WebOS in many ways seems to be a more consumer friendly version of Android. Hopefully when WebOS gets Java support it will expand even further.
You can insert a Page Break under the Page Layout tab as well :P
I can stand here arguing the minor details with you all day, but the fact is that those don't matter, because I never said it was perfect, I said it was better, and cited objective reasons for believing so. You have yet to do so other than give your own anecdotal opinion of being frustrated by it.
Insert is for objects, like Tables, images, etc. A Break is a type of page formatting, not an object. IDK, seems to make perfect sense to me. I didn't even click the Insert tab when I was looking for it.