Kindle Development Kit | Hacker News Reader

Kindle Development Kit

amazon.com

101 pointsfogus36 comments

So yet another platform and market - which I think is great news for developers.

I kind of have an insane dream where maybe instead of going for the usual platform candidate of say, a C derived language, Java platform or some kind of Web derived platform (widgets, WebOS et al), maybe someone will take a risk on doing something different.

Imagine if the Kindle platform was say, Scheme or Lua based? With a very simple (shallow not deep) set of libraries to access the screen, storage and network facilities.

It will never happen of course. But I wish someone would do it.

Or, you could hope for Java and use Clojure :)

Yeah you can embed various languages into C-based and Java-based platforms. It's not quite the same thing as the official platform being based on such languages.

The official platform will always have more mindshare, and thus support, in the way of things like:

- open source code

- developer support/discussion

- systems libraries designed with the strengths/weaknesses of the platform in mind

Play with Clojure's Java interop facilities. You'll find you get all three of those points for free.

Lua's designed to be embedded, no? And it loads into C, which is a strict subset of Objective-C, so that should be relatively straightforward. Same with Guile Scheme, no?

It's called iPhone Wax! A Lua/Objective-C Bridge http://github.com/probablycorey/wax

The laptop in the top banner appears to have some kind of curly-brace language code open in Eclipse. By the look of the syntax highlighting and flow of indentation, my guess would be Java (or possibly C++).

> It will never happen of course. But I wish someone would do it.

Amen.

"The laptop in the top banner appears to have some kind of curly-brace language code open in Eclipse."

Which may just be $StockPhotoOfDevEnvironment

Text driven apps are an interesting idea. It doesn't exactly put the Kindle in competition with Apple's products which is probably a smart move. It's building on the Kindle's strength. Anyone who is choosing e-ink over a more general purpose LCD/OLED tablet is definitely in it for the text. For developers it seems like potentially a very easy platform to work with if your primary concern is simply formatting & displaying text. As a result I bet we'll see an entirely different set of applications making the Kindle a unique platform. It's a very smart move by Amazon. Sell books on paper, sell them on the iPhone, sell them on PCs, sell them on tablets -- but keep the e-ink market of serious readers locked up for themselves.

Easy prediction: this will be big even if range of applications is limited to low bandwidth network apps.

I like the idea that they're releasing a SDK for it. But there's a big limitation of all Kindle's currently on the market, and that's the slow refresh speed of the screen. If you have one, flipping pages in a book is fine, but browsing a page on the web seems awfully slow (could be due to an un-optimized browser).

I'm not sure what full-screen frame rate it supports, but my hunch is in the 2-3 FPS range or less (someone please correct me if I'm wrong - I'm guessing). AFAIK there's not even a Doom port to hacked Kindle's yet, which is usually a badge of honor saying "this device can play games and has some power to it".

Any apps developed for it would likely be staticly-displayed on screen. Board games would work well, email clients, IM clients, to name a few. Amazon would have to release a new model with a better screen to, say, address what Apple appears to be doing with their upcoming tablet, and allow for applications which require refresh rates which can display motion.

what's the technology? is it java based? i can't see any relevant details on that page... [edit: i've searched around and can find no answer, although the underlying os is apparently linux] [edit2: see http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1066942]

It could be Java. The IDE in the picture up top looks very similar to Eclipse (although Eclipse handles more than just Java).

Java is a safe bet for this kind of thing: you can sandbox things up pretty well and keep people from doing Evil Things. Also, it's pretty popular with Big Companies, so it's a likely bet for that reason as well.

Kindle Simulator... on Mac, PC, and Linux desktops.

Simultaneous release? It could be another VM, but it smells like Java to me.

Yeah, if that picture has any accuracy, it'll be Java in Eclipse. I stare at Eclipse doing Java all day at work. That is definitely Eclipse and the format and length of the lines of code look like Java.

Is Amazon hoping/expecting big companies to buy Kindles in bulk for their employees to use these applications, or are they going for a large number of developers that already know Java so that development seems easier? My experience in big companies is that they don't buy new devices for everyone. It's more likely that a significant number of employees have to purchase devices outside of work and bring them into the office before the company considers supporting the device with applications.

Not sure whether the SDK will be Java-based, but here's some info on the software that runs on the Kindle: http://arstechnica.com/open-source/news/2007/11/linux-on-ama...

The Kindle runs Java ME so I'm guessing a CDC implementation with some proprietary extensions.

And that will probably mean that you cannot run software you wrote on a piece of hardware you own without paying somebody $200 a year for the privilege of a developer certificate. Oh how I hate Java ME. (Well, technically you can run anything on Java ME if you don't mind answering a security dialog every five seconds. Like every time your app tries to save a backup or changes to a new directory in a file selection dialog.)

ah, thanks. for those (like me) that don't know what cdc is, it's "the more capable configuration" of JavaME - see http://java.sun.com/javame/technology/ and http://java.sun.com/javame/technology/cdc/

It's Java - see:

http://www.mobileread.com/forums/showpost.php?p=639899&p... http://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=61093

For some previous attempts to hack apps together. It uses a modified AWT for display. The problem has always been that the API was heavily obfuscated.

In addition, active content must meet all Amazon technical requirements, not be a generic reader, and not contain malicious code.

"Not be a generic reader"? That shoots my goals down, as well as shooting down the goals of anyone interested in really making the Kindle an open platform for reading. I'd be willing to bet that will be arbitrarily extended to nearly any "reader" application that they perceive as threatening any of their market.

There's no real information on that page:-/

This will probably spur B&N to do the same thing for the Nook. Or maybe Amazon saw that coming since the Nook is an Android device and that seems like an obvious advantage for developing apps.

I believe Android-based devices will play important roles in this ecosystem, specially if devices with animation-friendly displays become the norm.

Personally, I like the Kindle because it's simple. Does it really need an SDK? How is this making the kindle a better product?

The big question for me is whether apps would have access to whispernet and how limited this access would be.

It seems that as long as your app is doing < 100KB/user/month of wireless data then it is free. Once you do more than that, you have to start charging a monthly fee. So you can use as much Whispernet as you want but be prepared to have that change your price point.

Lame attempt to get some attention before the Kindle gets killed by the impending Tablet?

It will take some magic for Apple to convince book publishers the Newton ][ is a better proposition than Amazon's. Amazon sells the paper versions too.

But I won't risk a prediction here. With OLED, PixelQi and that other Qualcomm color display competing, there is too much noise to predict what will happen to any individual product. The ecosystem will thrive, but who will inhabit is is a mistery to me.

It will take some magic for Apple to convince book publishers the Newton ][ is a better proposition than Amazon's.

No need. Apple could just run the upcoming OS X version of Kindle (perhaps virtualized) on their tablet. Amazon could respond by detecting this and disabling their software, but I doubt they'd do it.

That (running soft-Kindle on other platforms) is Amazon's play - removes cost of hardware (thin margin) and carrier charges (now borne by host), making the Amazon store more profitable ...

But then Apple would be ceding the future of electronic publishing of text to Amazon, and could never differentiate its hardware over the Kindle's, unless Amazon decided to support richer media in its files than the Kindle will actually display (not likely). That's not a plan that's consistent with Apple's strategy so far.

As ianferrel and ableal explained, the day Kindle software becomes the obvious way to read e-books on the Newton ][ (I love that name - too bad it won't be), Amazon wins.

Apple will do whatever it takes to prevent Amazon from controlling the ecosystem.

My point is that Apple doesn't have to "win" in this way. Why does Apple care if Amazon "controls the ecosystem," when they can still sell high margin hardware? Does Apple have to control the Web because they publish Safari? Safari was a play to assure the continued viability of OS X. Apple doesn't necessarily want to "win". They want to make money. "Winning" isn't necessary in every case for that.

The fact that Amazon has a stranglehold on distribution of dead-tree versions of books is precisely why publishers hate Amazon. As the buzz in the book biz around Apple's "agency" model for ebook distribution is starting to show, publishers would love nothing more than for Apple to scare Amazon. This lame SDK announcement and the recent change in the cut that Amazon will demand shows you just how scared Amazon really is.

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