Hacker News Reader

Actually, a pure content app like Flipboard I could easily see being developed on Famous/PhoneGap.

There's a big argument against doing something like that in PhoneGap. Phonegap/JS does not have (low-overhead, easy to use) multithreading. I can guarantee you that something like Flipboard is loading/marshalling all the content and data in a background queue of some sort. Maybe even doing some background rendering.

It bears noting that running background tasks in iOS is extremely easy for developers.

I bet a Flipboard-clone wouldn't be too difficult for a few engineers to bang out in Famo.us. But then again, the value of Flipboard isn't in being a beacon of iOS beauty and functionality, but instead lies in the apps wonderfully-curated content.

If Flipboard had any regular, perceptible lag, no one would use it.

You don't think that's possible on JavaScript/PhoneGap?

It's not currently possible today (Web Workers are high-overhead and quite limited) and I haven't seen it in any of the standards for browsers that will be implemented for the foreseeable future. Are there any solutions you can think of?

Famo.us?

Does famo.us do multithreading? (hint: no, because JS can't do multithreading except for high-performance-overhead, clunky Web Workers)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com