waffle

Last week, I said that I was going to create a new browser, Rouse, to replace the aging and increasingly less maintained OmniWeb as my favorite and primary browser.

The first step was going to be to string together something that people could start committing against. This step turned out to be more work than I anticipated. (I’ve always known that a browser is a ton of work, and that only with WebKit and other, previous open source browsers built on it does this project approach even a doable amount of work. I just didn’t expect this much of it to be necessary to even build a crude husk of a browser.)

I’ve been working on it most of the free hours of my week, which hasn’t been easy given the alternatives. But now it’s starting to look like something.

It doesn’t have thumbnail tabs, Google search, bookmarks, status bar updates as a page loads or a thousand other things, but I’m implementing the necessities, one by one. (I also “implemented” IDN. The precise details of this accident are not important because no one has ever managed to duplicate the exact circumstances under which it happened, and many people have ended up looking very silly, or dead, or both, trying.)

One of these days, when it has progressed enough, it will go up on the Google Code project’s repository. The good news is that Rouse has indeed progressed towards being usable, but the bad news is that it needs to be more usable until someone else can start to get involved.

In the old Soviet Union they used to say that anything that wasn’t forbidden was compulsory. The trick was to remember which was which.

– Douglas Adams

So it is that to the App Store, you can be denied entry for having too little and too much stuff; for being funny and for wearing too little; for “duplicating existing functionality” and for simply being of a suspicious genre that does not yet duplicate existing functionality. All this while there’s still crap allowed in, awesome locked out and the gates themselves ridiculing the idea of device ownership and customer respect.

It’s been close to two years. Is anyone still counting on Apple to sort this mess out? To speed up approvals? To start applying their rules consistently? To make their rules consistent? To make their rules clear? To make their rules sane? To start stripping away rules?

I’m still interested in seeing how big the balloon’s going to get, but trust me, at this rate and with this course, it’s gonna blow.

• Making it twice as deep as necessary and/or warranted, confusing every reviewer known to man and making the environment cry.
• Not including the MacBook/iMac/iPhone cleaning cloth, being the only material known to man to timely and reliably obliterate the smudges but not the rest of the device.
• Not including a dock, case or method of propping it up for typing.

Steve Jobs: want porn? Buy Android.

Someone doesn’t know his Internet.