S60 Open to new features

By this time you’ve probably seen the term “web runtime”. The marketing materials around the widget announcement call “web runtime” a new addition to S60. Even better, we’re told the Web Runtime “brings the convenience and power of widgets to smartphones”! Whew. I’m breaking out in a sweat already.

But since I don’t like to sweat (more accurately, I don’t care but the people around me might object) maybe it’s time to translate some of this stuff. It’s in an obscure language called “marketing” that’s drawn quite a bit of interest from linguists. Turns out it’s a language with an inordinate number of adjectives and some unusual semantics. For instance, in marketing it’s possible to create valid sets of words that don’t qualify as sentences. They don’t apparently have to refer to anything. Linguists classify these word combinations as “claims“, and speculate that they evolved to distract the attention of any predator thinking the speaker rather resembles lunch.

Anyway, back to the translation. Whenever you see “web runtime”, they’re basically talking about the browser being used in some way other than just rendering web pages. Whenever you see “widget”, they’re basically talking about a something somewhere between a web page and an application. I think of widgets as web pages packaged with some extra files, but the marketers are probably going to smack me. So I only think that, I never say it.

Apple, typically, has a very nice explanatory page that classifies widgets three ways: accessories, applications, and informational widgets. Looking at the widgets we’ve introduced, the WeatherBug widget is clearly informational, and the Chat widget is an accessory. I don’t think we’ve introduced any real “application widgets” yet.