Cesium in 2013 - Platform support

All,

One reason we used WebGL for Cesium was to be cross-platform on desktops: Windows, Linux, and Mac. When we consider improved platform support for 2013, there is the very obvious platform:

  • Mobile - for a while WebGL on Android was not in the best shape. More recently, Firefox has decent WebGL support and even ran the Santa tracker at a few fps. In b12, we added default behavior for several touch events. Chrome beta now has WebGL support; however, it needs to be explicitly turned on. Cesium still needs a bit of work - or workarounds - to run on Chrome for Android. I expect we’ll see pretty outstanding WebGL support on Android this year, and we plan for Cesium to continue to stay on top of it.

As for iOS, I don’t know anything more than anyone else, but I am hopeful.

Also, many of us have ran into issues with Cesium due to video driver and/or browser issues. So the other platform initiative for this year is to reach out to the GPU and browser vendors to see if they will run the Cesium tests as part of their release process. Part of this is, of course, making the tests quick and friction-less to run, and offering to provide the right hooks for our tests to fit into their automated tests.

Regards,

Patrick

Thanks for the recent attention to mobile support. I love being able to demo our satellite orbit app on a Nexus 7 with FireFox – it shows folks we’re not forgetting them.

We’re hoping to do an app for visualizing science data that would be most appropriate for mobile users in the field, so this is great news.