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We'll have to agree to disagree. URL discovery is still a major problem, it's what made Yahoo as a human-curated index popular back in the 90s. In my admittedly
by brisance 15y ago
We'll have to agree to disagree. URL discovery is still a major problem, it's what made Yahoo as a human-curated index popular back in the 90s. In my admittedly anecdotal experience with seniors, many of them still have difficulty understanding the browser since they are task-oriented, rather than URL-oriented. And apps are task-oriented. URL bookmarks saved to the home screen help but are still prone to problems e.g. website alters the landing page and now the browser returns a 404. No problem for us but a very jarring experience for seniors who don't know URI.
And Gruber's point is that web apps still require internet access to work, albeit with improvements like cached storage in HTML 5. Whereas apps on the mobile device already work and are already taking advantage of sensors onboard the device, but the internet (cloud) makes them even better. For example, Garageband for iOS would be really hard to do as a webapp. Not impossible, but hard.
- wunderfool 15y ago"URL discovery is still a major problem" come on, google search is smarter than the app store search
- brisance 15y agoI made no mention comparing the quality of search results because that's a whole other topic. I'm saying the App Store has categories, "Staff Picks", "iPad App of the Week" etc and it helps in discovery, just like Yahoo did back in the day. Google would have to tread carefully here or they would step on advertisers' toes or invite anti-competitive scrutiny due to their dominance in search.
- iaskwhy 15y agoGoogle Web Store might help.
- MatthewPhillips 15y agoGoogle doesn't have to do this, web takes care of recommendations. We have HN, Reddit, StumbleUpon, etc.
- ugh 15y agoAll those things benefit both web apps and native apps.