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It's a well-researched article, but i doubt it will change anyone's mind. What i got as a take-away from this is that the sort of mobile apps that i work on can

by Joeri 13y ago

It's a well-researched article, but i doubt it will change anyone's mind. What i got as a take-away from this is that the sort of mobile apps that i work on can be done perfectly fine in javascript, because i did their desktop equivalents in ie7 on pc's with 512 mb ram. I'm reminded of the native vs web debates on the desktop. Everything the desktop guys said was true, with whole categories of apps essentially off-limits to web developers, and the remainder clearly and obviously inferior to their native counterparts. That didn't change, native apps still rule supreme in capability and usability. And yet the average person is using web apps the majority of the time (although that opinion admittedly depends on what you understand as average). The reason why that is translates to mobile. Everything this article says is true, and still mobile apps will be mostly web-based. There is no conflict between those facts.

martingordon 13y ago
Not sure if you know this, but iOS doesn't use a swap/page file. iOS will kill an app that uses a lot of memory because it values speed over stability and can very easily run out of RAM. In contrast, Windows won't kill an app when the system runs low of memory and will create more memory (however much slower that memory is than physical RAM) for the app to consume.
coldtea 13y ago
>That didn't change, native apps still rule supreme in capability and usability. And yet the average person is using web apps the majority of the time Those web apps most people use are trivial compared to the stuff we do on Desktop and Mobile. And the main reason people use them "the majority of time" is because they are huge time-sinks. E.g: Social apps like FB and Twitter, that translate to posting and reading text and images. Web mail, which translates to working with lists of text articles. Nothing much CPU intensive, in the way desktop/mobile apps are. As for the CPU intensive stuff, it's really still a novelty on the web. Nobody (== few people, less than 1% is the numbers I show), use Google Docs (and that's not even a full featured office suite anyway -- not to mention the spreadsheet for example takes lot of time even on my 2010 iMac/Chrome to apply stuff like conditional formatting). Even less people use something like online image editors and such. The only thing people really use on the web, and is CPU intensive are web games. And even those are more like 1995 quality desktop games.

by Joeri 13y ago

martingordon 13y ago

Not sure if you know this, but iOS doesn't use a swap/page file. iOS will kill an app that uses a lot of memory because it values speed over stability and can very easily run out of RAM. In contrast, Windows won't kill an app when the system runs low of memory and will create more memory (however much slower that memory is than physical RAM) for the app to consume.

coldtea 13y ago

>That didn't change, native apps still rule supreme in capability and usability. And yet the average person is using web apps the majority of the time Those web apps most people use are trivial compared to the stuff we do on Desktop and Mobile. And the main reason people use them "the majority of time" is because they are huge time-sinks. E.g: Social apps like FB and Twitter, that translate to posting and reading text and images. Web mail, which translates to working with lists of text articles. Nothing much CPU intensive, in the way desktop/mobile apps are. As for the CPU intensive stuff, it's really still a novelty on the web. Nobody (== few people, less than 1% is the numbers I show), use Google Docs (and that's not even a full featured office suite anyway -- not to mention the spreadsheet for example takes lot of time even on my 2010 iMac/Chrome to apply stuff like conditional formatting). Even less people use something like online image editors and such. The only thing people really use on the web, and is CPU intensive are web games. And even those are more like 1995 quality desktop games.