So, one argument in favor of web apps is that many of the common, tough-to-program operations are carefully coded by top programmers who are devoting their care

So, one argument in favor of web apps is that many of the common, tough-to-program operations are carefully coded by top programmers who are devoting their careers to fine-tuning that operation. Browsers are constantly being upgraded more and more of this important functionality built-in, including rich-text editing Many tough-to-program things like rich text editing have also been implemented for you in native frameworks. For example see the source of TextEdit[1], it does not implement a rich text editing control from scratch, it uses NSTextView and the other NSText* classes. Only slowly has Objective-C been seeing strings and hash-tables becoming more than libraries accessed like other objects. This means that handling of modern cases (e.g., characters taking up more than one byte) happens naturally, efficiently, and hopefully more bug-free NSString has supported NSUTF8StringEncoding since OS X 10.0 (and I imagine since before that). Dictionaries and arrays did recently get some syntactic sugar, but strings have always had the @"" syntax, so I'm not sure what the author is referring to here. [1] https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/#samplecode/TextEdit/Introduction/Intro.html https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/#samplecode/TextEdit...