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> At Seravo we hold the belief that in the long term, browser based HTML5 apps will be more important than native apps. What is the "long term"? Has somebody a

by veeti 13y ago

> At Seravo we hold the belief that in the long term, browser based HTML5 apps will be more important than native apps. What is the "long term"? Has somebody actually managed to build a native HTML5-based UI that isn't a laggy and clumsy piece of shit yet? For example, webOS looked great but even the simplest lists scrolled with less than 30 frames per second. The videos I've seen of FxOS don't show much promise either (although those are running on really low-end hardware). I'm really skeptical that trying to shoehorn something called "hypertext markup language" and a generic web rendering engine like WebKit into a UI toolkit is ever going to work smoothly. Even on my desktop computer complex sites can work slowly at times. But I'd love to be proven wrong.

bergie 13y ago
Read this one: http://www.sencha.com/blog/the-making-of-fastbook-an-html5-love-story/ http://www.sencha.com/blog/the-making-of-fastbook-an-html5-l...
reubenmorais 13y ago
FxOS runs at 50+ FPS for pretty much all of the built-in UI, even on lower end phones like the Geeksphone Keon. Higher end phones are actually really fast, like the LG Fireweb (released in Brazil a couple weeks ago) and the GP Peak.
djjose 13y ago
I'm curious about this POV from folks of getting mobile web apps to look and feel like mobile native apps being a prerequisite for success. I just don't think this is true. After all, desktop web apps look and feel nothing like desktop native apps. I too believe that mobile web will one day overtake mobile native apps for most peoples' daily usage. I just don't think it'll look or act anything like what we're currently doing. Luke Wroblewski gives a great talk about the early days of a new medium being an awkward state where we try to shoehorn what worked in the last medium into it. At some point we'll figure out a design and usage patten for the mobile web that'll make a world of sense in hindsight. We're just not there yet IMO and of course I have no idea what this looks like.
- jay_kyburz 13y ago
  Yes, I agree, I don't think normal people really care about a. native look and feel and b. 60fps animations. People want apps that are easy to learn and use, have the features they need, and free.
  - daliusd 13y ago
    People are willing to pay for good product. You can remove "free" from your list.
marquis 13y ago
Think long-term. What could you conceivably do on the desktop that you can't do on the browser? Media recording and management? HTML5 is well on the way and someone compiled a functional version of FFMpeg in Javascript just recently. Storage? Security? Dropbox and more of the kind. We already have document management. The only thing I can think of right now is a render farm but we'll do that in the cloud anyway (even if the cloud is a desktop computer right next to you). I scoffed at the idea not too many months ago but I'm starting to see how mobile and desktop are converging, and I think it's going to happen faster than any of us expect due to consumer demand. Edit: thinking of program like Final Cut: someone will figure out how to do the hardcore processing over-the-wire using Thunderbolt or something. Dumb terminals, welcome back!
- gress 13y ago
  But why is that better? And won't native apps keep advancing in the meantime?
  - marquis 13y ago
    I don't think it's better: I work with heavy media files and it worries me when Apple makes OSX a bit more stupid every release. But I have faith that as developers we'll make it work (maybe the industry moves to Linux, who knows). But I also LOVE the idea that my mobile phone or some tiny gadget I wear around my neck is the key to my data, and I can rock up to any monitor or use any display, glasses, microprojector whatever. I just see the changes coming, where iOS and OSX are merging slowly. It's too early to say what this is going to mean for pro developers/users.
- ye 13y ago
  > What could you conceivably do on the desktop that you can't do on the browser? Off the top of my head, 1) Anything low level hardware (reading data via USB, or pushing data into HDMI, for instance) 2) Interacting with ANY hardware that's not explicitly supported by Javascript. Try creating an HTML5/JS scanner app. 3) Writing super-fast CPU-specific code, think Assembly language. That's the reason there are no HTML5 apps of the Photoshop caliber. 4) Disk access. Try creating a Javascript-based antivirus. Or an app that watches for changes in a certain directory. 5) Internal network access. Try writing a JS app interacting with your localhost or TCP/IP or UDP.
camus2 13y ago
> At Seravo we hold the belief that in the long term, browser based HTML5 apps will be more important than native apps. People have been saying that for 5 years + , the "future" still has a long way to go. By the way , that's what the iphone was supposed to be, a phone where devs write browser apps... we all know what happened.
- RussianCow 13y ago
  Not really, though. That was clearly just a marketing gimmick by Apple. They really haven't pushed HTML5 as much as they made it seem.
  - apetrovic 13y ago
    From http://www.theguardian.com/technology/appsblog/2011/oct/24/steve-jobs-apps-iphone http://www.theguardian.com/technology/appsblog/2011/oct/24/s... "When it [iPhone] first came out in early 2007, there were no apps you could buy from outside developers, and Jobs initially resisted allowing them," writes Isaacson. "He didn't want outsiders to create applications for the iPhone that could mess it up, infect it with viruses, or pollute its integrity." Then reality happened.
byw 13y ago
Forecast.io runs pretty well on my iPhone 5. With the smooth animations I honestly can't tell it's HTML/JS.

by veeti 13y ago

bergie 13y ago

Read this one: http://www.sencha.com/blog/the-making-of-fastbook-an-html5-love-story/ http://www.sencha.com/blog/the-making-of-fastbook-an-html5-l...

reubenmorais 13y ago

FxOS runs at 50+ FPS for pretty much all of the built-in UI, even on lower end phones like the Geeksphone Keon. Higher end phones are actually really fast, like the LG Fireweb (released in Brazil a couple weeks ago) and the GP Peak.

djjose 13y ago

I'm curious about this POV from folks of getting mobile web apps to look and feel like mobile native apps being a prerequisite for success. I just don't think this is true. After all, desktop web apps look and feel nothing like desktop native apps. I too believe that mobile web will one day overtake mobile native apps for most peoples' daily usage. I just don't think it'll look or act anything like what we're currently doing. Luke Wroblewski gives a great talk about the early days of a new medium being an awkward state where we try to shoehorn what worked in the last medium into it. At some point we'll figure out a design and usage patten for the mobile web that'll make a world of sense in hindsight. We're just not there yet IMO and of course I have no idea what this looks like.

jay_kyburz 13y ago
Yes, I agree, I don't think normal people really care about a. native look and feel and b. 60fps animations. People want apps that are easy to learn and use, have the features they need, and free.
- daliusd 13y ago
  People are willing to pay for good product. You can remove "free" from your list.

marquis 13y ago

Think long-term. What could you conceivably do on the desktop that you can't do on the browser? Media recording and management? HTML5 is well on the way and someone compiled a functional version of FFMpeg in Javascript just recently. Storage? Security? Dropbox and more of the kind. We already have document management. The only thing I can think of right now is a render farm but we'll do that in the cloud anyway (even if the cloud is a desktop computer right next to you). I scoffed at the idea not too many months ago but I'm starting to see how mobile and desktop are converging, and I think it's going to happen faster than any of us expect due to consumer demand. Edit: thinking of program like Final Cut: someone will figure out how to do the hardcore processing over-the-wire using Thunderbolt or something. Dumb terminals, welcome back!

gress 13y ago
But why is that better? And won't native apps keep advancing in the meantime?
- marquis 13y ago
  I don't think it's better: I work with heavy media files and it worries me when Apple makes OSX a bit more stupid every release. But I have faith that as developers we'll make it work (maybe the industry moves to Linux, who knows). But I also LOVE the idea that my mobile phone or some tiny gadget I wear around my neck is the key to my data, and I can rock up to any monitor or use any display, glasses, microprojector whatever. I just see the changes coming, where iOS and OSX are merging slowly. It's too early to say what this is going to mean for pro developers/users.
ye 13y ago
> What could you conceivably do on the desktop that you can't do on the browser? Off the top of my head, 1) Anything low level hardware (reading data via USB, or pushing data into HDMI, for instance) 2) Interacting with ANY hardware that's not explicitly supported by Javascript. Try creating an HTML5/JS scanner app. 3) Writing super-fast CPU-specific code, think Assembly language. That's the reason there are no HTML5 apps of the Photoshop caliber. 4) Disk access. Try creating a Javascript-based antivirus. Or an app that watches for changes in a certain directory. 5) Internal network access. Try writing a JS app interacting with your localhost or TCP/IP or UDP.

camus2 13y ago

> At Seravo we hold the belief that in the long term, browser based HTML5 apps will be more important than native apps. People have been saying that for 5 years + , the "future" still has a long way to go. By the way , that's what the iphone was supposed to be, a phone where devs write browser apps... we all know what happened.

RussianCow 13y ago
Not really, though. That was clearly just a marketing gimmick by Apple. They really haven't pushed HTML5 as much as they made it seem.
- apetrovic 13y ago
  From http://www.theguardian.com/technology/appsblog/2011/oct/24/steve-jobs-apps-iphone http://www.theguardian.com/technology/appsblog/2011/oct/24/s... "When it [iPhone] first came out in early 2007, there were no apps you could buy from outside developers, and Jobs initially resisted allowing them," writes Isaacson. "He didn't want outsiders to create applications for the iPhone that could mess it up, infect it with viruses, or pollute its integrity." Then reality happened.

byw 13y ago

Forecast.io runs pretty well on my iPhone 5. With the smooth animations I honestly can't tell it's HTML/JS.