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The cross platform experience will never match the native experience. Think about on the desktop. The only cross platform apps that behave natively on Mac, Wind

by adrusi 11y ago

The cross platform experience will never match the native experience. Think about on the desktop. The only cross platform apps that behave natively on Mac, Windows, GNOME (and derivatives) and KDE are apps tha have completely separate front-ends for every platform. Firefox is an ok example of this, although it in a way forms its own platform rather than integrating with its host, still it pulls it off better than other cross-platform apps. The Transmission bittorrent client is perhaps a better example, it has at least 4 mature front ends: gtk, qt, cli and os x. This is only feasible for a little free software project like Transmission because its UI is fairly simple, it has a list of torrents, a settings dialog and a properties panel. Most apps that try to be cross platform just use a UI toolkit that acts as a cross platform compatability layer. Qt, GTK, Swing, WxWidgets and Tk all fit the bill. The result is that the app doesn't look good or integrate especially deeply into any platform, except sometimes with the platform the the developers personally use. There are few exceptions to this rule. One is Sublime Text 2+ which is built on Qt. Without any customization, its theme looks OK, but doesn't match the design language of any platform, and its integration with its host platform is non-existant, everything happens within the sublime text window (no notifications or system tray/menubar widgets, no quick-view previews in Finder or Nautilus, etc). It's possible to improve integration by intstalling a custom theme which lets the user override a lot of the UI design, including the margins and padding, and plugins are written in python and can access a lot of host platform features. If you want a native experience, you have to write a native app. You can share your business logic by linking to the same C++ code or in the future maybe by using react native and sharing the same non-view code. But your UI-layer has to be tailored specifically to the host platform in order to look good.

dikaiosune 11y ago
Agree completely, what I'm seeing though is "web" being the new native for a whole lot of apps. It's familiar to users across platforms, it usually looks good, and while it might not integrate with the host environment, it provides many aspects of the native experience.
tonyarkles 11y ago
We have the same philosophy. Most of my experience here is with iOS and Android, but also a bit of Windows/Linux/Mac. If it's going to feel polished, then it's going to need a separate UI front-end for each platform. It's not that there's not yet a sufficiently good cross-platform library; it's that an Android app and an iOS app are different! They're structured differently! And if you try to use an x-platform library, you're going to end up with an iOS-app-that-runs-on-Android, or an Android-app-that-runs-on-iOS, or a this-app-doesn't-feel-right-anywhere. My approach varies based on the application, but in general one of two things end up happening: either the majority of the processing gets pushed onto a server with a well-defined REST API, or the processing gets put in a C++ library that gets linked everywhere (with JNI shims, ctypes shims, whatever's needed to load it in the appropriate environment). This approach does a few things: it ensures that you've got a UI that fits every platform, it improves code quality (you can't add a chunk of business logic in your view handler), and it makes porting so much easier.
marknutter 11y ago
Facebook.com and Hacker News are cross platform apps, and they work amazingly well.
- tracker1 11y ago
  Of course Facebook.com has been removing functionality from their mobile website for some time. At this point when you post a link from mobile it doesn't even add the thumbnails anymore. I know it's to drive people to use the native apps (so they get much more tracking information, and run your battery down faster). But the affect is just pushing me away.
tracker1 11y ago
But, even Firefox has a rather limited UI... Whenever you build anything with a moderately complex UI, it becomes nearly impossible to offer a good cross-platform experience. I also think that standing on the shoulders of bootstrap and material design (like materializecss) is a better place to start where users will be cross platform than trying to look native everywhere... not to mention that native looks different every other OS release. Hell, look at MS Office from version to version, they break most of their own rules. A relatively clean, usable design is more important than getting everything precisely native looking everywhere.

by adrusi 11y ago

dikaiosune 11y ago

Agree completely, what I'm seeing though is "web" being the new native for a whole lot of apps. It's familiar to users across platforms, it usually looks good, and while it might not integrate with the host environment, it provides many aspects of the native experience.

tonyarkles 11y ago

We have the same philosophy. Most of my experience here is with iOS and Android, but also a bit of Windows/Linux/Mac. If it's going to feel polished, then it's going to need a separate UI front-end for each platform. It's not that there's not yet a sufficiently good cross-platform library; it's that an Android app and an iOS app are different! They're structured differently! And if you try to use an x-platform library, you're going to end up with an iOS-app-that-runs-on-Android, or an Android-app-that-runs-on-iOS, or a this-app-doesn't-feel-right-anywhere. My approach varies based on the application, but in general one of two things end up happening: either the majority of the processing gets pushed onto a server with a well-defined REST API, or the processing gets put in a C++ library that gets linked everywhere (with JNI shims, ctypes shims, whatever's needed to load it in the appropriate environment). This approach does a few things: it ensures that you've got a UI that fits every platform, it improves code quality (you can't add a chunk of business logic in your view handler), and it makes porting so much easier.

marknutter 11y ago

Facebook.com and Hacker News are cross platform apps, and they work amazingly well.

tracker1 11y ago
Of course Facebook.com has been removing functionality from their mobile website for some time. At this point when you post a link from mobile it doesn't even add the thumbnails anymore. I know it's to drive people to use the native apps (so they get much more tracking information, and run your battery down faster). But the affect is just pushing me away.

tracker1 11y ago

But, even Firefox has a rather limited UI... Whenever you build anything with a moderately complex UI, it becomes nearly impossible to offer a good cross-platform experience. I also think that standing on the shoulders of bootstrap and material design (like materializecss) is a better place to start where users will be cross platform than trying to look native everywhere... not to mention that native looks different every other OS release. Hell, look at MS Office from version to version, they break most of their own rules. A relatively clean, usable design is more important than getting everything precisely native looking everywhere.