Seriously? I can't get over there are iOS fanboys out there still with their heads so far in the sand.
Along with more characterizations of web development that are a decade out of date... sigh. (And anyone who doesn't understand what I mean should watch the Shadow DOM and Polymers presentations from this year's Google IO. They really need to put the Sandbox on a public url for a quick impressive demo...)
> I can't get over there are iOS fanboys out there still
> with their heads so far in the sand.
Those iOS fanboys are just knowledgeable enough. Why don't you spend some time and educate yourself on a couple of things. First, where the first usage of the cornerstones of modern web tech appeared in the wild: I mean <canvas>, CSS transitions and animations. You may be surprised.
Second, learn a bit what native SDKs offer. Once you know the state of "modern web" and the state of modern mobile OSes SDKs you may be less tempted to try to compare them. Trying to portray web stack as superior is laughable and the person making such claim probably has his head in the darker place than sand.
> Trying to portray web stack as superior is laughable and the person making such claim probably has his head in the darker place than sand.
No such claim was made. He simply pointed out (correctly) that the mobile web is in much better shape than it is being given credit for. In that, I agree.
Ah, yes. Assume I'm ignorant about the technology you claim is superior (the exact same thing happened the last time I tried to point out that the web has advanced a bit in the last 10 years). I didn't even try to make any claim about the web being better than native, but for your own knowledge, I have experience with native SDKs from win32, to cocoa, to android and iOS.
>Trying to portray web stack as superior is laughable
In what regard? Surely not in ease of development? Ease of learning? Ease/portability/availability of tools? Portability of the end app itself? Available developer pool? Open source code to look at and use? I can't imagine a way that any native platform beats the web in any of those categories.
Or just in terms of making a fancy animation and having reusable UI elements? You're probably right, but oh wait, if only you'd investigated Shadow DOM and Polymers like I recommended you'd see that web technologies are rapidly advancing on that front as well.
Nope. Building a complex application in JS+HTML+CSS is still an enormously painful undertaking.
> Ease of learning?
Also nope. Complex applications are still complex.
> Ease/portability/availability of tools?
Compared to the development tools for other platforms (IDEs, profilers, etc), the web tools are far, far, far more limited.
> Portability of the end app itself?
Portability is a cost-cutting measure, but never a user-appreciated feature. The web would need to stand alone as a first-tier platform for this to be a net gain; as it is, web-only experience is subpar.
> Available developer pool?
Quality engineers capable of producing first-class applications for your users still cost a lot and are rare on the ground.
> Open source code to look at and use?
This is not even remotely unique to the web.
> You're probably right, but oh wait, if only you'd investigated Shadow DOM and Polymers like I recommended you'd see that web technologies are rapidly advancing on that front as well.
Catching up to 1990s application architecture is not really a cause to celebrate. The technology stack that drives desktop and mobile devices is massive. We don't build custom interfaces directly on top of OpenGL and call it a day.
Hmm, I suspect that the comparison is relative, whereas many of your comments are absolute. E.g. Quality engineers are certainly hard to find, but are good javascript developers _harder_ or _easier_ to find than iOS developers? I don't really know, but I suspect that good javascript developers are easier to find. Also, I think web-development tools are pretty on par to xcode.
Due to the degree that each of the major mobile players "cross-pollinates" or "copies" these days, why are we even still talking about who is copying who? Who cares? Looking at these new iOS demos, I see a lot of things that were first done elsewhere. But to most people (outside of our ivory tower), that doesn't matter, and it shouldn't.
But Apple shouldn't be faulted for some of these "borrowed" elements in iOS 7. Google does the same thing, Microsoft does the same thing, and so does everyone else. In fact, I expect them to copy good things, because I as a consumer want the best for my money. Stay on your own stubborn, outdated path and end up like RIM.
Right? I feel like for the first 4-5 years it was whining that Android stole everything from Apple (arguable) and then after that it was whining about iOS leaching Android features.
But now... who cares? Or has the effort to care? Look at both of the latest platform releases. It's new APIs. It's new services. It's new ways of giving them more data to improve their services. They're working on UI and UX issues and small features.
We've reached such feature parity - I honestly believe a choice between iOS/Android/WP8/RIM is going to give you a good, fairly polished experience. (The biggest differentiator left isn't bullshit gradients and transparencies; if anything it's personal preferences or App availability [I need my Google Voice!])
> We've reached such feature parity - I honestly believe a choice between iOS/Android/WP8/RIM is going to give you a good, fairly polished experience.
This is exactly right. Just like arguing over the pronunciation of "pecan", or which text editor is the "best", you're probably not going to convince anyone with an existing opinion on the "best" mobile OS. Who cares?
Yeah, I am an iPhone owner and prefer it to Android, but this article is just asinine.
First of all, you can absolutely do anything iOS does on the web; it's just a question of how much effort you're willing to put in. There's not a library already in existence that you can use easily which perfectly mimics iOS 7, but if there were then iOS 7 would need more work. But there will be web libraries that allow you to mimic iOS 7.
The whole concept of "X platform can't do this" is so wrong headed to begin with. When it comes to software, the first thing anyone should learn is that anything can do just about anything. The limitation is hardware.
Explain how you are going to animate blurred glass at 60 FPS if Safari doesn't give you a fast path to the GPU?
I don't understand your comment. Are you just saying that both Javascript and Objective-C are Turing complete? If that is the point your are making, well that isn't really debatable.
Yes, you can build Call of Duty with canvas and JavaScript. No, you shouldn't. A claim that faster hardware is a solution is circular: to get native performance today, faster hardware is needed. At that point, native performance on that hardware becomes great and theoretically is doing more amazing things than it did on the old hardware. In other words HTML-based apps always play catch up, unless native can't use the hardware anymore, or the interpreted bottleneck is reduced.
Of course mobile apps are always running slower than native, but that wasn't the issue here. The claim was that web apps CANNOT do what iOS 7 does and that's just horseshit.
Seriously? I can't get over there are iOS fanboys out there still with their heads so far in the sand.
Along with more characterizations of web development that are a decade out of date... sigh. (And anyone who doesn't understand what I mean should watch the Shadow DOM and Polymers presentations from this year's Google IO. They really need to put the Sandbox on a public url for a quick impressive demo...)