Re:Some iPhone apps should not be written in Cocoa
by ibsulon on Monday December 15, 2008 @08:03PM
(#399059)
That's the approach I am looking at. Consider a workout program for one reason for this approach. Many gyms are in basements and places where reception is crummy. The application should be able to run in these places, and offload to the webapp when necessary.
Consider travel applications. An American going to Europe will not want to spend the money to use your web application. (We've already heard about the incredible bills by people who didn't realize what was happening.)
Re:Some iPhone apps should not be written in Cocoa
by ibsulon on Monday December 15, 2008 @08:04PM
(#399062)
Forgot one thing -- don't forget about the iPod touch market. Webapps are useless for those in many cases.
Re:Some iPhone apps should not be written in Cocoa
by tlrobinson on Monday December 15, 2008 @07:43PM
(#399042)
Also, Titanium, an open source AIR competitor: http://titaniumapp.com/
The reality is that there are lots of native iPhone apps that should be web apps. Right now, the web apps don't quite pay as well.
I believe what we're ultimately seeing is the rise of the native/web hybrid application. These are a class of web-like applications that can run in disconnected mode:
* views use HTML/CSS stored locally on the client
* handling of requests from the views is done within the client itself, or dispatched externally to a web API
* sophisticated data structures can be persisted on the client (in mysql, text files, etc.)
* more sophisticated processing than typically occurs in your standard web app
* better access to native hardware features
The technologies are coming together: Adobe AIR, UIWebView/iPhone SDK, Android's WebView, etc. to support this. I'm looking forward to it.