Re:Things to Know When Making a Web Application in 2015
by TheAceOfHearts on Friday July 10, 2015 @06:22PM
(#9867268)
I strongly disagree. There's tons of people that talk about how everything should be mobile first, but that's just not feasible for a lot of web applications. Stop trying to shove mobile into everything.
If I'm making a Web IDE or a Web Photoshop, it's very unlikely I'll be able to fit all of the functionality that's needed into a tiny mobile screen, and it's also unlikely I'll be able to get it to perform well. And you know what? That's totally fine, because if my demographic is gonna be people with 1920x1200 monitors on a powerful desktop machines, it'll work great. I'll build an amazing experience for desktop, because that's my target demographic.
A lot of enterprise applications are impossible to scale down to mobile as well, due to the sheer amount of customizability and information they provide. I don't know of many enterprise applications that support both mobile and desktop. If you want to support mobile for an enterprise app, you're better off designing a separate mobile variant of your application. This assumes you have the resources to do so, and that there's sufficient interest from your customers such that the decision to have a mobile variant makes sense.
Here's the thing, building a sophisticated application that works well on a tiny phone and scales all the way up to a 30'' monitor is not feasible at all for a lot of teams. I'd challenge you to show me a good example of a sophisticated app (e.g. along the lines of a Web IDE or Web Photoshop) that will scale nicely from a tiny mobile screen all the way up to an awesome 30'' display.
If I'm making a Web IDE or a Web Photoshop, it's very unlikely I'll be able to fit all of the functionality that's needed into a tiny mobile screen, and it's also unlikely I'll be able to get it to perform well. And you know what? That's totally fine, because if my demographic is gonna be people with 1920x1200 monitors on a powerful desktop machines, it'll work great. I'll build an amazing experience for desktop, because that's my target demographic.
A lot of enterprise applications are impossible to scale down to mobile as well, due to the sheer amount of customizability and information they provide. I don't know of many enterprise applications that support both mobile and desktop. If you want to support mobile for an enterprise app, you're better off designing a separate mobile variant of your application. This assumes you have the resources to do so, and that there's sufficient interest from your customers such that the decision to have a mobile variant makes sense.
Here's the thing, building a sophisticated application that works well on a tiny phone and scales all the way up to a 30'' monitor is not feasible at all for a lot of teams. I'd challenge you to show me a good example of a sophisticated app (e.g. along the lines of a Web IDE or Web Photoshop) that will scale nicely from a tiny mobile screen all the way up to an awesome 30'' display.