> I thought the attraction of web development was that you just write something once and it works on all browsers. If you have to write it 8 times then what's the attraction?
You generally only have to write it once. But you've gotta write it right. The other attractions are no installs, just visit a web page. No users with "out of date" clients, you just serve the updated page to users. A sandboxed environment to run in. Ease of sharing (URLs). The DOM, while slow, is also rather nice if your layout model resembles documents. There's a million reasons why web might be the better choice. There's also a million reasons to prefer native.
> Often people show me "tech demos", by which they apparently mean something you'd never bother to show anyone else if it was an app or a game, but because it's running in a browser window and because it doesn't look like yet another shitty website (because it has something that moves, or which you can interact with in some limited way) it's supposed to somehow impress me. I don't get it.
Usually these are showing off new features available in the browser that weren't present before. And they can do a hell of a lot more than let you interact with it in some limited way, or move an object. How about an entire 3d Modeling Application in your browser? (Warning may lag a mobile device or slow PC)
http://www.3dtin.com/
But these are crazy, cutting-edge things that are still best done natively. Most of the time you're not making a 3d Modeling application. 99% of the time an "app" is something that shows text and images, and takes text (and sometimes images) from the user. You can make it super flashy, and that's where a native app would excel. But does it really need to be flashy? Does a cruise line's ticket booking app really need to show water flowing across the screen while you load the next page, and a tugboat pulling in prices? Or are these gimmicks that will just end up pissing off the user?
I guess I really just disagree with the blanket statements by the author. Native probably was a better call for their app, but they don't focus on why. Just that web supposedly sucks... Instead of learning the strong suites of web and native, and why they thought web worked for their app but it didn't, they've "learned" to not touch the web. Which I think is the wrong lesson.