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Shortchanging Your Business with User-Hostile Platforms

al3x.net

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Re: Shortchanging Your Business with User-Hostile Platforms

#21

Post by patio11 »

al3x wrote: post #15
aditya wrote: post #11

This is a fascinating question. AIR and the new mobile app frameworks are great for prototyping and getting an app out there really quickly, and perhaps then you can make the decision to either build native apps for your biggest platforms; or not. Alex is obviously pointing to the verbal minority (of which he is a part), because for every person out there that speaks out against, say, the Tweetdeck AIR app; there are…

You can dismiss the "verbal minority", or you could treat them as leading indicators. Personally, I'll err on the side of building something that's up to my standards rather than seeing if I can get away with mediocrity. It's entirely possible to focus on both stability and, say, a quality desktop application. If you're under-resourced to accomplish both goals, maybe you didn't plan correctly.

It is also possible that both moving to a native app and achieving five nines of uptime (from four nines) will do less for the business than changing the call to action on the pricing page. Luckily, God gave us AB testing.

Re: Shortchanging Your Business with User-Hostile Platforms

#22

Post by hightowk »

I have built some pretty impressive AIR apps for our customers (5 apps, 40 KSLOC or so total). It takes a good level of software discipline to make apps that perform, can be reused and are maintainable (like any good desktop app). We chose AIR because of Linux / Window cross compatibility and its beautiful appearance.

Re: Shortchanging Your Business with User-Hostile Platforms

#23

Post by ianhawes »

iamclovin wrote: post #14

I guess the same applies for apps in the mobile space too. iOS Apps built using frameworks such as Titanium and PhoneGap always seem a little off. There is an interesting discussion about this in Dan Benjamin's latest episode of the 'Build And Analyze' series with Marco Arment. http://5by5.tv/buildanalyze/8

PhoneGap apps feel very off because they're simply HTML/JS wrapped in a WebKit component, but Titanium is far different. Titanium makes native controls. Its virtually impossible to tell the difference between an app created in Titanium versus some JS crap wrapped in PhoneGap.

Re: Shortchanging Your Business with User-Hostile Platforms

#24

Post by grantheaslip »

StavrosK wrote: post #19
antimatter15 wrote: post #12

I've never liked AIR and QT/WebKit apps (or even the Opera web browser) because there's this feeling similar to that of Uncanny Valley, where something just doesn't feel right. The scroll bar doesn't work well, something happens too fast or too slow, selection doesn't behave as it should, the buttons look weird. Something along those lines.

Opera has been native for a while...

I think the point he's making is that a lot of the UI elements don't quite look or feel right, kind of like how a lot of Adobe CS apps have "native" dialogues full of weird mistakes.

Sometimes little look and feel things have a huge impact on how people react to apps: I remember (and I could be wrong, it's been a while) pretty much instantly not liking Opera on OS X when I first tried it since it had smooth scrolling turned on by default, something almost no Cocoa apps do.

Re: Shortchanging Your Business with User-Hostile Platforms

#25

Post by StavrosK »

grantheaslip wrote: post #24
StavrosK wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Opera has been native for a while...

I think the point he's making is that a lot of the UI elements don't quite look or feel right, kind of like how a lot of Adobe CS apps have "native" dialogues full of weird mistakes. Sometimes little look and feel things have a huge impact on how people react to apps: I remember (and I could be wrong, it's been a while) pretty much instantly not liking Opera on OS X when I first tried it since it had smooth scrolling…

Oh, yes, I'm just pointing out that they changed that because people who have seen opera recently might be confused by the comment.

Re: Shortchanging Your Business with User-Hostile Platforms

#26

Post by [deleted] »

al3x wrote: post #15
aditya wrote: post #11

This is a fascinating question. AIR and the new mobile app frameworks are great for prototyping and getting an app out there really quickly, and perhaps then you can make the decision to either build native apps for your biggest platforms; or not. Alex is obviously pointing to the verbal minority (of which he is a part), because for every person out there that speaks out against, say, the Tweetdeck AIR app; there are…

You can dismiss the "verbal minority", or you could treat them as leading indicators. Personally, I'll err on the side of building something that's up to my standards rather than seeing if I can get away with mediocrity. It's entirely possible to focus on both stability and, say, a quality desktop application. If you're under-resourced to accomplish both goals, maybe you didn't plan correctly.

[deleted]

Re: Shortchanging Your Business with User-Hostile Platforms

#27

Post by jrockway »

Indeed. These group chat businesses should support open standards like XMPP or IRC. Yes, XMPP and IRC suck, but there are tons of clients available that work with each. If you support one of these, the user can use your "beautiful" web or AIR client, or they can bring their own real client. You get happy users without having to write any code.

I've worked at several jobs with distributed teams, and the one that used IRC was the easiest. (I've also used Outlook Communicator, which is, as you'd guess, the worst fucking software product of all time. Except for Windows and Outlook, of course.)

Re: Shortchanging Your Business with User-Hostile Platforms

#28

Post by Jach »

keyle wrote: post #4

He has a point. I'm an ex-air developer. I moved to WPF. So yes, ok there are heaps of bad air app out there, because the learning curve is so low. That being said I think AIR can be very close to native. It takes that extra mile of programming that most don't do. In the end, you might as well make it native. But think about this for a moment. An AIR app can and does run well on both Mac and PC. I understand native i…

I figure Flex and AIR are just becoming the new PHP. People love to hate, but I really like programming in both even though my favorite languages are Python and Scheme.

When people say programming in Flex is annoying.. have they ever done SWT development, or Swing? GUI work in general usually bugs the crap out of me, but MXML with AS and HTML with JS are fantastic.

Re: Shortchanging Your Business with User-Hostile Platforms

#30

Post by myth_drannon »

iamclovin wrote: post #14

I guess the same applies for apps in the mobile space too. iOS Apps built using frameworks such as Titanium and PhoneGap always seem a little off. There is an interesting discussion about this in Dan Benjamin's latest episode of the 'Build And Analyze' series with Marco Arment. http://5by5.tv/buildanalyze/8

There is very informative discussion on StackOverflow about Titanium vs PhoneGap :

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1482586/comparison-betwee...

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