The Shape of Mobile Development To Come • Hacker News Board

Re: The Shape of Mobile Development To Come

#41

Post by weixiyen » Mon, Jul 30, 2012, 8:13 AM UTC

10char wrote: post #22

franzus wrote: post #8

One thing all those "let's build our app on top of 1000 layers so we can use our $favourite language"-people tend to forget is that mobile software runs on mobile devices. Which have one remarkable property: they are energy constrained. So you better write some fast, native code or your users will have trouble keeping their devices alive for one day.

I think RubyMotion proves that alternative languages don't need to come at a cost to performance. It's tougher to write a custom compiler like RM uses, but the end result is identical performance to normal Objective-C. "Just" write a similar compiler for Android/Dalvik and you're there ;)

Just watched the video on RubyMotion. Is this really saving much time over Objective-C? I'm saving a few lines of code, but now I have to keep compiling from Ruby to Obj-C, and get none of the benefits of XCode.

Re: The Shape of Mobile Development To Come

#42

Post by weixiyen » Mon, Jul 30, 2012, 9:05 AM UTC

spaghetti wrote: post #33

The article's mention of beautifully designed mobile apps sparked a few thoughts for me. One property of mobile devices and especially smaller devices like phones is people use them frequently throughout the day in short bursts. Small wait times associated with bouncing, translating animations etc are magnified and the UIs start to feel laggy. Yesterday I purchased my first Android device and the snappy UI has been q…

I disagree about the prediction for simplified Craigslist-style UIs. I don't think it will ever happen on Mobile.

Animations play a very important role in communicating to the user how to interact with the interface. Animations also give the illusion of a responsive app.

The best apps are likely built by great designers who know how to use animations effectively to communicate with the user.

Everyone else will simply try to copy the best apps along with their animations... thus, it's hard to see animations going away any time soon.

On another note, I find it surprising that yours was the only comment even mentioning design. For me, that was the most important part of the article with by far the biggest implications.

The author predicts that designers will be able to take on a portion of the client-side engineering role in the near future. If this happens, it will completely change how apps are made. It will change the workflow between designers and engineers.

The traditional model of mocking up a PSD and passing it off to an engineer will no longer be viable. Designers will just build clients and interact with APIs. This means that more and more designers will probably have to learn programming, which is a good thing for the future of mobile apps.

Re: The Shape of Mobile Development To Come

#43

Post by weixiyen » Mon, Jul 30, 2012, 9:10 AM UTC

ecspike wrote: post #3

He lost me with his "Objective-C ...has evolved over the past two years to become an "easier" language ... " I would argue that it has less to do with the ease of the language and instead the market effects of iOS.

It's true. Honestly, Objective-C in its current state is far easier to pick up than JavaScript, which only gained popularity due to the market effects of browsers.

Re: The Shape of Mobile Development To Come

#44

Post by spaghetti » Mon, Jul 30, 2012, 1:52 PM UTC

weixiyen wrote: post #42

spaghetti wrote: post #33

The article's mention of beautifully designed mobile apps sparked a few thoughts for me. One property of mobile devices and especially smaller devices like phones is people use them frequently throughout the day in short bursts. Small wait times associated with bouncing, translating animations etc are magnified and the UIs start to feel laggy. Yesterday I purchased my first Android device and the snappy UI has been q…

I disagree about the prediction for simplified Craigslist-style UIs. I don't think it will ever happen on Mobile. Animations play a very important role in communicating to the user how to interact with the interface. Animations also give the illusion of a responsive app. The best apps are likely built by great designers who know how to use animations effectively to communicate with the user. Everyone else will simply…

I think you're right about animation not going away. Especially animations that help the user understand the app. However I think there's still some animations and especially some shadow, gradients and other small design touches that are overkill and can be removed w/o negatively impacting the user-experience.

Re: The Shape of Mobile Development To Come

#45

Post by stcredzero » Mon, Jul 30, 2012, 4:47 PM UTC

cageface wrote: post #31

stcredzero wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If MS and Apple threw JVMs onto their devices then we would be 90% of the way there already. As a one-time proponent of write-once-run-anywhere solutions, I would have to say this would probably result in a reduction of UX quality.

I think the MonoTouch guys are handling this in the only sensible way. Non-UI code is shared across platforms but UI code is written per-platform using the native toolkit. I think this is about as close as you're going to get without compromising user experience.

That is indeed the only sensible way.