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Show HN: Automatically convert a website to Android and iOS

gonative.io

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Re: Show HN: Automatically convert a website to Android and iOS

#22

Post by krrishd »

nkozyra wrote: post #16
krrishd wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Out of curiosity, how hard is it to build something that could parse HTML markup and some CSS stylings and convert that into native views? Assume that the HTML markup and CSS is all done as per your documentation, so that the parser works as expected every time.

Almost impossible in an automated fashion. You can extract all of the data but it's very hard to know what links are supposed to do, how pieces of content should be presented, etc.

What if there was a standard created for the markup, so that the parser would know what the links were supposed to do and how the content shoud be presented, because there would be structured data everywhere specific to the parser?

Re: Show HN: Automatically convert a website to Android and iOS

#25

Post by sumukh1 »

I tried it out and for those who are asking for the difference between PhoneGap and other tools is that this takes your website, adds native components like navigation for menus that it detects and login capabilities. For example in about 10 minutes I "built" a Twitter app using the twitter mobile interface. It has native login/signup, a sidebar for accessing elements, and native search. I don't know how well non-mobile interfaces will translate over - but the native components make it useful.

This is pretty good and it's really what building a hybrid app should look like. There's probably a lot of areas it can be improved.

Re: Show HN: Automatically convert a website to Android and iOS

#28

Post by Hrundi »

Osiris wrote: post #3

Does it make an actual native app or just a wrapper around a web view? I have a couple of (Android) apps that I use that are clearly just a wrapper and it's really annoying. 1) The back button always exits the app instead of going back a screen as would be expected. 2) Switching to another app and coming back causes the app to reload rather than staying on the screen it was on when I switched out.

The only reason you are being bitten by those two points is because the developer is being lazy and neglectful of user experience.

Making those two issues dissappear takes about 6 hours of developer time.

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