421–430 of 515 posts
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Amazon's best selling laptops - http://www.amazon.com/Best-Sellers-Computers-Accessories-Lap...
On the US market. Additionally how many of those laptops are actually running ChromeOS, instead of being replaced by a proper Linux distribution?
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Auto-updates are great except in the rare cases where they aren't at all. Picking up my phone in the morning to recognize that it lost half its battery in the night due an extensive auto update and being left in the cold with a 10% battery (instead of 60%) isn't that great. Beside that I think virmundi above has his points, and I agree with him. App updates are not instantaneous.
i think the default setting for new android releases is only update on wifi and plugged in.
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Both Android Studio and XCode will give you usable iOS and Android code from visual layouts. Well, for some definitions of "usable" and "visual layouts"! Our goal is to make a designer's tool that can output complete, store-ready projects for simple apps and for both platforms. That includes three things that neither Xcode nor Android Studio does: 1) Interface Builder and Android Studio's layout editor are not meant…
I'm sorry, after reading you say "they are now the same because they are flat", I sincerely hope you fail. You are clearly not a designer, yet attempt to market a development tool as such.
For a random example, look at Periscope's new Android version -- the differences from the iOS version are minor, yet it fits in nicely on Lollipop: http://www.theverge.com/2015/5/26/8657349/periscope-android-...
As for the "I sincerely hope you fail" part: we're a startup, so we're likely going to fail anyway. Thanks for the honest sentiment, I guess.
Unless you're making something that needs really good performance (3D gaming for example) building a hybrid app wins every time. Something based on Cordova (eg PhoneGap, Ionic) with Crosswalk can get you to about 90% of the performance of a native app, with about 1/2 of the development time because it's all built with web technology. 90% is easily good enough for most applications. Cordova wraps a uiWebView in some b…
> Something based on Cordova (eg PhoneGap, Ionic) with Crosswalk can get you to about 90% of the performance of a native app Companies like Famo.us have proven this is incorrect mathematically over 2 years ago. That is precisely why Famo.us built its own rendering engine that subverts the DOM and renderings content similar to a gaming engine (Unreal Engine). The DOM can't render as many surfaces as a native app in on…
Unless you're making something that needs really good performance (3D gaming for example) building a hybrid app wins every time. Something based on Cordova (eg PhoneGap, Ionic) with Crosswalk can get you to about 90% of the performance of a native app, with about 1/2 of the development time because it's all built with web technology. 90% is easily good enough for most applications. Cordova wraps a uiWebView in some b…
This is true only if you're working with people without experience. Someone who is experienced with the mobile toolkits is going to be able to develop the app just as fast, with more functionality.
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Both Android Studio and XCode will give you usable iOS and Android code from visual layouts. I've found that usually the easiest way to prototype an interface is just to build it for real - it's faster than Photoshop, even. The hard part about X-platform mobile development is that oftentimes you need different product concepts on Android & iOS, because the idioms, best practices, device capabilities, and user expecta…
Both Android Studio and XCode will give you usable iOS and Android code from visual layouts. Well, for some definitions of "usable" and "visual layouts"! Our goal is to make a designer's tool that can output complete, store-ready projects for simple apps and for both platforms. That includes three things that neither Xcode nor Android Studio does: 1) Interface Builder and Android Studio's layout editor are not meant…
Notifications are completely different on iOS and Android. Sharing data between apps is completely different. Wearables are different. Communicating with a server is different. Accessing contacts is different, as is accessing the camera. Sensors are different, and often differ between Android models.
Most of the big mobile success stories we've seen in the past 5 years have come from people utilizing the unique features of the phone, not treating it like a 5-inch dumb terminal.
I pretty much agree with the post, even more — I like to agree with it. But there's a problem. The problem is there's no stuff like "web/native app": there's a bunch of functionality that solves user's problem to greater or lesser extent. Although there are needs which are technically complex, usually what the user can ask for is pretty simple. Clean UI, button here, button there, some lights and pop-up notifications…
Have you checked QML? It is kinda mix of "native" and "web".
And it isn't the real thing anyway: in order to be a good platform for building GUI apps all that functionality should be directly provided by the DE in the first place (like it is in Android, for example). You cannot play with representation the same way in (say) xfce, as you can in the browser console, moving containers and changing colors as you like.
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> Look at a site like YouTube today. And yet any media player beats it at its core functionality: video playback. Often I find myself using youtube-dl to fetch a youtube video and just play it in a regular media player because it just works better than what browsers have to offer. There even are addons to export YT playlists to VLC and stream them. pdfjs is great. but every 3rd scientific paper I read tends to be som…
> And yet any media player beats it at its core functionality: video playback. And at it's core, BetMax is better than VHS. HD-DVD is better than Blu-Ray. Often, it's not about what is "better". It's about who has the most moment, is easier, less encumbered by DRM, etc. Sometimes it's better to download Youtube... more often than not, Youtube "just works".
Actually this is exact reverse of a Betamax story - better and more expensive long term improvement won over short term and cheaper one.
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> Look at a site like YouTube today. And yet any media player beats it at its core functionality: video playback. Often I find myself using youtube-dl to fetch a youtube video and just play it in a regular media player because it just works better than what browsers have to offer. There even are addons to export YT playlists to VLC and stream them. pdfjs is great. but every 3rd scientific paper I read tends to be som…
YouTube's video playback problems might have nothing to do with the web. Despite having an iPad app that is otherwise mostly great, their iPad video player itself is abysmal. It's just flat-out broken, and they're presumably not going to fix it. If you start playing a video, the timeline at the bottom will start turning grey from left to right to indicate the part of the video that is buffered. But if you scrub to a…
I don't see why any reasonable developer would choose building the same app on multiple platforms over building it once on a standardized platform and having it just work everywhere.
That is, of course, if the standardized platform had all the capabilities and great UX of the proprietary platforms. This is where the web often falls short, and the companies behind proprietary platforms have some very sweet incentives to keep it that way, i.e. developer lock-in and maintaining complete control over the platform's direction.
Despite all the impediments, I still firmly believe an open platform will triumph eventually, because developers love efficiency, and the current landscape of wasting work on rebuilding for proprietary platforms is anything but efficient.
In fact, the web is already capable of competing with native in terms of general UX, not yet quite enough to match or surpass it, but definitely within striking distance. Just take a look at some of the apps made with Ionic: http://showcase.ionicframework.com/
Additional tip for for Android Cordova development: bundling an external WebView like Crosswalk makes quite a bit of difference for <5.0, both in terms of performance and in terms of not having to worry about legacy WebView quirks for older phones.