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All apps should be native. Who needs browsers and JavaScript?

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Re: All apps should be native. Who needs browsers and JavaScript?

#12

Post by tolmasky »

As I downloaded the economist app to listen to economist articles today, I felt the exact opposite of this article...

1. Won't be able to link to any article to friends unless the app maker decided to implement specific "share" functionality. Unlike a link that I can email, text, store in a file...

2. Oh and even if they have made this share functionality, it may not work on my friend's non-iPhone device. Even if I decided to share this with myself, I may not be able to consume it on my Mac.

3. Can't open multiple articles/audios in different tabs unless the app writer specifically took the time to make a multiple views interface

4. I'll have to wait 8 months before I can view this data on my iPad, because the co made the 100% reasonable decision to ship iPhone only first. I much prefer being completely incapable of viewing this data on one of my devices than a possibly less than ideal rendering of a web page with it on every platform I own.

5. Almost certainly can't group media in terms of topic, since the top level view is always going to be "app". So no collection of research bookmarks, just everything lost in their little provider's containers...

6. And the bonus is I now have to worry about the right place to organize this stupid app on my screen since I can't just keep a link to the data I care about.

Re: All apps should be native. Who needs browsers and JavaScript?

#13

Post by BWStearns »

snitko wrote: post #6

So, you don't like the Javascript language, therefore web sucks? I'm no big fan of Javascript myself (so I'm gradually switching to Dart), but really, that's a lousy argument. Web is essential. Some apps are better be implemented natively, true. But most don't need that. And it's a great win for developers too, so you don't have to re-implement stuff for different platforms. I'm not even sure the author is being seri…

I think it's fair to say that some of his points are either hyperbolic or should be reasonably interpreted that way, but given that all the perceived flaws in javascript are essentially allowances for the original perceived purpose of the language (being a lightly used logic layer in the browser that was highly error tolerant), it not longer makes sense to us JS when you're building out massively complex apps that in a business sense need to be nearly/possibly-totally error free.

It would be nice to see a kind of pseudo-browser platform that served as a casing for generic apps that you could write in server-side languages clearly you lose some flexibility from doing that in terms of fault tolerance but many apps these days have a business case where fault tolerance is already so low it doesn't matter.

Re: All apps should be native. Who needs browsers and JavaScript?

#14

Post by davideschiera »

Right now, browsers are the easiest platform where you can build an application that can be made available to a lot of different devices. And when it's a requirement, from a time-to-market point of view this is a huge benefit. And this should be taken seriously into account especially now that people tend to use 2 or 3 devices every single day.

On the other side, from application point of view both the browser and the operating system are containers that offer some sort of API to interact with the user, the device and other resources. I wouldn't say that one has to be necessarily better than the other, it depends on the goal of the application.

Re: All apps should be native. Who needs browsers and JavaScript?

#15

Post by gravity13 »

briantakita wrote: post #2

> as I mature as a programmer I continually see JavaScript as a pretty awful language for real programming Not sure what the author means by "real programming". Is this opposed to "fake programming"? The more I mature as a programmer, the more I appreciate JavaScript's flexibility & readability. This allows for some useful idioms to manage complexity on large & intricate codebases. I like these dynamic idiomatic arch…

Fake Programming: Using hacks and tricks to achieve things other languages have natively.

Though anybody will admit it's some pretty clever stuff, not many seem to look at things like this and recognize it for what it is.

Javascript's not the language rife with proprietary bullshit anymore, it's become something a bit more new: a hacked together super-language. Stick thousands of brilliant people on one unfortunate platform together and it will be inevitable.

So perhaps it's "not real" because I can't do it without requirejs. Maybe we'll appreciate it when you can do what Sass does in a .css file. So what if you can OOP, FRP, MVP, P its got a vast supply of crud-you-should-never-use.

I tell you one thing, though: I'd really love to rewrite everything I've ever done into Objective-C.

Re: All apps should be native. Who needs browsers and JavaScript?

#17

Post by dzkanner »

dang wrote: post #16

This post was killed by user flags.

I'm pretty new to HN and am not sure why the post was killed. I was looking forward to an interesting debate on the value of browsers vs native apps. Can you please give advice for how to avoid being flagged while stimulating interesting debate? Thank you for the help.

Re: All apps should be native. Who needs browsers and JavaScript?

#18

Post by dang »

dzkanner wrote: post #17
dang wrote: post #16

This post was killed by user flags.

I'm pretty new to HN and am not sure why the post was killed. I was looking forward to an interesting debate on the value of browsers vs native apps. Can you please give advice for how to avoid being flagged while stimulating interesting debate? Thank you for the help.

I can't speak for the flaggers, but perhaps some of them will explain.

Re: All apps should be native. Who needs browsers and JavaScript?

#19

Post by ASneakyFox »

tolmasky wrote: post #12

As I downloaded the economist app to listen to economist articles today, I felt the exact opposite of this article... 1. Won't be able to link to any article to friends unless the app maker decided to implement specific "share" functionality. Unlike a link that I can email, text, store in a file... 2. Oh and even if they have made this share functionality, it may not work on my friend's non-iPhone device. Even if I d…

I don't think hes argueing of the whole web.. hes talking about javascript. Eg websites that could and perhaps should be apps. This is different from a website that provides information.
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