Earlier quoted context omitted.
The fact that you go to this effort is why I love HN.
If only we could get notifications for replies & a decent mobile app existed.
Did you read the blog post? It would need to be at least two decent mobile apps.
It’s cheaper to build multiple native applications than one responsive web app
191–200 of 322 posts
Re: It’s cheaper to build multiple native applications than one responsive web app
#192The web's view layer, html and css, has the wrong granularity for building precise ui. Html's controls are too high level for pixel perfect manipulation, and too low level for easy assembly into rich ui. CSS meanwhile tries to get you to make general rules that interact to produce a precise rendering, which you never quite achieve because there are always unintended side effects of the rules. No native view api works like this, and for good reason. Since these technologies are almost entirely but not quite unsuitable for building a native-like view layer, people build abstractions around them to approximate the view layer api any native ui gives you. But then the problem becomes one of synchronizing the facade view to the real view, hence ten thousand templating and layout frameworks, all while continually dealing with the leaky nature of the abstraction.
I guess what i'm saying is that i believe in the principles of the web, but i think html and css are terrible technologies that do a disservice to those principles.
Re: It’s cheaper to build multiple native applications than one responsive web app
#193Earlier quoted context omitted.
The fact that you go to this effort is why I love HN.
If only we could get notifications for replies & a decent mobile app existed.
Dan Grossman maintains a tool to help you with one:
I use it.
Re: It’s cheaper to build multiple native applications than one responsive web app
#194Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think the author is already addressing this: Yes, you can build 2007 websites much better now. They will be consistent across platforms and perform great. But my 12 year olds don’t want 2007 websites. They want 2016 apps.
Sure, but "2016 App" and "2007 App" are not monolithic design choices. If you can decompose those things, you can keep the important bits and throw away the peacocking. Just a simple example: it's trivially easy to make large, flat shaded buttons on the web. That's going to be more familiar to younger users than native web buttons like those on HN. However, there's also spending weeks to make a web button that animat…
> is largely just a thing that native app builders do to show off and give clients a reason to believe their $300/hour is well spent
I recall an article by Zynga (maybe in Gamasutra? Can't find it now) that talked about user retention in relation to "rewards." They said that it's essentially a pure win to make every single action a user performs reward them in some way. Not a big reward—not a "points in a video game" kind of reward—but at least a pretty sound and an unexpectedly smooth animation (vis. "magic sparkles.") These things do make a difference, and it pays (in a competitive niche) for your app to do them. Just like B2B apps are sold mostly on checkbox features, B2C apps are sold mostly on how pretty they look doing their job in the app-store video.
Re: It’s cheaper to build multiple native applications than one responsive web app
#195I completely agree with the article. I joined a startup a few years ago and we went mostly native on Android and iOS with some simple screens as web views shared between them. Later on some clients wanted desktop and Windows Phone versions so we built a lesser featured version as a website to cater for any other devices (adding features as necessary). We started out as 3 software developers and a designer and are expanding. Native apps was a more cost effective way to deliver a good experience while the competition mostly developed web apps resulting in a lesser experience in my opinion.
Re: It’s cheaper to build multiple native applications than one responsive web app
#196I don't like how the author mocks other people who make decisions based on money over ideals:
> That group, btw, has mostly sold out taking high paying jobs at Facebook and Google, and have not heard from since
...but then later justifies his argument to forsake his ideals because "hey I've got a business to run":
> I don’t need you to troll me on Twitter and tell me how I’m betraying the web and the free fucking world. I am just trying to keep my startup going.
Re: It’s cheaper to build multiple native applications than one responsive web app
#197I don't think that's remotely true if you keep the responsive web app simple. YNGNI and KISS and what not. I've been doing this for over ten years. In that time I've seen large web applications built for under 4k; I've also seen massively overbuilt simple applications go for 50k+. It comes down to often how needlessly complex you make the stack. If you stick with solid simple guaranteed tech instead of cutting edge y…
My favorite comment here. People are trying to resolve too many solved problems. Life is much smoother when you're not obsessively teetering on the bleeding edge.
[deleted]
Re: It’s cheaper to build multiple native applications than one responsive web app
#198I like the last line
Re: It’s cheaper to build multiple native applications than one responsive web app
#199The web's view layer, html and css, has the wrong granularity for building precise ui. Html's controls are too high level for pixel perfect manipulation, and too low level for easy assembly into rich ui. CSS meanwhile tries to get you to make general rules that interact to produce a precise rendering, which you never quite achieve because there are always unintended side effects of the rules. No native view api works…
> Html's controls are too high level for pixel perfect manipulation, and too low level for easy assembly into rich ui.
HTML+CSS isn't the only abstraction available, though. If you want a lower-level abstraction, you can use canvas. If you want a higher-level abstraction, you have your choice of composable view component systems (e.g. React).
Re: It’s cheaper to build multiple native applications than one responsive web app
#200Earlier quoted context omitted.
this is also pretty substantive. Fuckity fuck fuck fuck you, and shut the fuck up, dear reader. More fuckity fuck because the author has a keyboard macro that expands "," to "fuck". I don't know, I thought it was pretty much a waste of my time. Read the top of the page you're looking at right now, read my first sentence. There, saved you a few minutes.
Yeah, I don't have any issue with swearing but using any word that often is just poor writing.
I don't know about that. The word "web" is used far more often in that article than any swear word, and "build" is used precisely as often. Yet there are no comments complaining about those words, and I feel pretty sure there wouldn't be even if the swearing were omitted. It seems like it's the swearing that people object to.