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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

#32

Post by weiyin »

blueicelt2004 wrote: post #26

What exactly is this looking for in terms of creating the sidebar? Loading your android source code and going to your site nothing appears in the navigation menu.

for the sidebar in particular, it's looking for menu_default.json. hope that helps!

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

#34

Post by nkozyra »

krrishd wrote: post #22
nkozyra wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I immediately thought about that after posting, but in reality markup is a clunky and expensive way to dictate this and it would create a lot of waste for something that would be used infrequently.

An interesting idea that comes to mind is the concept of a Mobile Stylesheet / .mss file that would define elements by ID / class and dictate what those elements would represent in a mobile UI. Then you wouldn't have a bunch of needless data-mobile-intent="blah"

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

#35

Post by mike415 »

krrishd wrote: post #11
weiyin wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We use webviews, but try to intelligently integrate them into the app. Things like back button, transitions, caching, and offline mode are designed to work automatically w/ little or no configuration.

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.

As @nkozyra says, understanding what all the links do is hard, however there are automated ways of converting common types of webpage layouts into structure data for native presentation.

For example, our startup (shameless plug) utilizes a computer vision technology to automatically extract structured data from articles, images, products, and videos, etc: http://diffbot.com/products/automatic/. These can then be used to present native-experience views.

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

#39

Post by lbotos »

mike415 wrote: post #35
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.

As @nkozyra says, understanding what all the links do is hard, however there are automated ways of converting common types of webpage layouts into structure data for native presentation. For example, our startup (shameless plug) utilizes a computer vision technology to automatically extract structured data from articles, images, products, and videos, etc: http://diffbot.com/products/automatic/ . These can then be use…

Out of curiosity, I'd love to learn more about your stack. Any blog posts handy?

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

#40

Post by weiyin »

swozniak wrote: post #36

Really interested to see the end result. I submitted and received the "Success" notice about two hours ago - how long should I be expecting before having access to a build?

Normally ~1 minute, but our build queue got a bit out of hand. We've fired up a few more build processes and are working down the queue. You should get an email shortly. Sorry for the delay!
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