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PPK: "Apple is not evil. iPhone developers are stupid."

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Re: PPK: "Apple is not evil. iPhone developers are stupid."

#71

Post by wallflower »

> After ten years I am f*ing tired of the "Web development is not real programming" bullshit that the arrogant bastards in "real programming" are spouting because they’re too frightened to learn something new.

As someone who tinkered with browser-specific Javascript in the ugly, pre-jQuery early days of DHTML and failed to see where Javascript and HTML and CSS were headed (retreating into the safe world of Java for years - completely missing the ascendance of XHTML/jQuery/CSS - rendering my web skills of the Netscape 4.x era), I agree.

Re: PPK: "Apple is not evil. iPhone developers are stupid."

#72

Post by tjogin »

jbc25 wrote: post #61

What a ridiculous article. The downsides of web apps on the iPhone are painfully obvious and have been pointed out by the other commenters. Anyone who has tried to use web apps on the iPhone knows they are not ideal.

Yeah, obvious trolling. Had this come from someone unknown it wouldn't had gotten any attention.

Re: PPK: "Apple is not evil. iPhone developers are stupid."

#74

Post by gord »

allenbrunson wrote: post #56
SamAtt wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You left out one important point that he mentions but doesn't give enough credit to... 3) There's still a lot of features on the iPhone that you can only access through native apps. He claims most of the apps he has could be web apps. But I just opened my iPhone to the Top 25 paid apps and 7 out of the top 10 could only exist as native apps (and the other three are debatable but in theory you could write them in Java…

The fact that iPhone web apps can't access iPhone hardware comes up all the time here. It seems odd to me that nobody mentions the fact that, with not much work, it's possible to create an iPhone browser that can give a website access to most of the iPhone hardware through javascript: gps/location services, the camera, the photo library, the music library, the accelerometer, and so on. One enterprising developer wrot…

The demos look good, although I think the 12.99 price is going to rule it out, because at least initially its too much to pay in order to use one app.

For such a critical component, youd really want something open source [and free as in beer also]... after all it needs to keep pace rapidly, be rock solid, trusted by all developers, etc.

[EDIT : correction.. Big5Lite is free, not sure what non Lite has. Big5 project is opensource it seems - http://code.google.com/p/big5/]

App developers who use it can compete while adding to this common component - it plays the role of the browser. It just happens to be a browser which gives you access to nice hardware features such as geo location, media library, contacts etc [policed by os].

Here lies the solution for some percentage of apps, between 90.0 and 99.95.

Re: PPK: "Apple is not evil. iPhone developers are stupid."

#75

Post by gord »

mattmaroon wrote: post #31
SamAtt wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You left out one important point that he mentions but doesn't give enough credit to... 3) There's still a lot of features on the iPhone that you can only access through native apps. He claims most of the apps he has could be web apps. But I just opened my iPhone to the Top 25 paid apps and 7 out of the top 10 could only exist as native apps (and the other three are debatable but in theory you could write them in Java…

All sufficiently popular platforms trend towards games. Graphics alone makes the app store a necessity.

Wouldn't the popularity and success of flash games be a counter argument?

Admittedly not for 3D intensive games. But maybe flash+browser will catch up with 3D. Only a year ago RaphealJS was magic.

Re: PPK: "Apple is not evil. iPhone developers are stupid."

#76

Post by gord »

pvandehaar wrote: post #58

Summary: "Webapps are almost as good as Native Apps in many ways." The author reveals no advantages of webapps over a good AppStore that allows 3rd-party software sources. He is simply angry that he doesn't get enough attention as a web developer, not especially different from the complaint of a three year old child, though with the language of a nine year old.

We can criticize the delivery.. but given the popularity of the thread, I think the OP is making a valid point.

I have written location-aware iPhone native apps, and if I had an open-source alternative to Big5 then, I probably would have used that.

In my case it would have saved me quite a lot of overhead in terms of moving from Linux to a full mac development platform. Not having to learn a new syntax and api for iPhone might have been handy... and then I would have avoided having to jump through the code-signing hoops that tend to break when you upgrade software versions.

So.. that's quite a bit of overhead for an app which only uses the geo-location feature of the hardware.

I do enjoy the Mac platform, XCode etc. I'm not apple bashing here, but making a comparison.

Re: PPK: "Apple is not evil. iPhone developers are stupid."

#77

Post by tcarnell »

We're almost there, one step removed and we'll have it.

Let's replace 'stupid' for 'greedy'.

Then --> more fool the iPhone users that are paying billions of dollars for average/poor applications that could be replaced by FREE, high quality web apps.

Apple have found a way to make a forture selling what is already freely available - a neat trick.

Isn't it incredible that anybody would pay for a 'dictionary application' these days - whatever the platform?

Re: PPK: "Apple is not evil. iPhone developers are stupid."

#78

Post by wvenable »

ynniv wrote: post #50
wvenable wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any reasonably interesting web app is going to do it's "work" on the server. A web app can run it's UI in offline mode but you've scooped it out's brains.

Either you meant "it's data", or you're doing it wrong. http://sproutcore.com http://googlecode.blogspot.com/2009/09/chris-anderson-couchd...

Wow, you can store data and retrieve it. Why do we need web browsers at all -- Microsoft released Access decades ago!

Re: PPK: "Apple is not evil. iPhone developers are stupid."

#79

Post by ynniv »

wvenable wrote: post #78
ynniv wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Either you meant "it's data", or you're doing it wrong. http://sproutcore.com http://googlecode.blogspot.com/2009/09/chris-anderson-couchd...

Wow, you can store data and retrieve it. Why do we need web browsers at all -- Microsoft released Access decades ago!

Impressively worthless comment. If MS Access apps were free to develop and worked on any platform in useful sandboxes, your sarcasm would be warranted. Instead you make yourself look like as idiot, suggesting that the Web is popular because people didn't know about Access.

Re: PPK: "Apple is not evil. iPhone developers are stupid."

#80

Post by wvenable »

ynniv wrote: post #79
wvenable wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow, you can store data and retrieve it. Why do we need web browsers at all -- Microsoft released Access decades ago!

Impressively worthless comment. If MS Access apps were free to develop and worked on any platform in useful sandboxes, your sarcasm would be warranted. Instead you make yourself look like as idiot, suggesting that the Web is popular because people didn't know about Access.

Whoosh That's the sound of my comment going over your head.

If you think the web is popular because it's a cross platform sandboxed version of Access (which is essentially what you were suggesting) then you're the idiot. There's only so many useful applications you can make by simply storing and retrieving very simple data locally.

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