In response to the introduction of tools for writing mobile apps for multiple platforms Bob Writes:
I can predict with some confidence that these tools will work "ok" but will suffer as they all do with the same traditional issues.
Either you have to work to the lowest feature set and the Apps look rubbish, or you will have to write extras to cover the specific platform and you will run out of budgeted time, or you will use the "specific" tool’s features (drop downs are a classic for this) and you App will not look "Native".
There is also the question of copyright. If Apple is happy to sue people who try and copy it’s ‘look and feel’ on other phones, would it be happy if you made an Android App look like it’s iPhone equivalent?
A good specification maybe a better tool to deploy. Get what you want down on paper, involve experts on each platform to identify where there should be native features included and then get a top team to write for each platform.
It will be interesting to see some real life examples and successes with these tools.
Bob, you bring up a lot of really great points. Let’s see if we can address some of them from my limited experience and research. It would be great if others would clarify or correct anything I don’t have accurate.
The software generated from these tools does work “ok” with some difference from what we have experienced with problems in the past. The key difference today is that the standardizing framework does not replace native presentation or device capabilities. Instead it generates the necessary op code to interact with the native APIs.
However, since the code is operating in HTML5, CSS and JavaScript it will not perform as fast as native code.
So, you probably wouldn’t want to write something that is really intensive like a game. But, writing applications interacting with mobile capabilities work “ok”. For many things, users wouldn’t notice any difference between native and hybrid code.
As far as look and feel, well that is not really an issue because those features are part of the native code that is retained. You’re not going to be presenting Apple look and feel on an Android. Instead you are using HTML5 and CSS for your rendering so things should look pretty much native on each device.
Am I getting this right? Please add your comments here of drop an email to btaylor@sswug.org.
Cheers,
Ben