I think Roger missed the point of this entire group. The original intent of iPhoneWebDev, was to support WEB developers who were trying to make their sites more iPhone friendly, not to supplant native apps. In fact the group was started prior to the existance of any API/SDK for building native apps.
I do agree with Roger that trying to "fool the users and/or the Apple Store into seeing a Web app as a native app is clearly folly", however, it is not folly to try to improve the usability of existing web content and being able to render a better user experience for the iPhone users who would browse those sites. Native apps clearly have an advantage over web apps since they can make better use of the underlying native hardware at native speeds, whereas web apps must rely on the interpretation and emulation of code from within the browser. Using tools such as big5 and phonegap does help a little towards building "native-like" web apps within a native app shell, but still can't match the performance of an app built entirely in native code. I personally have used big5/phonegap and have successfully submitted 20 apps to the appstore, with one of the titles actually in the top 100. I wasn't proud of the performance, but it got the job done, and after all, at the end of the day that's what's important. Frameworks like iUI served their purpose, they allowed the early developers of iPhone Web Apps to build list based apps that had a somewhat similar look-and-feel of native apple apps. Did it match the performance? NO. Did it get the job done? YES. Could it be improved? YES. Kudos to Joe Hewitt for his contribution to the iPhone community during those early days. Even bigger Kudos to the hundreds of active participants in this forum who've helped others improve their understanding of how to develop for the iPhone. While I've only used iUI in one web app, the discussions in this group helped immensely during my repurposing of my own websites so that they could be viewed better on an iPhone. Over the past 2 years, I've been able to "iPhonify" almost 100 of my web apps, with lots of help from the information gained on here and other groups. I will always be a proponent of the community approach to solving problems, and iPhoneWebDev was/is a great place to work out those problems related to building functioning web sites tailored to iPhone users. On Jan 6, 3:41 pm, Roger <[email protected]> wrote: > Seems that the emphasis is on making Web applications "look and feel" > like native apps. Looking through the archive, it seems this has been > pointed out as a bad idea for some time, but the pointers are always > shouted down as "impolite" or "off-topic." > > A recent post suggested a starting point for a design was choosing an > "appropriate framework" with IUI and iWebKit as examples. The former > is clearly a derelict and has anyone actually looked at the latter? > In short, the ZIP contains one pseudo-XHTML document (of course) and > one really confused script that includes some attempts to support IE, > browser sniffing and lots of mistakes (all in about 50 lines.) How > could such a thing help any app, let alone serve as a common > framework? > > The means to the desired end are not available. Trying to fool the > users and/or the Apple Store into seeing a Web app as a native app is > clearly folly. --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "iPhoneWebDev" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/iphonewebdev?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
