On 1/3/17, John Spikowski <supp...@scriptbasic.org> wrote: > I truly enjoy your views of the mobile industry and the tools being > used. > > Have you looked at Adobe's PhoneGap? It seems to translate JS, HTML and > CSS into Android or iOS phone apps. > > https://build.phonegap.com/ >
PhoneGap was a kind-of competitor to Corona and a little more so to Appcelerator. If I’m not mixing it up, PhoneGap is basically just a webview packaged up as a native app. I generally don’t have any enthusiasm for that approach. I mentioned before that WebViews suck on pretty much everything except iOS (and even there they aren’t great). Even if they didn’t have all the bugs and technical limitations we encountered, I find the user experience bad. My experience with them was they were bloated and slow. There is just too much machinery in the web browser which gets in the way of making anything fast. Memory pressure is terrible too which gets in the way, which is compounded since the JavaScript engine uses garbage collection. Heck, I was just trying to browse a simple website for documentation the other day on my Raspberry Pi 2 with its default web browser. The process kept dying, presumably because it was eating too much RAM. I remember various usability complaints on certain web view implementations. For example, I remember at least one of them (probably several), don’t let you override the scrolling behavior of the webview. I remember users trying to do stuff with webviews and they were trying to prevent touch dragging from causing the view to start panning. Their content were no larger than the content view so there was nothing to scroll, but for example, iOS has that springy rubber band bounce that happens when you drag at the end. Everybody was trying to disable that, but it wasn’t possible. And I remember WebView itself on iOS is so complicated, nasty, and I guess potentially dangerous to exploit, it is forbidden to subclass it. I remember hearing that internally at Apple, there were discussions about adding a “final” keyword to Objective-C mostly prompted by this one case. (I also remember causing kernel panics and machine freezes related to doing stuff the graphics stack with WebViews on Mac, and all sorts of broken crazy behavior on Android, especially has they rolled-out their hardware accelerated renderer in Android 4.) Anyway, part of Appcelerator’s marketing challenge was to explain the difference between a native app using a JavaScript VM (this market generally hasn’t heard of Lua or understands how it works), vs. a webview based app. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Check out the vibrant tech community on one of the world's most engaging tech sites, SlashDot.org! http://sdm.link/slashdot _______________________________________________ Iup-users mailing list Iup-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/iup-users
