On Fri, Jan 4, 2013 at 2:29 PM, Greg Keogh <[email protected]> wrote:

>  The former means that the apps will be crippled because HTML5 just can't
> reproduce the rich UI of GDI/WPF or Silverlight,
>
Depends on the rendering engine. Throw this in Chrome:
http://www.htmlfivewow.com/slide1, my jaw dropped at this:
http://www.htmlfivewow.com/slide52

That aside, check out Xamarin.com (god I love these guys - is there nothing
they cannot do?)


> I fear that the Silverlight version of our app is doomed to die at an
> early age because it can only be seen in the ever-shrinking world of the
> desktop web browser. Years of Silverlight development may be wasted.
>
Silverlight always was a lame duck that wanted to be Flash for no other
reason than Flash was everywhere.

Not only is there coding confusion about using ObjectC, Java, C#,
> HTML/Javascript, etc, there are marketing problems about the functionality
> of the apps on different devices. The Windows desktop app is very
> sophisticated, but the versions for phones and tablets would have to be
> seriously dumbed-down to be touch friendly. Even the Metro version would be
> utterly incapable of expressing the full app functionality. We now have the
> nightmare of managing not only different codebases and developer teams, but
> mutiple versions of the app with various functionality.
>
One man's "dumbed down" is another's "optimised for specific scenarios".
There isn't anything inherently evil or bad in offering a subset of
functionality on the go *if it is the subset people actually need*.

Anyway, you get the idea. There must be other people in here who are going
> through this multi-platform conundrum in the new phone and tablet world.
> What ever happened to the promise that software development would get
> easier as languages and platforms converged? Remember the promise that VMs
> like Java and .NET would make our lives easier? It looks like different
> huge companies have betrayed us and are forcing us to use their platforms
> for their own greedy profit.
>
Well, Java is shit slow and does a great job of providing uniformly garbage
experiences across platforms. MS has never been very good at
cross-platform. .NET's cross-platformness died when they started building
the framework out of thin wrappers around pre-existing WIn32/COM IP.

On the plus side, there are companies of pure genius out there making stuff
like Xamarin, Phonegap etc. Reading between the lines - it sounds like
Xamarin is what you are after.


> That leaves the developers and the marketing people bewildered without a
> clear path, and it's happening around me now.
>
You would have to post some more detail on what the app does. Unless there
are specific and compelling reasons (i.e. needs GPU shaders, camera and
stuff) I would do the whole thing web based.

-- 
David Connors
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