On Fri, Jul 12, 2013 at 11:22 AM, Steven Walling <[email protected]>wrote:
> On Fri, Jul 12, 2013 at 9:00 AM, Brion Vibber <[email protected]> > wrote: > > > I'd recommend against building any specific 'app' for a web-based OS like > > this, but if we can have a Chrome Web Store entry that conveniently > > bookmarks us and that makes us easier to use, well that'd be awesome. > > > > You mean you recommend against OS-specific apps, like we have specific apps > for Windows Phone, iOS, and Android? ;) > Windows Phone, iOS, and Android aren't web-based OSs -- a web site doesn't get full access to the system on them. We are currently working on OS-specific (not HTML-based) apps for iOS and Android for the Commons photo uploader, but Firefox OS and Chrome OS get to make do with the web sites. :) Note that we don't have a Windows Phone app at all (though there are some third-party ones -- and we do have a Windows 8 tablet app that's mostly experimental). The official iOS and Android Wikipedia apps in the stores are currently unmaintained, and will get replaced in a few months... We're still evaluating how much balancing between native code and web-based code to use on the new versions (ultimately a Wikipedia app is a big wrapper around a web view with the actual content; we'll move at least some of the chrome out to native for performance and integration reasons). But we do know we don't want to use the "pure locally-hosted HTML 5 app stuck in a WebView" approach of PhoneGap, which required us to have two HTML frontends (the site, and the app) *and* be stuck with the limitations of mobile web browsers *and* have to debug the framework ourselves a lot. :) > Snark aside: what you proposed is essentially how most Chrome apps work and > is easiest to implement. For HTML5 games and such, I'm sure it's more > app-like in that you may not be able to launch the game without installing > the app, but most people basically just redirect users to the normal site. > Obviously this makes the use of the name "app" seem bizarre, but the > advantage for ChromeOS users is that we make it easier to get back to > Wikipedia. (One step instead of three.) > Excellent. :) -- brion _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
