Skip to main content

Going native

This afternoon I was pleasantly surprised to see the announcement that Facebook for iOS has gone fully native. Previous to today, the Facebook app has been a viewer to HTML5 based content that was mostly functional, but slow. The old app was adequate, but not stellar. When I fired up the new app I was greeted with a much nicer user experience in regards to smoother scrolling, and cleaner animations. Overall, it was a positive change, although it still does nothing to combat the incredibly content heavy feed that Facebook shoves at your phone. At least I get smoother scrolling while I'm waiting for all my content to take forever to load.

But this all got me thinking about the how far we've come in regards to write-once-run-anywhere promises of the web of the early 2000's. For a big part of my IT career everything seemed to be focused on a movement to make HTML everywhere, a ubiquitous language that could present it's content to all corners of the ever-more-connected globe. But HTML had some serious flaws. First, it's not really an interactive programming language with all the rich features of control structures and variables, so along comes JavaScript to save the day. In fact JavaScript was a huge boon to static web based content, and quickly became the defacto dynamic page language. Perhaps these two together could conquer the world and make it possible to create a single app for every circumstance?

The dream was almost realized fully with Palm's WebOS. Here you had a fully featured smartphone operating system that had as it's core, HTML and JavaScript. For the most part it was a great idea, but it got destroyed by poor hardware, that couldn't keep up with the demands of a fully interpreted system language. Eventually Palm released a native SDK so that developers could go back to writing low level, compiled applications that took full advantage of every possible memory bit and CPU cycle. Native had once again won the day.

Although specialized toolkits such as PhoneGap try to continue to bridge the gap and allow the vision of write-once to continue, even most developers understand that abstraction toolkits end up costing in the end. Especially as an application continues to grow, it usually becomes apparent that, despite their usefulness, toolkits often can't keep up at the same pace as an investment in a native application.

So today once again, native has become the choice for what is probably the most installed app on the planet. The dream of being able to utilize the universality of HTML5 came to a halt, as users breathed a collective sigh of relief, and waiting for Facebook's servers to respond to another smoothly scrolled pull down reload request...

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

The beat goes on

Yesterday Apple revealed their long awaited entry into the streaming music field. They were able to do this quickly because of the acquisition of Beats last year, and the systems and intellectual property that came with that purchase. Considering that the music reveal was pretty much the only big news out of a pretty benign developer keynote, I'll take a few moments to talk about what I think about it. Apple was perhaps the defining company in the music revolution of the past 20 years. With the introduction of the iPod that revolutionized portable music, to the creation of the iTunes store and the eventual death of DRM, Apple has been at the forefront of digital music. This leadership comes with high expectations to continue to lead, and so many people have long questioned Apple not getting into the streaming music business quicker. For the past few years new companies have come forth to lead the change in the streaming music evolution. From Pandora and its ability to create un

Microsoft Surface Pro 3

So I've been a horrible blog author and have neglected this site for far to long. It's not that I haven't had anything to say, I've just neglected to say it. So with an attempt to get back on the wagon, here's some thoughts on Microsoft's announcement yesterday for it's Surface Pro 3. Despite being a minor Apple fanboy, the most interesting company to watch, in the personal computing space right now, is Microsoft. With the departure of Steve Ballmer, and the rise of Satya Nadella, it has been an interesting 9 months for one of the founding pioneers of personal technology. Many agree that Windows 8 has not lived up to what Microsoft would like it to be. They made a bold attempt to redefine how users interact with their computers, and merge the tablet and desktop experience. However, that experiment, by most accounts, has failed. This is a common pattern for Microsoft however, alternating between a mediocre OS release, and then a stellar one. Therefore, it&#

Under the Surface of Microsoft

One of the big tech announcements recently, that caught the world by surprise, was the new Microsoft Surface tablet. Although many people expected some sort of tablet annoucement, I don't think anyone thought that Microsoft would pull out a full-on iPad competitor, complete with massive innovations in design and functionality. My first impression of Surface is that it's a really great piece of technology, and things like the built-in kickstand, and the smart-cover-like touch keyboard are really inventive. Since I'm writing this on an iPad with a wireless keyboard, I know there are plenty of times when the marriage of an old-school physical keyboard input method with modern touch screen interfaces results in something even better :) The thing I wanted to comment on though wasn't the introduction of new hardware, because I think that story is still evolving, and Microsoft's involvement with it's OEM's could be quite the fireworks show. What I want to ramble