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Showing posts with label HTML5. Show all posts
Showing posts with label HTML5. Show all posts

Thursday, September 8, 2011

HTML5 for Mobile -better than native apps or a "flash" in the pan?


Interest in HTML5 is definitely hotting up-and not only from within geekland. Leading corporates are keen to "something different" that hasn´t been before, and HTML5 is definitely flavour of the month.

There still are several issues with HTML5 that mean that its adoption has been limited or, at best, what has been adopted were the "easy bits" of HTML5 that are more stable than the more racy components (the location component, for example).

Specifically in terms of mobile browser adapted sites, the examples are even thinner on the ground. The Financial Times´s recent move to switch from a native iPhone app to a HTML5 site instead could be seen as a watershed event.

However, while HTML5 is great for showing content, clearly it is not a replacement for native apps which call native features of the handset (camera, accelerometer etc). Can you make an image in an HTML5 mobile site animate when you shake the phone...no, you cannot (and yes, some clients ask for it!).

You can see a great comparison by Michael Mahemoff of some pros and cons of developing native vs HTML5 apps here: HTML5 vs Native apps comparison. Overall, the point is that web apps are closing the gap on native apps..this is true in many ways, but then the gap in some cases was very large.


Tuesday, April 6, 2010

HTML5 on iPhone and Offline Web Apps














Making iPhone Web Apps continue to run after they went offline used to be an uphill struggle. However, with the specification of up-and-coming HTML5, you can now load a web app just once and then let it run offline. All this, without a need for a continuous internet connection, giving it the feel of a locally installed native iPhone app.

In his recent post on Mobiforge, Wei-Meng Lee explains how to use Dashcode to write offline iPhone web apps. His article gives you a great step-by-step explanation, from the Configuration of Apache for Web Publishing to Session- and Client-side Storage.

If you are about to develop an app with offline mode, I recommend you read through Wei-Meng's article for further insights. You can find it by clicking here.
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