Mobile HTML5

11% of Web Traffic Worldwide is Now Mobile

Fri, 09 Jul 2010 14:29:55 -0400

Mobile traffic to sites designed for the desktop Web have increased over the last 6 months from 8.3% to 11%, a 32% increase.

Will Mobile Web Apps Eventually Replace Native Apps?

Mon, 05 Jul 2010 19:51:51 -0400

Will Mobile Web Apps Eventually Replace Native Apps?

The preference of marketing over technical reasons signifies a...

Mon, 05 Jul 2010 19:22:00 -0400

The preference of marketing over technical reasons signifies a turn in the developer mindset. Developers no longer see programming fun as a sufficient reward in itself, but consider monetisation opportunities as a primary priority. It seems that, mobiledevelopers now have a sense of commercial pragmatism. As commented by one of our developer respondents, “Technical considerations are irrelevant. The choice of platform is always marketing-driven”.

- Mobile Developer Economics 2010: The migration of developer mindshare. Lots of interesting data and graphs here.

Will HTML5 be the demise of apps?

Fri, 02 Jul 2010 13:25:48 -0400

Will HTML5 be the demise of apps?

HTML5 and the Write-Once, Run Anywhere Dream

Thu, 24 Jun 2010 11:35:50 -0400

thegongshow:

Dan Kantor wrote a piece for Ajaxian about the “write once, run anywhere” dream and how HTML5 is a big step along that path.

Dan’s execution on Extension.fm feels like he reached two years into the future, and pulled an app back in time to show us all what the future of web development could be. In doing so, the tradeoff Dan made was to restrict compatibility to Chrome-only until other browsers become more standards-compliant.

The article is a great case study on the state of modern browsers, and you can see visions of the future peeking out. Read Dan’s piece first, and then revisit a true classic: Joel on Software’s “Strategy Letter IV” from September 2007. Go read the whole thing, but for people with no attention span, here’s the best part (long excerpt I know, but necessary — and funny):

Imagine, for example, that you’re Google with GMail, and you’re feeling rather smug. But then somebody you’ve never heard of, some bratty Y Combinator startup, maybe, is gaining ridiculous traction selling NewSDK, which combines a great portable programming language that compiles to JavaScript, and even better, a huge Ajaxy library that includes all kinds of clever interop features. Not just cut ‘n’ paste: cool mashup features like synchronization and single-point identity management (so you don’t have to tell Facebook and Twitter what you’re doing, you can just enter it in one place). And you laugh at them, for their NewSDK is a honking 232 megabytes … 232 megabytes! … of JavaScript, and it takes 76 seconds to load a page. And your app, GMail, doesn’t lose any customers.

But then, while you’re sitting on your googlechair in the googleplex sipping googleccinos and feeling smuggy smug smug smug, new versions of the browsers come out that support cached, compiled JavaScript. And suddenly NewSDK is really fast. And Paul Graham gives them another 6000 boxes of instant noodles to eat, so they stay in business another three years perfecting things.

And your programmers are like, jeez louise, GMail is huge, we can’t port GMail to this stupid NewSDK. We’d have to change every line of code. Heck it’d be a complete rewrite; the whole programming model is upside down and recursive and the portable programming language has more parentheses than even Google can buy. The last line of almost every function consists of a string of 3,296 right parentheses. You have to buy a special editor to count them.

And the NewSDK people ship a pretty decent word processor and a pretty decent email app and a killer Facebook/Twitter event publisher that synchronizes with everything, so people start using it.

Dan’s not building an SDK obviously, but he is building a killer app that is an example of what’s possible on the HTML5 platform with a few browser hooks from Chrome. Dan’s case study exemplifying the power of HTML5 is, for me, a clear look at the future of app development and a great example of where Joel’s NewSDK revolution will come from.

Funny enough, in 2007 Joel assumed that NewSDK would be a private company (like the Win32 API of the 90s) but in its seems that the outcome may be a open standards body, the W3C, with the HTML5 development largely led by Ian Hickson of Google. So, Joel nailed the evolution (jury’s still out technically, but I think Joel nailed it), but he missed on the players.

The world is getting more platform-fragmented, not less. Do...

Wed, 23 Jun 2010 16:41:36 -0400

The world is getting more platform-fragmented, not less. Do yourself a favor and write your next app in HTML5.

Why Porn and the iPad Are King for HTML5

Sat, 19 Jun 2010 15:51:50 -0400

Why Porn and the iPad Are King for HTML5

Sencha Touch

Thu, 17 Jun 2010 14:51:30 -0400

Sencha Touch:

Sencha Touch allows you to develop web apps that look and feel native on Apple iOS and Google Android touchscreen devices.

Why You May Not Need A Mobile App

Wed, 16 Jun 2010 16:25:40 -0400

Why You May Not Need A Mobile App

W3C: Mobile Web Application Best Practices

Sat, 12 Jun 2010 13:05:32 -0400

W3C: Mobile Web Application Best Practices

Making an iPad HTML5 App & making it really fast

Sun, 06 Jun 2010 16:46:12 -0400

Making an iPad HTML5 App & making it really fast:

Fantastic overview of making a beautiful, fast iPad optimized web app (everytimezone.com).

Apple's HTML5 and Web Standards website

Fri, 04 Jun 2010 01:47:40 -0400

Apple's HTML5 and Web Standards website:

html5watch:

Apple just launched a website which demoes some great examples of rich webpages made using standards-based technologies. A fantastic resource.

"What’s amazing about fortysquires is that I really didn’t expect to sell more than a few copies. It..."

Thu, 03 Jun 2010 18:27:39 -0400

“

What’s amazing about fortysquires is that I really didn’t expect to sell more than a few copies. It was built just to be a reference app. Remember, this is a paid ($0.99) app that competes against free, better-featured native apps for Android, iPhone, and BlackBerry. There’s also a mobile web version of foursquare (but it’s not HTML5 and doesn’t include geolocation, etc, like fortysquires does). I really thought I’d sell maybe two or three copies to developers looking to test out the workflow.

Yet, what I’m seeing is that real users are purchasing this app, everyday. Everyday, I sell at least one — but typically more like 3-4 — “copies” of the app. It’s not a gold mine, of course, but it far surpasses my expectations.

These are users from all over the world on all sorts of different devices. iPhone usage is >50%, but Android is close to 20%, and Symbian, Windows Mobile, Palm, and Samsung all make the cut. And 50% of visitors are from the US, 25% from western Europe, and the rest is divided between many, many countries like Canada, Australia, Israel, Russia, many Asian countries, Costa Rica, Maldives, Camaroon, Kyrgyzstan, etc. In all, more than 70 different countries have checked out fortysquires!

”

- Case Study: Selling a paid mobile web app (fortysquires)

How HTML 5 link prefetching can make your site load faster with one line of code.

Thu, 03 Jun 2010 18:25:21 -0400

How HTML 5 link prefetching can make your site load faster with one line of code.

"We have two platforms we support. One is open and uncontrolled — that’s HTML5. We..."

Tue, 01 Jun 2010 23:55:43 -0400

“We have two platforms we support. One is open and uncontrolled — that’s HTML5. We support HTML5. We have the best support for it of anyone in the world. We then support a curated platform which is the app store. It is the most vital app community on any platform.”

- Steve Jobs.

iGesture

Mon, 17 May 2010 18:46:00 -0400

iGesture:

iGesture provides an event-driven model for supporting gestures (like swiping the screen) in your web application. iGesture is especially useful if you are building an application for mobile devices such as the iPhone or iPad and wish to support the same gestures as a native application on both mobile devices and in standard browsers. Because iGesture is event-based, you can support gestures exactly the same way you support other interactions such as mouse clicks: By binding event handlers to DOM elements.

iGesture is a jQuery plugin.

CBS has confirmed that they plan to bring all CBS.com video...

Sat, 08 May 2010 17:08:16 -0400

CBS has confirmed that they plan to bring all CBS.com video content to iPad via HTML5 format by the fall television season.

When we were looking at the iPad as a separate device, it had a lot more similarities to a PC in our mind…So for us, we wanted to make sure that video was available through HTML5 on the iPad first.

Via TiPB, via NewTeeVee.

"Though the operating system for the iPhone, iPod and iPad is proprietary, we strongly believe that..."

Thu, 29 Apr 2010 13:33:44 -0400

“

Though the operating system for the iPhone, iPod and iPad is proprietary, we strongly believe that all standards pertaining to the web should be open. Rather than use Flash, Apple has adopted HTML5, CSS and JavaScript – all open standards. Apple’s mobile devices all ship with high performance, low power implementations of these open standards. HTML5, the new web standard that has been adopted by Apple, Google and many others, lets web developers create advanced graphics, typography, animations and transitions without relying on third party browser plug-ins (like Flash). HTML5 is completely open and controlled by a standards committee, of which Apple is a member.

Apple even creates open standards for the web. For example, Apple began with a small open source project and created WebKit, a complete open-source HTML5 rendering engine that is the heart of the Safari web browser used in all our products. WebKit has been widely adopted. Google uses it for Android’s browser, Palm uses it, Nokia uses it, and RIM (Blackberry) has announced they will use it too. Almost every smartphone web browser other than Microsoft’s uses WebKit. By making its WebKit technology open, Apple has set the standard for mobile web browsers.

”

- Steve Jobs: Thoughts on Flash

Official Google Blog: The New Image Search for Android and...

Wed, 28 Apr 2010 18:37:05 -0400

Official Google Blog: The New Image Search for Android and iPhone

Android outpaces iPhone in US web traffic, via IntoMobile

Tue, 27 Apr 2010 13:33:44 -0400

Android outpaces iPhone in US web traffic, via IntoMobile