native v html5

Apple Analyst Zabitsky Is Lone ‘Sell’ Holdout as IPad Maker’s Stock Climbs

This analyst is basically arguing that you should sell apple stock because, html5 apps are going to take off, making apples awesome iOS app store less relevant.

I actually totally agree with this, html5 is the future and making a custom app for each mobile OS will become very archaic. The problem I have with his argument is his time scale. He claims that the repercussions of this movement from native apps to html5 is going to take place in the next 2 quarters. THAT’S INSANE! Yes I hate trying to write objective-c, and yes I think html5 is the future, but it’s a future that is at least 3 years away, if not longer. For at least the next 3 years, native apps are going to fully dominate the mobile landscape.

Although the potential for html5 web based mobile apps is awesome, it’s just not going to do it for right now. My reason for this is purely based on the present day capabilities of web based mobile apps, the problem with them being is that they can’t access enough of the phones hardware sensors at this time.

Let’s not sell them short though, for some web apps they are just as capable as their native app counterparts. I’ve seen web apps that can store huge amounts of background data, use location, and even access a phones accelerometer.

Another huge problem with this prediction is that web developers don’t use all of these features. For html5 to have any chance developers need to better utilize a phones capabilities. While phones can store data from a website, most of them don’t thus making the user wait for around 10 extra seconds just to get onto the web site. This is nonsense! The Financial Times does an awesome job at demonstrating how this can be done (the reading experience still can’t compare to that being done in the native app Flipboard, but maybe someday).

Most importantly, the two hardware features of phones that html5 apps need to find a way to access in order for them to succeed are being able to use a camera and being able to access a phones background processing so that they can run in the background (thus enabling them to send notifications). Once these two problems have been solved, I think that the usage of mobile web apps will explode.

Pressing play in @Spotify for iPhone and then having my desktop client pause is so gratifying. I wonder if this was planned as a feature or if it was conceived in order to prevent multiple people from sharing a single account.

i heart path

I originally sent this as an email to one of my friends who just started using path, but I thought I’d share my love of path with the world:

just incase you didn’t read up on why they created path. The idea is that you’re friends with everyone that you’ve ever met ever on facebook, and this isn’t good because you don’t actually care about all 1000 of these people. This theory is based on dunbar’s number, which basically says that humans don’t have the mental compactly to keep track of over 150 relationships (basically it’s unfathomable that you could truly trust 150 people). I find this concept really interesting which is why I’m so passionate about path. also I think it has huge potential since my facebook and twitter feeds are just becoming way too overwhelming, and this attempts to find a solution to that.