The Linuxification of Webapps

Gave up on the article when he renamed Pluto. Feels like a rant, reads like a rant and it's nothing but a rant on how Cocoa is great compared to HTML5 and calls that "Linuxification".<p>Call me back when every phone runs Cocoa apps.

A more accurate title would be "The Linuxification of HTML5 Mobile Apps" (the author specifically talks about mobile apps, not all web apps).

To me, the most important sentence in this article was actually one that seems to invalidate his main point:<p>&#62; I don't want to install an app for a one-time hotel room reservation<p>Most of my time spent on my phone is spent doing mundane things, like using wikipedia or making hotel reservations. I would rather not use an app for these things, and would gladly sacrifice a bit of usability for the convenience of not having to leave the web browser.

For those not familiar with his work, Benjamin is an excellent designer and certainly a purveyor of future web tech (a visit to deaxon.com will offer a great example). However, I feel like this post has come a bit too soon. Yes, as it stands native apps are more powerful than mobile web apps built on HTML5, CSS3, JS, etc., though, I think we're only at the onset of this technology. While there does seem to be a fair amount of hype behind mobile web apps these days, seasoned developers know when switching to an HTML/JS only app is suitable. That being said, we can't ask everything of a spec that hasn't even been recommended yet, or languages that have only been around for a couple of years (in some cases months). These things take time. It's good people are hyped because that can only mean a positive future with more rapid innovation. If we're still in the same spot as we are now in a year, feel free to start the onslaught.

I went in thinking this would be about the process model gaining traction with the new release of Heroku only to find a rant on native vs mobile iOS apps. Horrible title.

Imagine we had a clean slate. We wanted to design a technology stack that would fill the space that's currently filled by browser+javascript+dom+css+html. We don't need to use those technologies, just to fill that space. What should we do differently than the world has done?