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by Hrothgar15 5478 days ago
Latency and responsiveness are still a huge problem for web apps, especially on mobile devices. Elements consistently come into view only when they're ready, jerkily appearing out of nowhere, as opposed to in native designed interfaces in which everything is presented instantaneously. UI feedback is often delayed, inappropriate, or at times nonexistent. This is pretty consistent across the board.

As for the user experience argument, I'm still looking for a valid excuse why the Facebook mobile website is so astronomically poorer in all aspects to the Facebook for iPhone app. In theory, they can and should function exactly the same when viewed on such a device, but they are leaps and bounds apart.
2 comments
kenjackson 5478 days ago
Latency is still a huge problem for web apps, especially on mobile devices. Elements consistently come into view only when they're ready, jerkily appearing out of nowhere, as opposed to in native designed interfaces in which everything is presented instantaneously. This is pretty consistent across the board.

Ironically this is almost the polar opposite of Gruber's view. Gruber argues in this piece that web apps are local client apps running on your mobile device (and he urges you to view source). Both forms of apps (native and web apps) can mask latency in the same ways.

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ryanisinallofus 5478 days ago
Latency and responsiveness are still a huge problem for all network-heavy apps.

We have a professionally used iOS app that relies on server data (the magical cloud) and the number one user complaint is speed. Creating your client on iOS rather than in HTML/JS doesn't give you any magical "Latency and responsiveness" user experience unicorns.

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glassx 5478 days ago
Distributed software will work perfectly, provided it works under perfect conditions :)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallacies_of_Distributed_Comput...

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