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Comment by jordanekay | Hacker News Reader

This is some impressive work, but at the end of the day it's just another unecessary attempt to reinvent the wheel, a wheel that will always lag behind the original. The time he spent reverse engineering UITableView could have been spent doing useful things with actual UITableViews.

Web apps are hacks.

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That is incredibly short sighted. The web is universal, iOS is not.

Is it not?

Please, tell me where to find these mobile web apps that are superior to their native iOS counterparts.

I'll second that "incredibly short sighted" judgement. It's efforts like Hewitts, which works exceptionally well for a days work, that lead to superior mobile web apps.

Monoculture is seldom a good thing. Though native apps have strong advantages, web apps also have advantages in terms of deployment, compatibility on multiple platforms, and (possibly) freedom from Apple's walled garden.

Just like everything else: use the right tool for the job, and choose your trade-offs.

http://touch.sproutcore.com/npr/

Being able to develop one simple web app that make the page so much more accessible on a smartphone without the need to develop 3 native apps (iOS, Android and perhaps Windows Phone 7?) is pretty nice and cost effective.

There are a lot of native apps that are easily reproduced in pure HTML, CSS and Javascript.

while i agree that there are ways in which native user interface controls are currently more compelling than their web alternatives, shouldn't we all be diligent in hoping for and working towards the end of that situation? it might not be as impossible as it once seemed, they're doing angry birds in a browser now!

either way i can't imagine that an iOS monoculture in high-end mobile applications really serves anyone but apple in the long run. i think there's a general consensus that it didn't work out that well with windows, and there's arguably a lot more at stake this time.

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