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Comment by freemarketteddy | Hacker News Reader

Truth hurts doesnt it!

I think Joe is spot on.The web is already miles behind native mobile platforms.Personally I can vouch for iOS.The kind of stuff you can do on iOS now just in terms of UI is just impossibly hard to do with HTML5 or any other web platform.

But then if you think about it.Its not surprising at all.Of course you will have a much more power on a native platform than a web platform which is built on top of a native platform.

In my opinion in the future you will have a browser and type in a url but a native app will open in the browser window.These native apps will be built for different platforms.The web app will be shown by default if a native app hasnt been developed for that platform.

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WebGL is picking up steam. Supported in Webkit and Firefox, with IE being the laggard (as usual). Once you have WebGL you have the building blocks needed for any kind of UI you want.

Yes WebGL is the first step....like OpenGLES ...next step would be something like CoreAnimation and CoreGraphics....then something like UIKit....(then something like Three20 haha!)

Although I think its very hard for any company including Google or Facebook to make something the matches the design quality of these frameworks....The real problem is that no one company or person is going to take this responsibility...and hence even a good attempt will end up looking like a clusterfuck....and that is exactly what Joe is trying to say!...the Web needs its Apple!

Not to mention that by the time something like UIKit exists for the Web Apple would be miles ahead!

> In my opinion in the future you will have a browser and type in a url but a native app will open in the browser window.These native apps will be built for different platforms.The web app will be shown by default if a native app hasnt been developed for that platform.

That's basically the present, where sites detect your platform and prompt you to install an app if they wrote one. Is it so great? Are we going to write HTML/JS, Objective-C, Java, and C# versions of all of our apps?

Yeah thts true...But how cool would it be if the objective C code was loaded dynamically and run on the browser(or something like the Web Browser for apps)....No need to load any apps..just use em when you need them....Just like the Web...On the Android similarly the Browser will send Java Code.

I have thought a lot about making something like this...With the power of the Objective C Runtime I think it should possible!

But yeah I agree...Writing different code for all these platform kinna sucks!..But the results are better!

just wondering what you consider is impossibly hard to do is ?

Check out the pulse app or the flipboard app or even the twitter app for the ipad!....its hard to even come close to the UIs of these apps on web platforms!..although Joe is doing some cool work on that front!

The future is already here - Java applets.

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