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Comment by FooBarWidget | Hacker News Reader

I can't see why anybody would actually use jQuery Mobile and Sencha for web app development. I've tried them last week and they were impressive on a desktop browser. On a mobile device, not so much. Both jQuery Mobile and Sencha feel slow, very slow. The animations are choppy. Response times on clicks are way too long. Everything flickers like mad. Focus borders are drawn at all the wrong places. I can actually feel that it's a web app trying too hard to be a native app. On my Android phone it's even slower than on my iPad 1.

I'm not blaming jQuery Mobile or Sencha. I think mobile browsers are just not ready for delivering a smooth UI experience that's up to par with native apps.

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Somehow we ended up with very different experiences. I played with Sencha Mobile Kitchen Sink demo on the iPhone 4 and it was quite impressive. http://www.sencha.com/products/touch/demos/

Yes, it lags ever so slightly, but faster CPU in iPhone 5 should take care of that. My only other complain is that they messed up calculating tap areas for tabbar/toolbar items - Sencha has tap area equal to the visual size of the button, whereas UIKit assigns entire section of the toolbar (44 pixels tall in portrait), which makes a lot of difference in tap detection. But I don't see why they can't fix it, and then it would be pretty good...

To be clear, I am still staying away from UIWebView in favor of UIKit, but I am getting increasingly interested in this.

Yes, it lags ever so slightly, but faster CPU in iPhone 5 should take care of that.

This is always the reply of web developers -- even on the desktop! "Yes, it's slow now, but it'll be faster with new hardware!".

Meanwhile, the native applications use that additional processor power to do more stuff, and the webapps fall further behind again.

So? Desktop HTML/JS was too slow for a while, all the way until the point when it became fast enough to handle maps, email, finance etc. Remember MapPoint? It used o be a desktop map application. No one uses it anymore.

I have to wonder who is the downvoting person, who beleives the above post does not contribute to the discussion? Would you rather this not be posted at all? Because if you keep with the downvotes that's what's going to happen - no links to Sencha demo, no keen observations about tap areas, no personal opinion from experienced i-thing developer.

I also wonder where are the people who would appreciate this sort of contribution. They gotta be somewhere...

Mobile web development requires a different way of thinking about code. Every line counts. More lines equals a larger code graph in browser memory and starts to affect your app's performance.

Mobile web frameworks get you an immediate boost in developer productivity, but down the road, those gains are given back as you try to achieve reasonable performance, which to some extent is a fools errand because you just have so much library code bogging down the browser/webview.

Other parts of a mobile web app, like CSS3 transitions, will perform as well as the browser/phone lets them. Using CSS3 for transitions and animations is definitely "the right way", but as of now, these are pretty clunky on most phones.

I agree somewhat, and would add that I wish jQuery Mobile would focus more on being a solid compatible framework for mobile 'websites' than in emulating the features/transitions of a native app.

Agreed. When i first heard about jQuery mobile i was hoping they would take the familiar jQuery syntax and add things like touch events and optimize it for mobile. However, you really can't make your own custom jQ mobile site without getting the 'app' thing. Also, you need to include the normal jQ library, which is a pretty big download and includes lots of cross-browser code for fixing old IE bugs.

Right now i guess either rolling your own framework or looking into alternatives like Zepto.js makes more sense.

I've been using phonegap and jQM since pre-alpha, and I've found it to be a near-native experience on the iphone and impressively responsive on android and palm. I think the alpha version had some flickering, and it is a bit slower on android, but if there is "mad flickering" something likely wasn't done right.

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