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Comment by Sujan | Hacker News Reader

Nice.

I don't agree really on your definiton or usage of "hybrid". For me, your are just a different form of hybrid. Let me explain: With Phonegap the "shell" or container is native, the rest is webview. So this is "hybrid".

If I got your approach right your container includes a bigger bit of native logic and you sparkle some smaller html webviews through the apps. So Phonegap apps tend to be "little container, much webview" while yours are more "much container and app, little webview". Correct?

But this is a detail, I still like the concept and page.

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Thanks! I wish there were a better word. We actually struggle with this because when we initially explain the concept, people tend to gravitate towards thinking of it like PhoneGap. So, I wish a more descriptive word existed for what we've built, but I think "hybrid" is what we're stuck with--at least for a while.

Can you elaborate some more on how clutch differs from phonegap. Or why I'd choose clutch instead of phonegap.

There are two main differences: syncing of code, and philosophy.

The main tangible difference is that we enable you to push out incremental updates to your app, immediately. And to do so in a way that your app feels completely native. PhoneGap does not offer this. The only way to do it with PhoneGap is to actually point their UIWebView instance at a URL on the live internet, which makes your app slow. That, or you'll have to build a lot of complicated syncing and caching and updating stuff, which is what we've built.

The second difference is more philosophical. That is, for most apps, we don't believe that you should attempt to write a whole app inside a web view. It just leads to apps that don't feel native. So our approach, and the one that Clutch has been tuned for, is where you build most of your app using native tools. Then, you use Clutch to build out certain display areas using web tech.

I hope that answers your question.

Interesting. Excuse me for my ignorance here (I haven't fully looked at your product), but how do you push app updates? Is it like Heroku/git? Or do I have to "submit" it to you? Can you schedule when the update goes live?

I make a rough guess about the technology... It's like HTML5 based webapp relying on local storage. You change the remote HTML and clean the local storage for the update.

Like I mentioned in another thread, similar "push updates" mechanism have already been banned by Apple. (I don't know, why am I downvoted for informing HN users).

Could you elaborate on how it compares to Titanium? Thanks, great work.

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