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Comment by mindstab | Hacker News Reader

Android was leading the way in this (best sharing between online services etc). This looks like the first other OS to "get it" and push hard to integrate with the cloud. I think in some ways this surpasses Android.

Mean while we have iOS that's just congratulating itself for allowing photo uploads to twitter, meanwhile my Android phone has integration with services I've never even heard of.

And MacOS and Windows... nothing. Stupid silent sitting on the internet.

It's nice to see some real innovation in the Linux camp on the user end front.

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I think you're a bit confused, Android doesn't do a very good job of making web apps 1st class citizens at all. Even though I don't use it, iOS does the best job there. When you create a desktop shortcut for an app, it will get an icon that looks just like all other apps' icons, it will launch into a full-screen chromeless browser that you wouldn't know was a browser at all (with a loading image, even). You can also control web apps that play HTML5 audio with the built in music controls from the multitasking pane.

Android has none of those things. I've had hit or miss experience of it even picking a decent resolution icon, and Chrome uses the favicon with an envelope behind it, so it sticks out as a second class citizen (chrome also doesn't go chromeless).

I think you might be missing the point. Android does a great job of integrating data from the cloud with the operating system. An example is the Google Music player streams your music from the cloud and integrates the player controls with Android on the lockscreen, in the widget, in the status bar etc. The demo video from Canonical shows this kind of integration with last.fm. Nobody is saying Android or Ubuntu is perfect or whatever but there are similarities to what Android does and what Canonical is doing here.

The point of this (Ubuntu feature) is not that it's integrating proprietary Ubuntu services with the OS (it has already done that, with Ubuntu One), like your example of Google Music, the point is that it is promoting web applications to first-class citizens alongside the native apps. Android fails at this pretty badly.

"web applications to first-class citizens alongside the native apps. Android fails at this pretty badly"

Android isn't "failing" at something that it isn't trying to do. Web apps generally suffer from low performance when trying to do anything moderately complex on a mobile device. If you must use web technology to create apps on Android, there is webView in the sdk for you. Many web apps that have tons of users like Google Maps, Pandora, etc. have native apps that are actually performant, follow UI conventions, and have access to all the APIs.

You're missing what's right in front of you; the fact that web apps suffer from bad performance on Android is a prime example of how it is failing. Perhaps Google doesn't care about web apps, but that would be a huge turnaround from just a few years ago when it was one of the web's biggest proponents.

I have an iPad and web apps suck on it too. What is your benchmark for good performance? I'm being serious as I'd love to be able to have a legitimate mobile outlet for high performance web applications.

I think the best example of this is Windows 8, which has 2 application environments, .NET and Trident (The IE10 rendering engine). They are, for all intents and purposes, on equal footing with each other, and an end user can't tell which environment an application uses.

In that case, it's no longer standard or portable HTML/JS, no?

The engine that powers it is exactly the same, the difference is additional APIs (that add functionality, not performance). Everyone already agrees that HTML/JS needs more APIs.

It's the prime example of how JS and HTML is a failed model for efficient application implementation. It is not an example of Android's failing.

I think it has less to do with this and more to do with them not focusing their efforts on that front. It isn't like their current dev stack is the pinacle of performance either. Give it a few years and I'm sure they'll have native Dart applications which will be just as performant.

I don't just want to be able to open webapps on my phone with a shortcut, I want real integration. I'm sometimes not connected to the Internet so I like to have my data offline, but I like to be able to get it online quickly. Android does this very well. Share intents, music player integration, it's just a very slick offline to online seamless system.

Rewatch the video, it's more than just a shortcut.

Yeah, I'm referring more iOS. I think the idea of "webapps as a first class citizen" is a bit of a red herring. Web apps will never be first class citizens (especially not on a phone) because they fail simple performance tests. I think what OSs ought to aim for is what Android does, a smooth integration of offline and online modes.

Ubuntu does this somewhat, iOS not really at all (though it is successful in the way you speak of), but I feel there's a combination of the way Adnroid, iOS and Ubuntu are doing this that could hit a sweet spot.

I think you're being short-sighted. There's nothing inheritantly different about mobile that prevents web apps running as well as they do on the desktop. You are aware that on the desktop JavaScript engines like V8 can keep up with any garbage-collected language, right? There are a few reasons why things are progressing slower on mobile, among them:

1) There is very little browser competition on mobile. Users are either unaware of or don't see the benefit to downloading an alternate browser, and as a result the OS vendors have less of an incentive to improve their browser rapidly. On the desktop browsers like Firefox and Chrome release a new version every few weeks, whereas on mobile the OS vendors release once or a twice a year.

2) The JS engines haven't been optimized for ARM as heavily as x86. We'll get there though.

These are very much short-term problems. And despite that, you can write performant mobile web-apps today. If you have an iOS device you should try out the game X-Type: http://www.phoboslab.org/log/2012/06/x-type-making-of which is written by a fellow HNer. It is extremely snappy, even when played without the assistance of Nitro.

I have a couple of responses:

1. Who wants to write complex programs in JS? I mean, it's OK and all, but it's messy when you can be writing native apps. I remember the iPhone being all about the webapps when it came out, but native apps ultimatly won.

2. Internet access is still not widely available. On Sprint, where I am, it sucks. If I'm out in more remote regions (which is part of mine and many others jobs), it's gone. Or if I'm in a tunnel on the train, or an elevator, or in my bathroom at work, etc. Or you're on AT&T, have capped bandwidth, etc.

No, we need apps that have a smooth offline to online transition. Maybe web apps will make it there, but I feel we're far enough away that I still like Android's approach.

Re: 1, see https://github.com/jashkenas/coffee-script/wiki/List-of-lang... and http://altjs.org/

OS X had all this in the Dashboard long before... anyone, maybe? There are some pretty amazing Dashboard apps, and quite a lot of them are well integrated with the Internet. They should have called it Floorboard, though, because that's where it seems to be hidden under, and system performance takes a huge hit as soon as you activate the Dashboard and every single app you've loaded into it, even if you only want to use one. If they had made them first class desktop citizens, you'd be praising Apple for this innovation. A nod should probably also go to Opera, which had something similar, but just as crippled in Widgets.

Win7 and IE9 had some integration, not sure if anyone used it but they are trying.

http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/222712/how_to_...

That looks like a copy of chrome's "create application shortcut" and is less than a tiny percentage of what ubuntu is announcing. Am I missing something?

Last time I used it, Chrome's shortcut was just a shortcut and nothing more (which launched into a chromeless browser window). Perhaps that has changed. The Windows 7 stuff integrates more deeply into the OS, so you can pin a site to the taskbar and its icon will appear like any other app, you can create what they call "jump lists" which are available on right click of the taskbar icon, and from those you can visit deep links inside of a web app.

So it's much more than the Chrome thing, but not quite as deep as this Ubuntu announce.

Exactly right and one of the main things I missed about Ubuntu on my desktop over Android on my Xoom was Android's seamless integration of "cloud" data and the operating system. In comparison desktop OSs feel like a collection of silos. I'm very excited about the future of Ubuntu and am beginning to think that Canonical actually do "get it".

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