PieGuy - fully cached iPhone webapp game | Hacker News Reader

PieGuy - fully cached iPhone webapp game

mrgan.com

19 pointsjazzychad8 comments

After the last couple of PPK articles about native-apps vs webapps, I think this was a great example of a webapp that works well even in offline mode by using the local storage manifest.

It even addresses some of the issues I raised in a comment yesterday about my webapp development frustrations by dealing with them client-side (in javascript) instead of server-side like I was doing.

Yesterday's comment: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=959587

It's unplayable on my 3G iPhone - too slow. Probably fine on a 3GS, though.

> Pie Guy will run on iPhone 3GS with OS 3.0 or higher installed.

— http://mrgan.tumblr.com/post/257187093/pie-guy

Sure - but if the point here was to demonstrate that a web app can be just as good as a native app, it fails due to lack of performance. (Unless you have the latest hardware, that is, but this isn't exactly a graphically intense game - this is something that looks like it would have run smoothly on an Apple II clone 20+ years ago.)

It was barely playable on my 3GS. The controls were difficult and slow to respond.

WTF? Can't see it from a desktop browser; can't see it on an iPhone unless I "install" it....

Go away.

Installing it merely puts a shortcut to the website containing the game on your iPhone home screen.

If you change your user agent to iPhone and go to http://mrgan.com/pieguy/ on your browser I assume you could play it on your desktop.

For the curious: you can coax it into loading, but you can't play it.

You will need a WebKit-based browser, as it uses CSS transitions, transforms, and animation properties. The game checks the iPhone-specific property "window.navigator.standalone" to see if the game is running full-screen (i.e. it is installed), but you can work around that in the Web Inspector JavaScript console or editing the source to get the game to load. Then you can click to start a new game, however you're left with no control as it uses iPhone-specific JavaScript for swipe controls.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com