On Fri, Jul 12, 2013 at 11:22 AM, Steven Walling steven.walling@gmail.comwrote:
On Fri, Jul 12, 2013 at 9:00 AM, Brion Vibber bvibber@wikimedia.org wrote:
I'd recommend against building any specific 'app' for a web-based OS like this, but if we can have a Chrome Web Store entry that conveniently bookmarks us and that makes us easier to use, well that'd be awesome.
You mean you recommend against OS-specific apps, like we have specific apps for Windows Phone, iOS, and Android? ;)
Windows Phone, iOS, and Android aren't web-based OSs -- a web site doesn't get full access to the system on them.
We are currently working on OS-specific (not HTML-based) apps for iOS and Android for the Commons photo uploader, but Firefox OS and Chrome OS get to make do with the web sites. :)
Note that we don't have a Windows Phone app at all (though there are some third-party ones -- and we do have a Windows 8 tablet app that's mostly experimental). The official iOS and Android Wikipedia apps in the stores are currently unmaintained, and will get replaced in a few months...
We're still evaluating how much balancing between native code and web-based code to use on the new versions (ultimately a Wikipedia app is a big wrapper around a web view with the actual content; we'll move at least some of the chrome out to native for performance and integration reasons). But we do know we don't want to use the "pure locally-hosted HTML 5 app stuck in a WebView" approach of PhoneGap, which required us to have two HTML frontends (the site, and the app) *and* be stuck with the limitations of mobile web browsers *and* have to debug the framework ourselves a lot. :)
Snark aside: what you proposed is essentially how most Chrome apps work and is easiest to implement. For HTML5 games and such, I'm sure it's more app-like in that you may not be able to launch the game without installing the app, but most people basically just redirect users to the normal site. Obviously this makes the use of the name "app" seem bizarre, but the advantage for ChromeOS users is that we make it easier to get back to Wikipedia. (One step instead of three.)
Excellent. :)
-- brion