On Fri, Jul 12, 2013 at 11:22 AM, Steven Walling
<steven.walling(a)gmail.com>wrote;wrote:
On Fri, Jul 12, 2013 at 9:00 AM, Brion Vibber
<bvibber(a)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