God... I LOVE HTML5 and Javascript/CSS etc, I wrote a couple of PhoneGap based apps, and to be fair I think 70% of the apps in the apple app store (Not counting games) can be created using just HTML5, most are simple list/todo/map/location apps and so on.
I want to write only in HTML5 to be fair, why? Deploy to multiplatform with small changes, no Objective-C or Java headache ;-P , but... it just feels as if it's not quite there yet, we are missing a little bit of performance in JavascriptCore, for animations (CSS the accelerated transitions work quite well) heck you can even achieve smooth parallax scrolling with some (mostly) css tricks on mobilesafari/UI WebView.
Now what's really missing here is a standard animation container, instead of doing CSS-sprite animations by creating loops that modifies background-position on elements (which will awlays be slower) there should be some other thing that lets you generate an animation (As a sprite or whatever) then play it accelerated in the DOM or Canvas... instead of using javascript to do everything.
Canvas performance is still horrible, but perhaps when apple comes around add adds more natively hardware accelerated stuff for the canvas and so on we could do some neater stuff.
Whats my point, you can develop the vast majority of "apps" with no problem what so ever for iPhone/Android with HTML5, you do need a "FrameWork" to deploy to the appstore, such as PhoneGap, but in the end it's basically javascript/css.
Games on the other hand is harder, we're still missing a standard animation container, performance amongst other things. Add WebGL on top of this and you can probably come up with some cool stuff, not sure if WebGL is supported on the latest iOS/Android?
For me, Javascript/CSS/HTML is the UI future of apps, the backend can be whatever, Java/Python/PHP/C++, but for UI stuff, Javascript/CSS just tastes damn good and gives you a lot of freedom... my 2 cents.
Um, well thats fine and thats what I am using, the problem is that only a few are hardware accelerated (Opacity, translate3d) are the ones I know are hardware accelerated in iOS at least.
What I want is some sort of container format for making animations, so I don't have to "hack" with background-position for a running animation as an example, sort of like GIF is a container for animations but obviously we'd need some sort of container that we can interact with... using javascript :P if that makes any sense.
I want to write only in HTML5 to be fair, why? Deploy to multiplatform with small changes, no Objective-C or Java headache ;-P , but... it just feels as if it's not quite there yet, we are missing a little bit of performance in JavascriptCore, for animations (CSS the accelerated transitions work quite well) heck you can even achieve smooth parallax scrolling with some (mostly) css tricks on mobilesafari/UI WebView.
Now what's really missing here is a standard animation container, instead of doing CSS-sprite animations by creating loops that modifies background-position on elements (which will awlays be slower) there should be some other thing that lets you generate an animation (As a sprite or whatever) then play it accelerated in the DOM or Canvas... instead of using javascript to do everything.
Canvas performance is still horrible, but perhaps when apple comes around add adds more natively hardware accelerated stuff for the canvas and so on we could do some neater stuff. Whats my point, you can develop the vast majority of "apps" with no problem what so ever for iPhone/Android with HTML5, you do need a "FrameWork" to deploy to the appstore, such as PhoneGap, but in the end it's basically javascript/css.
Games on the other hand is harder, we're still missing a standard animation container, performance amongst other things. Add WebGL on top of this and you can probably come up with some cool stuff, not sure if WebGL is supported on the latest iOS/Android?
For me, Javascript/CSS/HTML is the UI future of apps, the backend can be whatever, Java/Python/PHP/C++, but for UI stuff, Javascript/CSS just tastes damn good and gives you a lot of freedom... my 2 cents.