sa pits
Webmaster, ritani.com
engagement rings

This post was written over a year ago, so in that time there has been a lot of improvement in the quality of many Android apps, as well as with Android itself. Froyo was a big step forward. I haven’t had the chance to use GIngerbread yet, but hopefully that’s even more of an improvement.

Thanks,
Paul

Mitchell Dawson
Webmaster, supportsockshop.com
compression stockings

This post was written back in April of 2010. Good to know they got around to documenting it!

Here is where everyone should be looking for these details: http://developer.android.com/guide/topics/resources/string-resource.html#Plurals

Nothing gives control over a device than native control; by definition. Similarly, native access to a platform is “closer to the metal”, meaning there are fewer abstractions and layers to get to control and interact with the actual hardware. The performance demands of certain kinds of fast-action games will always seek lower levels of power and control.

The downside is that native development requires a higher level of expertise that is only applicable to a single platform. This means a longer or more expensive time to market, or both… AND the solution is only good for one platform.

So there is strong pressure for more common, standard platform/API definitions so that software can be developed to run across multiple kinds of devices. That means power and control sapping abstractions. It usually also means “least common denominator” solutions (that ignore device specific features of many devices). But time to market and the larger potential audience is hard to resist.

The increasing power of handheld mobile devices and power of HTML/JavaScript coincided with Apple’s release of the iPhone without a native SDK, prompting a surge (and push) in relying on HTML/JS as the only “application” technology available for that platform. This opened the eyes of many who never considered web technologies as a true application programming solution. This has helped push the efforts make HTML a _true_ programming platform, in its own right and accelerated the evolution to HTML5.

Non-the-less native will always win in performance and control, especially over a standards constrained, heavy, abstracted technology like AJAX/HTML5. But there are pressures for the availability of both proprietary-native and abstract-standard technologies, each satisfying a different problem; and both often overlapping in appropriateness.

I’ll never understand why Google and Apple put people who apparently don’t understand linguistics in charge of these libraries.